My Dog Marcus by Colin Howard

I was reading Shivu's post (in Kannada) about how street dogs took revenge on his newspaper distribution team. Thinking of how clever animals can be, first thing that came to my mind was "My Dog Marcus"

My Dog Marcus was one of my favorite animal stories from my school time English textbook. There were hundreds of other interesting stories in our CBSE English textbooks, but this is one story I still recall once a while and enjoy. (we had it in our 8^th Std I guess- about 12 years ago- good old days). Suddenly this story came to my mind and felt like reading it again. I googled it but no result. (this proves Google still has lots of archiving to do). I couldn’t recall the author- contacted my classmates and drew a blank. Called our english teacher and she replied that the said textbook isn't in use anymore and english text book has been changed twice since we left and she'll try to get author's name. If any of you can identify who wrote this story please comment.

My dog Marcus is an interesting story. Since it is not available on internet, I’m rewriting an abridged version below, for your quick reference.

It’s a story of a family and their pet dog, Marcus. Marcus was a very good dog, but had one peculiar character-it hated being taken for a walk. Its owners had to wake it up and literally drag it along to give it some exercise.

One fine day, Marcus gets a novel idea to save itself from the trouble of going for a walk. It started acting deaf. It wouldn’t respond when called and behave with innocence as if it heard nothing. Initially the owners seriously believed that their pet dog has gone deaf and stopped bothering it much. They stopped troubling it for a walk and used to take its food to wherever it was. This went on for a while.

One day, while Marcus was away in a different room and the family was having lunch, a piece of meat falls down on the ground, making some noise. Next moment Marcus leapt from its room, ran towards the meat and started chewing it. The owners were shocked- how did Marcus hear the meat piece fall? They realized that Marcus wasn’t deaf at all and was cunningly acting as one.

Deciding to teach Marcus a lesson, the owner (husband and wife) avoided making any noise when Marcus was around. They would just make lip movements and act as if they were speaking-they would run TV on mute-and every other precaution to make sure that Marcus doesn’t hear any sound.

The absolute silence went on for several days and Marcus started feeling worried. “Did I really go deaf? Why can’t I hear my owners talk?” it wondered and grew tense.

One fine day the owners decided to break the deadlock and announced “Marcus, let’s go for a walk” On hearing the words Marcus’s joy knew no bounds and it leapt with all its energy. Thereafter Marcus never complained about going for a walk. -with due credits to the author, whose name couldn't be recalled yet.

This abridged version is no replacement for the detailed original one. But hope you managed to get the essence of it. What’s your favorite story from your language textbooks? 

June 2010 Update: Thanks to vfive, I managed to trace the author and full story. My Dog Marcus is written by Colin Howard and full story can be found here