I Remember Prince

Interview Contact: Orrin Alley

"One day when I was about nine years of age, my older brother who was eleven, well, eleven yeah, brought home a dog... a spaniel. Of course the kids all fell in love with the dog, but it belonged to another family. The owners didn't want to part with it. They would eh, tie it up, but he would chew off the rope and come back to us. So at last the man that owned the dog, gave the dog to us. This dog was really quite intelligent. We didn't try to teach him much, but he just seemed to be naturally intelligent.

My father's [boat] engine had a different... a little different sound to it than any other engine. The dog would hear my father coming in from hauling his traps and the dog would go down to the shore. Before my dad got to the moring where he put the boat, the dog would swim out to the boat and Dad would take the dog aboard. Then they would come home together.

One time Dad took the family fifteen miles up to [Beals Island] where Dad's sister lived. We took the dog with us because we were going to stay for the weekend. We were all very excited. That was really quite an occasion in those days to do that. We stayed overnight and the next day we started back home, but nearly half way home we discovered we didn't have the dog. We had left the dog there! Dad said, "Well, I'm going back up there tonight and get the dog." So I went in the boat with him and my brother and when we got abou two-thirds of the way to where we had left him, we saw him on the shore of an island. Now this dog had been swimming from one island to another that were probably 1/2 an hour [swim] apart. There's no doubt that the dog had a sense of direction enough that he would've gotten home after a while. We were very pleased to have our dog back.

Well, the dog lived to be sixteen or seventeen years old and all the kids were grown up. The dog began to get sick and there weren't many vets back then and we had to make'way with him. It's a lasting memory and it's stayed with me for many, many years. I've never owned another dog since. I guess that one took my heart with it when he left and that's the way I remember Prince."

Cindy Wallace