Treve

by Albert Payson Terhune

A pedigree collie becomes a sheep dog loyally serving two ranchers whose ages and personalities are distinctly different.

Genres: Dogs, Classics, Animals, Fiction, Childrens

Hardcover

First published June 1, 1924

About the author

Albert Payson Terhune (1872 - 1942), a local author of some fame, wrote numerous adventures about Collies, most notably, "Lad, A Dog", "Sunnybank: Home of Lad", and "Further Adventures of Lad". Sunnybank, his home on the eastern shore of Pompton Lakes in northern New Jersey, was originally the home of Terhune's parents, Edward Payson Terhune and Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune. Later as his home with his wife, Anice Stockton Terhune, Sunnybank became famous as "The Place" in the many stories of Terhune. Much of the land once constituting the Sunnybank estate was lost to developers in the 1960's with the house being demolished in 1969. Fortunately though, the central 9.6 acres was preserved through the dedicated efforts of Terhune fans and dog fanciers, and is now Terhune Sunnybank Memorial Park, administered by the Wayne Township Parks Department.

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book at Project Gutenberg right after I read The Heart Of A Dog by the same author. I had not ever read Terhune's Treve stories, so the book was entirely new to me, but it did feel more like separate stories hooked together rather than a seamless book. And since by coincidence I happened to be reading a different dog book in print form, I found myself comparing the two books. This one did not have the charm of the other, and I was a little disappointed in it. Mostly because Treve never actually came to life for me. He was constantly being shown doing thus and so, and then there would be a statement about collies in general. Terhune wanted to share his imaginary dog with the reader but he also wanted to be sure the reader would know that any good collie should act the same way. It became a little monotonous. I began to skim and that is never a good sign.

Poor Treve gets a rude start to life. He was a pedigreed dog that had to be sold along with everything else his breeder owned. A disagreeable man bought him and was taking him by train to a big dog show in order to sell him for much more than he had paid for him. But there was an incident on the train: Treve was taken out of his travel cage and in his innocence he offered to make friends with a grumpy German Shepherd who bit him on one ear, causing it to lose the classic tulip-tip and hang down the way a lop eared rabbit's ear does. The disagreeable man knew that he had just lost any profit he could have made by selling Treve, so what does he do? Throws him off the train, of course. At the precise moment of crossing a river. Treve lands in the water and drags himself into a hobo's camp. This hobo just happens to be a surgeon. Well, used to be a surgeon. And he managed to fix the ear, then the two pals go on to a sheep ranch where the hobo plans to get a meal. But things go a bit wrong there for various reasons and the hobo runs off, leaving the dog behind.

So begins Treve's life on a sheep ranch with the two men who decide to share ownership in him. The older man was grumpy and did not believe in doing anything with animals except use them. The younger man made a friend of Treve, which made his partner jealous, but he wouldn't admit it. I thought this whole line was carried on far too long, since the older man did learn to love the dog but refused to admit it. Only Treve understood, because collies are so smart, you see.

Adventure follows adventure, but Treve just never seemed like a real character to me. The focus was much more on the people in the story. I suppose I should not have been reading about Derry the Airedale at the same time. This book suffers in comparison.

Oh, and the final chapter was the very story I had read in The Heart Of A Dog, which explains its title, which had me confused in that book: Afterword. Now I understand! lol

[Timothy Bazzett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know I'm a little old to be reading Albert Payson Terhune. The last time I read Terhune I was probably about eleven years old. I'm 67 now, but by golly, I found I still liked this kind of book. Oh, it's not the kind of thing I'd enjoy a steady diet of now, certainly not the way I did between the ages of seven and eleven. Because I was in the "dog book" phase back then, devouring canine stories for children by Kjelgaard, O'Brien, Curwood, London and others. And of course all those Sunnybank collie books from the old master, Terhune, about his dogs - Lad, Lady, Wolf, Bruce, Buff, etc. This book, TREVE, was one I'd never read, so I was particularly pleased to find this old 1924 copy in a used bookstore last year. I read the whole thing yesterday, in just a couple sittings, just like I used to read Terhune over fifty years ago. TREVE is set in the southwest of the early 1920s, and the eponymous canine hero does a lot of the usual dog book stuff, dispatching mountain lions, wolves, and ratllesnakes, as well as heading off a stampeding herd of cattle, bringing in a flock of lost sheep through a winter storm, and tracking down and stopping all manner of bad guys too. Of course there are some not very politically correct elements here too - the way a Chinese cook is portrayed, for example. But the book was published more than eighty years ago, so what the hell, I suppose.

Reading TREVE yesterday allowed me to remember myself as a kid, and also reminded me what a terrific yarn-spinner Terhune was. No wonder so many boys and girls loved his books. Today the language may seem quaint and even archaic, but it's still completely accessible for any kid who wants to read a good dog book. And some of his books are still in print, most notably his most famous one, LAD: A DOG. If you're eight or nine years old you'd love it. If you're over sixty and read Albert Payson Terhune as a kid, you'll probably enjoy the trip back. And TREVE wouldn't be a bad place to start. Five stars because, well, because "thanks for the memories" and all those hours of enjoyment Terhune provided me with all those years ago.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book once, at about age ten. It's the only Terhune about a border collie. It was the first Terhune I read. APT was not a very good writer and I'd probably cringe on re-reading Treve, but I rate the book highly because it made me love collies and border collies so much that my parents got one for me from a ranch in Chino CA. This was a loving mistake: borders are not meant to be small-town house pets, whether in 1956 or 2014 Follow the work of Donald McCaig on this topic. He pleads with people: don't have a border for a pet. Anyway, the book Treve had a big influence on my life. Brought great happiness and great sorrow (when Angus, prone to chasing kids on bicycles, had to be taken back to the ranch he'd come from).

[7$MartyQ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another heart stolen

If there is a heaven, surely it would be inhabited more by"dumb" dogs than by "smart" people. The more I know people, the better I love my dog.

[Stephen Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Terhune's writing and this one is pretty dern good. It has all the laundry list of heroic things a dog can do but in a different setting of a sheep ranch in semi-arid foothills. A few of the tales were a bit taller than others, but told with Terhune's sincerity and enthusiasm you want to believe and just enjoy.
I wanted to be able to add this to my list of top books on dogs, my 'dogs-favorite-books' shelf, but a few things are of concern. The book was published in 1924 and there was somethings that are not woke by our standards. There was a chapter that dealt with their Chinese cook that was very racist.

There was also something that was very sexist, which can be seen in odd bit told in the speaking through a reporter:
"I've figured it out. I mean the reason for the dog-game's unsportsmanliness. And I think I've hit on the answer. It's because there are so many women in it."

People were stupid then to think that race or sex made a person less than another and not treated with respect. Hopefully people find different things to be stupid about now. I believe people are easily influenced, like by the mob, or the media. Psychology tells us people don't like to think and look for other facts to confirm what they have been told.

Another item to note is how in the old books dogs could bite the bad guys. We all think that anyone who abuses dogs is a villain, but when the dog meets that person later and bites him, or even when the dog bites someone in defense of his owner or property, it still makes me cringe and think of legal complications that would happen now. In one case, Treve's owner did have to pay a fine of $5 for biting the bad guy. A 'righteous bite' is the big weapon of a hero canine's arsenal and adds to the drama but still I cringe. (If violence makes you cringe, consider also that a couple of rustlers get killed with a shotgun.).

I think it is a great adventure book and would want to recommend it for dog lovers. I could have filled this review with all the individual adventures that fill each chapter, but I don't like to give those away other than say they are there. But I know some people that are easily triggered would want to know what is in a book, and that those of us who still like the book overall do not take the bad parts without concern they are wrong.

[Vu Minh Thu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nếu sau này có cơ hội sinh ra ở xứ lạnh, mình sẽ nuôi chó chăn cừu Collie.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unfortunately, Terhune did not feel himself equal to writing a book about the real Treve, which I feel would have been a great deal more interesting. In fact, the events of this book are not set on or anywhere near The Place, but on a fictional sheep ranch that is probably somewhere in Texas, though this is never explicitly stated. Despite the setting on a sheep ranch next to a cattle ranch, the animosity between the two types of ranch is more mentioned than taking any active role in the story for the majority of the book. In fact, Treve is only rarely depicted as herding sheep in the book, with most of the stories having little enough to do with the sheep... or, in fact, Treve.

Treve is certainly ONE of the main characters, but occupying nearly as much verbiage is Joel Fenno, and in fact he performs more actions and has more thought tangents than Treve does. It is hard to even see what Treve's character is, as so much of the story is taken with men's appraisals of him and so little involves the dog directly. He is more often the flashpoint for the story, rather than the story itself. Often as not, he disappears for pages at a time, and events in which he takes part are described in brief. For example, he at one point makes a hundred mile trip that is almost entirely skipped over. This happens multiple times in the book. It's also a little hard to get behind Treve as a hero when he provably does less work than the other ranch dogs, simply because his master wants to preserve his looks... for no readily apparent reason. There's also any number of chapters that have an impressive number of coincidences to get them off the ground. Not to mention the character of Nellie, and the abhorrent purpose to which she was put, story-wise. I resent it deeply.

All of that said, I do love Terhune's style, and there was something refreshingly different about the way the characters of the young, jovial Royce Mack and his terse, crotchety ranch partner Joel Fenno were handled. These stories were at least moderately enjoyable, and Joel Fenno is probably one of Terhune's more interesting human characters... perhaps because he unknowingly used the real Treve's character as his inspiration in designing Fenno.

Of course, as with so many of Terhune's books, the REALLY good part is the lengthy afterword, which in this is used to describe, at some length, the antics and idiosyncrasies of the real Treve who, unlike the fictional Treve, is an interesting and unusual dog of particularly fascinatingly odd habits. The fictional Treve, sadly, could be virtually any collie... except for the part where he has the slightest inkling of how to herd cattle. There is nothing that really sets him apart as unique among the collie heroes of Terhune's creation, and overall the stories were not the best of Terhune... but not the worst either.

For fans of Terhune, this is definitely one to pick up and put on the shelf. For anybody else... give it a pass and read one of his other books such as Lad, Wolf, Gray Dawn or Bruce to get a feel for how good his stories can really be.

[Ruth Sims · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Terhune raised collies and made up adventures featuring his long-haired friends. He had a lot of collies and a lot of books. When I was about 7 until 11 or so, I went through my horse book and dog book phase and read all of Terhune's collie books and horse books from Black Beauty to Smokey. I loved them all, though truth to tell I was (still am) afraid of dogs. That didn't keep me from enjoying stories about them. Paper dogs can't chase or bite you. And paper horses, like paper dinosaurs, are much smaller than the real article.

The story of Treve is not the most skillfully written story I've ever read, then or now. But I loved it then. And when I reread it recently, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a lovely, sweet trip back to my childhood. When I first read it, then, my favorite character was, of course, the dog, Treve. When I reread it recently, my favorite character was the grouchy, crusty, bad-tempered Fenno who resented Treve and told him constantly how worthless he was. Of course, Treve's courage changed everything and Fenno became secretly devoted to the dog. Openly, when his younger partner was looking or listening, Fenno still treated the dog with contempr. Fenno was the most believable character in the book. I could see Walter Brennan playing the part in a movie.

The book was written in 1924 and it shows in its innocence. But it's a children's book, after all, and even though current children's books are often coarser and more graphically violent in language and action, I think even today a youngster who likes dogs would enjoy the story. And adults too, as far as that goes. I was sorry I couldn't get my 11-year old granddaughter interested in it. She's reading Hunger Games.

[Stephanie A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collie on a cattle ranch! What could be better?

[Eva Tipps · Rating 4 out of 5]

Treve was a compilation of short stories about an extremely intelligent hero collie who, like James Bond, survives multiple attacks on his life by skill, intuition, or just plain luck. Because Treve is an innocent dog, I was cheering for him in every chapter, wondering how in the world he would get out of his latest predicament! The ornery old coot's change of heart -- from hating the dog to paying a LOT of money for a blind female pup because Treve was protecting her -- was one of the parts of the story I enjoyed. To my surprise, this book became a page-turner as I wanted to find out what happened next. Having been published in 1924, I also found reading about a sheep-herders life out West interesting. I haven't decided if I will keep this book to possibly re-read or if I will donate it so that hopefully someone else can enjoy it.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great dog story from the master of great dog stories, Albert Payson Terhune. Nothing complicated here, no complex plot twists, no detailed character development, really more a string of vaguely related anecdotes than a novel, and yet the author manages to en-noble the spirit of the Dog as only a true dog lover could. You finish this book and you want to give your own dog, be it pure bred or shelter rescue mutt, a big hug.

[Louise Bergin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This November 2021 I chose to read Treve for the annual Read-a-Terhune-Book day. This is a collection of short stories, featuring a collie on a sheep ranch in southern Texas. The stories are fictional, but there really was a collie named Treve whom the author owned. He uses the last chapter to talk about the dog. I am glad this day reminded me to pick up one of his books again to reread.

[Phyllis James]

I loved Terhune’s collie books as a child, but I had never read this one. It’s a bit different but still wonderful.

[Maura Cuneo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good for a book written so long ago.

[Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can't beat Terhune's story telling. For a lover of dog stories this is a must read

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great story teller Terhune was!
I had never read any of his books before but absolutely loved this collection of hair raising adventures of a border collie on a sheep ranch in the old south west.
Terhune and his wife bred and showed collie dogs. Treve is one of a series of dog books written in the 1920s and ‘30s which were probably originally written for “young adults.” Whatever your age, if you like animal stories, Treve is good solid fun!

[Jeanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book in 1952 in my school library and was powerfully moved by it. Children's literature was not what it is today, and these stories were written for adults. The style was already outdated when I first read it, and takes a certain patience now. But Terhune loved dogs and his descriptions of them are full of heart. I was so pleased to see I could get the book on Amazon and add it to my Kindle library.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely a very sweet book.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read. I liked the afterward about the real dog almost as much as liked the story itself. I'm sure I read some of his other stories when I was young.