Book: The Dog Who Came to Stay

Overview

Hal Borland’s 1961 book The Dog Who Came to Stay is a quietly luminous memoir about a stray hound that wanders into the author’s New England farmhouse and, by degrees, into his and his wife Barbara’s lives. Framed by the turn of the seasons, it blends narrative with natural history, fieldcraft, and a newspaperman’s eye for detail, becoming as much a portrait of a place as it is of a dog. The story’s power lies in its restraint: a celebration of kinship with an animal that remains resolutely itself.

Story

A lean, weathered hound appears one day, hungry and wary, clearly lost yet unwilling to surrender his independence. The Borlands feed him, offer shelter, and begin the patient work of earning trust. No owner comes forward. What starts as a temporary kindness grows into a pact: he will be their dog so long as he can keep his hound’s freedom. The book follows that year, late winter into spring, the green swell of summer, and the austerity of autumn and snow, through episodes that test and confirm the bond. He patrols stone walls and fencerows, noses out the night’s news in the fields, and learns the household’s rules, especially the hard one about not running deer. Now and then his instincts outvote training; a hot scent can pull him beyond earshot, and there are anxious waits in the dark, but he always finds his way back.

There are country complications: poultry to be respected, gardens to be skirted, skunks and porcupines to avoid, the occasional raccoon treed in the small hours. He becomes a sentinel at the lane and a companion on footpaths along brooks and through second-growth timber, attentive to the ground while Borland reads the sky and the treeline. The narrative is modest in stakes yet rich in incident, where the drama is a change in wind, a thaw that opens the river, a night when foxes bark on the ridge and the hound quivers with every nerve awake.

Character and Relationship

The dog is never sentimentalized into a furry child. He is a hound, independent, courteous, stubborn, and exact about scent. Borland meets him on those terms, asking for obedience when it matters, allowing room for the ancient craft that lives in muscle and nose. The marriage in the farmhouse shapes the bond; Barbara’s patience and clarity offset the narrator’s occasional fretfulness. Together they make a place where the dog can choose to stay, and the choice, renewed day after day, becomes its own meaning.

Themes

Belonging without ownership anchors the book. It weighs freedom against safety, instinct against discipline, and argues for trust earned by consistency and respect. The dog’s presence reframes the countryside, making hedgerows and thickets legible, reminding the humans that their home sits inside a larger, older order. The cycle of seasons carries a quiet lesson about change and continuity, loss and return, and the dignity of letting a creature be what it is.

Style and Setting

Borland writes in clean, lyrical prose tuned to weather, light, and sound. His newspaperman’s precision keeps sentiment at bay; his naturalist’s attention turns small moments, pawprints in crusted snow, the rasp of cicadas, a dusk chorus of thrushes, into touchstones. The setting is a modest New England farm with stone fences, pasture gone to brush, hardwood ridges, and a nearby river, rendered with the intimacy of daily acquaintance.

Legacy

The Dog Who Came to Stay endures because it honors the ordinary miracles of companionship and place. It reads as a field guide to trust, a calendar of rural life, and a love letter to a dog who remained wholly himself and, by that very integrity, made a home.