Lassie Come Read Online

Lassie Come-Home

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To

DR. HARRY JARRETT

A Man Who Knows a Dog

ILLUSTRATIONS

Lassie paused, then walked head down

Then slowly she pulled herself upwards

There was a blur that flashed through the gate

Lassie, with head low, gazed at him—yet instinct drove her on

With her forepaw over one dog’s body, Lassie faced the other dog

She ended with her best trick, walking on the ball of wood while she carried in her mouth a tiny national flag

Introduction

In the early 1960s, the best night of television, as far as my younger sister, Jane, and I were concerned, was Sunday. The Ed Sullivan Show aired at eight, but even better was what came on an hour earlier: Lassie. Adventures about the beautiful and noble collie, Lassie, and her boy, Timmy, held Jane and me entranced from the first note of the whistled theme song until the final credits rolled. Our family didn’t have a dog, but every Sunday night we had Lassie.

The Lassie I saw on television, an American Lassie living with an American farm family, had been inspired—although I didn’t know it then—by the book Lassie Come-Home, which was published in 1940. Lassie’s creator, British-born author Eric Knight, died just three years later, at the age of forty-five. He didn’t live to see the TV Lassie I knew or to hear from the legions of passionate fans his canine character attracted.

In 2015, Knight’s readers will observe the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lassie Come-Home, an enthralling tale about—no—not a collie living with Timmy Martin and his farm family, but a collie living with Joe Carraclough and his parents in a tiny cottage on the outskirts of the village of Greenall Bridge in northern England. On the very first page of the book, we learn that “nearly every man in the village agreed [Lassie] was the finest collie he had ever laid eyes on.” But of course there’s much more to Lassie than her lush tricolor coat and her “aristocratic bearing.” Lassie has a sense of time (the people in Greenall Bridge maintain that you can set your clock by her), and every afternoon, rain or shine, she arrives at Joe’s school at four o’clock, just as the doors open to release the students, and then she and Joe walk back to their cottage together.

Lassie’s tale is one of loyalty and devotion, of bravery and determination. When Joe’s father, who has fallen on hard times, sells Lassie to a wealthy duke, Lassie wants nothing more than to continue to be able to meet “her boy” at four o’clock every afternoon and walk home with him. Time after time, Lassie escapes from the duke, who then moves her north to his estate in Scotland. Eventually, Lassie breaks free of him for good and begins the long journey south—hundreds of miles—back to Greenall Bridge and Joe.

Why do our hearts sing—or break—when we read about dogs? In part because of Lassie herself. She’s portrayed as a creature that will do anything to be reunited with the human she loves most in the world. She faces wild animals and men with guns. She falls ill; she walks until her paws bleed. And all to reach Joe. Eric Knight created a fictional dog so real, so breathtakingly alive, that we are caught up in her quest. And what leads Lassie on that quest are all the qualities of the best sort of hero.

Because of the Lassie I saw on TV every Sunday night, I fell in love with dogs, or the idea of dogs. Who wouldn’t love a creature as noble and brave and principled as Lassie? Whose heart wouldn’t sing when a dog—any dog—risked her life to save another life, human or animal? Whose heart wouldn’t break when that same dog faced a cruel hand, felt the crack of a stick across her back? And whose heart wouldn’t sing once more when that abused dog was brave enough to trust and love another person?

I would be forty-two years old before I got a dog and forty-eight before I began working on my first book about a dog. But I felt as if I had known dogs most of my life, starting with Lassie. My own dog, Sadie, was a gentle soul, as sweet as Lassie, but not, I have to admit, nearly as brave. Still, the emotional connection I had with Sadie, a connection that had been awakened decades earlier as I watched Lassie’s adventures, informed my own stories.

There are many scenes in Lassie Come-Home that make readers catch their breath—scenes that illustrate Lassie’s courage or the sense of justice that leads her to fight to protect a man she barely knows. But the image of Lassie that most speaks to me is subtler, the image of a dog following her heart. “And the heart was gallant and the instinct was true. And so the dog went, day after day, steadily south in the Highlands, over bracken and heather, through hill-land and plain, through stream and woodland—ever going steadily, always south.”

Toward her boy.

—Ann M. Martin

CHAPTER ONE

Not for Sale

Everyone in Greenall Bridge knew Sam Carraclough’s Lassie. In fact, you might say that she was the best-known dog in the village—and for three reasons.

First, because nearly every man in the village agreed she was the finest collie he had ever laid eyes on.

This was praise indeed, for Greenall Bridge is in the county of Yorkshire, and of all places in the world it is here that the dog is really king. In that bleak part of northern England the dog seems to thrive as it does nowhere else. The wind and the cold rains sweep over the flat moorlands, making the dogs rich-coated and as sturdy as the people who live there.

The people love dogs and are clever at raising them.