How Don Was Saved

by L.M. Montgomery

Unknown Binding

About the author

Lucy Maud Montgomery was a Canadian author, best known for a series of novels beginning with Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908.

Montgomery was born at Clifton, Prince Edward Island, Nov. 30, 1874. She came to live at Leaskdale, north of Uxbridge Ontario, after her wedding with Rev. Ewen Macdonald on July 11, 1911. She had three children and wrote close to a dozen books while she was living in the Leaskdale Manse before the family moved to Norval, Ontario in 1926. She died in Toronto April 24, 1942 and was buried at Cavendish, Prince Edward Island.

Reviews

[Katja Labonté · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars. Curtis Locksley’s Don has been seen with a sheep-killer, and Paul Stockton, the most influential farmer around, accuses him of worrying his own flock. Is Don doomed to being shot?

Oh, I love this story. You dog lovers who avoid dog stories because someone always dies, well, cheer up and try this one: instead of losing lives, we save some! Don is just splendid, and the characters are well done. The storyline is also great and the setting is perfect. <3

[Manybooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now Lucy Maud Montgomery does truly and certainly present in her 1904 short story How Don Was Saved (and which I first read in the edited by the late Rea Wilmshurst collection of sea and ocean themed short story collection Along the Shore: Tales by the Sea) some pretty well awe-inspiring textual, verbal descriptions of how during inclement weather the ocean is generally not to be considered as benign and soothing but rather more akin to a fearsome monstrosity intent on consuming those who dare to venture out (or are returning), that the sea is both beautiful and fearsome and as such also a force of nature with always features inherent threats and massive dangers (and while I do find the ocean inspired descriptions in How Don Was Saved visually stunning and even with their viciousness of a wonderful aesthetic beauty, there is also always that sense of dread, that during rough seas, danger indeed lurks everywhere).

However, as much as I have obviously both loved and appreciated L.M. Montgomery’s narrational descriptiveness with regard to her seascapes in How Don Was Saved, the actual featured contents, Montgomery’s story of how Don the Newfie dog manages to help rescue a large fishing boat in distress and is by this act of heroics then himself saved from being shot for supposedly attacking and killing sheep, all this (and especially how ecstatically Montgomery’s text depicts Don swimming out into the sea to retrieve the tow line the stricken vessel’s crew has tossed into to raging waters) does feel (at least to and for me and my reading tastes) just a bit too heavily laden with emotionality. Because yes indeed, how overly dripping with feeling and pain (and somehow even perhaps on equal par with the ocean’s weather related fury) Don’s plight and young Curtis’ devastation are depicted by L.M. Montgomery, this is just a wee bit too extreme and too overly exaggerated for me, and therefore also leaving me feeling more than a bit unsatisfied with Don’s presented story in and of itself (and indeed, with said dissatisfaction, my verbal, my textual delight with L.M. Montgomery’s sense of and for the sea and how the ocean can be both placid and a raging torrent of destruction notwithstanding, also quite markedly lessening my reading pleasure to the point of How Don Was Saved being only a three star rating at best).

[John Yelverton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful albeit simplistic short story about how a family dog was saved from being put down for killing sheep.

[Alayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A much loved Newfoundland dog is saved in what was a predictable way, but I still enjoyed the story.