Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers Read online

  Stubborn, immensely strong-willed and powerful, and completely, totally dedicated—this wasn't just another dog, it was Cookie.

  She looked for the pup with her nose, pushing the others out of the way, tumbling them, trying to find the dead one, and when she couldn't find it, she looked at me.

  None of this side-looking stuff, none of this looking up and then away, none of this I-don't-want-tothreaten-you dog-man looks. This was a look from a mother with a missing baby, a look aimed directly, fiercely, hotly into my eyes, into my soul.

  Where is it?

  It was as clear as if she'd asked it. And I knew that I had almost no time to find the pup and give it back. It was no longer man and dog—if, indeed, it had ever been thus with Cookie and me. It was now mother and intruder, mother and possible kidnapper, mother and fool. She would take me, tear me apart, and there was no doubt anywhere in the shelter. I reached under the straw and started to hand it over, but she reached for it, took it gently in her mouth, and set it on the straw and began working on it again, nudging it with her nose, licking it with hard strokes, trying to get it to breathe, to move, while making small whines. I think she knew, really knew, that it was hopeless but could not let it go, would not let it go.

  The other pups nursed and she checked on them at intervals—every two, three minutes—but kept working on the dead puppy and when she could not get it to respond no matter what she did, she picked it up and put it with the other pups to nurse.

  She watched it carefully and the movement of the other pups caused the body, of the dead one to move and she must have thought it alive because she lay back, exhausted from the birthing, and closed her eyes and went to sleep.

  I waited a full minute, then carefully reached over and removed the dead pup. While Cookie still slept, I crept out of the hut and put the body of the pup some twenty yards away in a snowbank. I didn't want to leave Cookie yet and planned to spend the night or at least stay until I was sure the rest of the pups were all right, and I thought she would not find the body there. I pushed it into the snow and covered it, and then stole back to the shelter, rearranged the plug and unrolled my sleeping bag, and went to sleep. I would take care of the body of the pup when I went to the house.

  I had become exhausted and when I next awakened, the wind had abated and I could see daylight coming through the crack in the opening. I turned on my headlamp and scanned the interior of the bale house and saw that Cookie was still fast asleep. I was getting ready to leave when I saw a strange lump.

  There, in the middle of the puppies, lay the frozen body of the dead pup, stuck back into a nursing position.

  Without awakening me, Cookie had gotten up during the night, gone out, found the pup and brought it back, arranged it to "feed" with the others, and gone back to sleep.

  I was caught somewhere between heartbreak and admiration, and I thought suddenly of orphan children I had seen in the streets in Juárez, Mexico, back in the early sixties and how it would have been for them to have such a mother, such a wonderful mother.

  Cookie slept hard, was absolutely sound asleep, and I thought I would take the body now, take it to the house and dispose of it so she could not find it. But when I reached across the hut to get it, her eyes opened and her lips moved to clear teeth, and again she looked directly into my eyes.

  I will pull your sled, she said, and love you and lead the team and save your life and be loyal to all that you are and obey you in all things until I cannot, but if you touch my pup you die.

  I left the pup and it was not for three days, almost four, when the still-frozen pup was clearly not going to come back to life, that she finally surrendered to her grief and let me take it away.

  But even then she growled, this time not at me but at the fates, at all of it. That she would lose a young one—a growl at life.

  Joy

  IT'S WONDERFUL HOW they learn and grow. Puppies.

  We did not isolate them from the main kennel as some do, to make them more convenient to handle. Cookie remained loose in the bale house with her litter for three weeks, unchained and able to come and go as she pleased.

  During that time all was peaceful. The other dogs understood her "lying in" period, and even when we harnessed and ran other teams, with other leaders, Cookie let us go. Several times she came to the door of the shelter to watch us leave, and I heard her whine once and seem to be discomfited because we left without her. Normally she would not have stood for it. Without puppies to hold her back, it would have been nearly impossible to leave without her, so strong was her drive to run, to lead.

  But we weaned early and within nine days started the pups on a meat slurry that was completely disgusting to make—involving shredded livers and kidneys—and so effective it turned even puppies only nine days old into ravenous carnivores. The upshot was that by the time they were three weeks old, the pups were round and fat and didn't need much milk, and Cookie started the weaning process, which varied somewhat depending on location and the litter. In this case she would leave the shelter and sit on top so they couldn't get at her nipples, and only come down to feed them once a day instead of letting them free-feed as she had at first.

  The pups—really only just able to trundle around and so fat from her milk and the meat we fed them they could hardly hold their weight up—would rumble around the house in the snow, making pitiful cries, begging Mother to come down and feed them.

  By the fourth week the weaning was all but done and Cookie—almost as a signal—would return to the kennel and pick the nearest female and set about trying to kill her. With all her drives, intensity, and strength, she would brook no interference in what she thought of as her territory, and that generally meant the kennel, the house, me and the rest of the family, and all the area encompassed within about a four-hundred-mile radius. She loved us all, but owned us as well.

  She did not recognize males as threats to her supremacy, but God help any female when her birthing and nursing period was done. Cookie would imagine some slight or insult and raise holy hell until I put her back on her chain.

  This was not a small matter. Cookie was large for a female and was at least a third wolf—with wolf color and wolf markings—and when she hit a dog, it usually went down, and when it was down, she went for the throat, and she had, indeed, on one occasion killed another female in one of these end-of-birthing wars.

  As soon as she was on her chain it was all right and she dropped back into her normal frame of reference, where she ran lead and took over the duties of the team again.

  But not the puppies. The puppies were left loose to run free until they were four or five months old or until, as my son said, "the day after they get in the chicken coop and kill all the chickens." (It was amazing how often this edict was true; in ten years in the bush, trying every year to raise chickens and turkeys and ducks, we never once got a bird to maturity while we had pups.)

  On the whole, we had a very happy kennel, with dogs that would jump up to be petted and come when called. Sometimes even when it wasn't time to run, my family and I would go and picnic in the kennel, just to be with them, and in a moment of gaiety we put a tape player in a waterproof box in the kennel and kept music going all the time from then on. They liked classical best—some of the females seemed to particularly love Bach—but also favored country music, particularly Willie Nelson. Willie was Cookie's favorite and sometimes—especially during his song "Angels Flying Too Close to the Ground"—she sang with him. What with music, feeding three times a day, watering with warm blood soup twice a day, and all the attention given, the kennel was an obviously happy place.

  But to cap it, the loose puppies brought a wild joy wherever they went. 1 have heard stories of kennels where puppies could not be loose, where other dogs would harm them, and it is possible they are true, but not at ours. I never saw an adult dog harm a pup.

  The puppies had a schedule, almost a ritual. They would sleep like they were dead until they smelled the first soup in the morning, the
n tumble out of the doghouse (the bales were gone and they were back in a normal house) to eat, go to the bathroom, and then head to the first dog of the day, a big bruiser named Charley.

  Charley would lie like a sphinx, his great feet out to the front and his head up, while they all ran to greet him and climb all over him. It was a game, all of it, and the rules were very rigid. Apparently Charley was not allowed to move or show expression no matter what the puppies did to him. And the puppies were allowed to do anything they wanted, including hanging on to Charley's lips, which two pups did at one point, swinging like round-bellied little trapeze artists.

  When the game was completed with Charley, the litter moved on to the next dog, a frustrated little female named Sarah, who had never had a litter and spent a hectic fifteen minutes trying to get all the puppies in one place at one time so she could "nurse" them. She would grab one, pull it into place, hold it with a foot, then another, then a third, holding them down with her feet, and then it would all go to pieces because when she grabbed the fourth one the first one would get away and she would have to start over. One, two, three, almost four, one, two—it was like trying to grab mercury.

  When they all escaped from Sarah, the pups would tumble into Anthony's circle. Anthony, a small dog with amazing stamina, played a game in which he held his head low to the ground and ran around the outside of his circle with the chain stretched tight along the ground. Each dog was held in his or her circle by an eight-foot chain bolted to a rotating car axle driven into the ground in the center and on swivels so it wouldn't tangle.

  The chain moving along the ground caught the pups in the middle of their sides and sent them tumbling, and the game was to try to get through Anthony's circle, dodging under the chain or trying to jump over it. Since Anthony was clever and knew how to tighten and loosen the chain—which raised and lowered it—and increase and decrease his speed, very few puppies made it through. But they all tried and must have loved it, because they easily could have walked around Anthony's circle and avoided the whole escapade, but every morning they went to Anthony.

  Then to Carlisle, a quick red dog who had wonderful things hidden in his circle—bits of meat, bones with scraps on them, and frozen beaver skulls. (We fed the dogs beaver carcasses given to us by trappers—the state controls the beaver population by trapping because of the damage they do cutting trees and clearing land. There is, indeed, a wonderful and probably accurate theory that all European and many North American cities were initially "settled" by beaver because they cleared areas along rivers where people could start to build.)

  Carlisle delighted in hiding the bits of treasure; some under the straw in his house, others in the snow around the edge of his circle, and some beneath him as he lay. He would roll and laugh and giggle as the puppies descended on him, everybody trying to find the first and best, digging in his house, around the circle, and finally diving beneath Carlisle himself for the prizes.

  All the adult dogs wanted to be visited by the pups—males, females, young and old. They loved the little pack—as they had loved all the puppies we had raised—and they would reach out and try to snag the puppies into their circle as they went by, hooking them with a foot and pulling them in to play and roll, and I could not watch it without thinking of them all not as a kennel or a pack but as a wonderfully happy family with fifty-odd uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters and parents and grandparents.

  The puppies, fat and round and happy, spread an almost consummate joy wherever they went, and if it took all morning they would go to every single dog to say hello and play, at least for a few minutes. Now and then they would run back to Mother to make sure Cookie was still there. She would give them each a perfunctory lick—they were no longer just her children but were weaned and belonged to all and would, in a few months, be all but ignored by her as she returned to her normal life—and they would run back and pick up the trail of fun where they'd left off.

  If for some reason the kennel had been an unhappy one, the puppies on their own would have made it happy. As it was, they put a joyous frosting on an already merry cake and many times I caught myself laughing out loud as they rumbled through the kennel.

  There was a side benefit that was perhaps even more important than the happiness, and that was the education of the pups.

  Each dog, young and old alike, had something to teach them, and the pups were avid learners. By the time they were five weeks old they were starting to develop as individuals, which was, and is, completely amazing to me. How one father and one mother could come up with so many completely different beings is perhaps the true miracle of procreation. Some of them were shy, some bold, some smart, and some not-so-smart; some learned in seconds, some took months; some loved with all they were, some were indifferent to all but the sled and pulling. All of them from Rex and Cookie.

  But they all learned. At different rates, and most certainly in different ways, they all studied and learned and grew.

  Many times—at least once a day—I would catch them at "school." There was often an element of play in the study—as with Carlisle—but sometimes it was very serious. Once while cleaning the kennel I saw them at such serious study. The kennel is cleaned twice daily so the dogs won't eat their own stools (as they will, as wolves do, to recycle any missed food), and the dogs view whoever is doing the cleaning as a servant beneath their consideration. Even the driver, who normally commands a certain automatic attention, is ignored when he approaches with the wheelbarrow, rake, and shovel, and in the ignoring there comes a valuable time to watch the dogs when they do not feel as if they are under scrutiny. It is during this cleaning time that I have seen their humor and anger expressed in natural terms and learned more about them as dogs and not just extensions of human training.

  On this one occasion the puppies were with an older dog named William. We never called him Bill, always the more formal name, because he was so staid and proper in the way he sat and studied the kennel and all its surroundings—birds flying overhead, clouds, and, in the summer, butterflies and sometimes ants. I think William, who was large and gray and—like so many of them—wolflike, thought he was on earth for three reasons: to pull and to learn and to teach.

  In this case he was trying to teach the puppies the intricacies of anatomy, particularly where it applied to beaver skulls.

  Sled dogs are unbelievably strong—perhaps the strongest of all dogs—and much of this strength is imparted to their biting abilities. Once while I was pulling porcupine quills out of William, he reacted and bit the pliers—never me, just the pliers—and actually dented the steel with his teeth. Had he bit my arm it would have come off. But with all their strength and force, beaver skulls are stronger. Beaver regularly chew oak trees down, white and red oak alike, and while their teeth—virtually two wood chisels in front—do the work, the skull carries the weight of leverage when they work.

  Inside the beaver skull there are things to eat and the dogs save the skulls and work at getting into them the way a safecracker works at stealing. Now and then a dog would come along who could crush the skull and get inside, but most of them have to find an opening to lick out the interior, and this finding of the openings involves them for days, weeks.

  William knew of a way to stick his tongue in the opening left by the spinal cord and lick out the inside of the skull, and was as deft as a surgeon, holding the skull with his paws while licking it clean.

  The puppies knew nothing except that the skulls were fun to play with and that—by the smell—there was something delicious inside, and I watched as William tried to teach them how to get into the magic opening.

  The puppies squatted in a half-circle around William. He sat like a professor with a beaver skull—minus the lower jaw but with the top front teeth still in place—on the snow in front of him. While the puppies stared up at him, then down to the skull, he leaned down carefully, turned the skull with his paw, and showed the opening where the spinal cord had gone in. Slowly, with great deliberation
he leaned down and licked at the opening.

  Then he stood again and pushed the skull away with his paw and the puppies piled into it, growling and fighting at the skull, all but a small female—I would later name her Poppy—who had enough of Cookie's intellect genes to have learned. She burrowed beneath the pile of fighting puppies and found the cord opening and stuck her nose into it, then a tongue.

  One, I thought. One got it. For a moment I didn't believe what I had just seen. We are so chauvinistic and so brainwashed to humans being superior to all other forms that the ignorance this causes has become something close to horrific. The bullshit—certainly the most appropriate word—about manifest destiny and how we have dominion over all other creatures has caused such terrors as vivisection, cosmetic testing, use of animals (particularly beagles, for some reason) in aerospace testing, and I think ultimately led to such monstrosities as death camps and genocide, which are really nothing more than an insanely rabid expression of one race thinking they are superior to another.

  But I was caught in this ignorance, this chauvinism, and after a few minutes decided that what I had seen was an accident, that I was reading more into it than was really there.

  William dispelled that thinking. When it was clear that only Poppy had figured it out and that the others were just playing around, William pulled the skull back, growled at them to get their attention, and started over.

  Skull in position, puppies watching, he tipped the skull to show the opening, then, slowly and deliberately, he leaned down to lick the opening, in the skull. Then he pushed the skull away and watched them again.