Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers Read online

  This time Poppy went right for the opening and another puppy—he would be named Marvin by my son—saw her do it and joined her, nuzzling into the small hole and licking inside, and I thought, two.

  It is real, I thought. William is teaching them and he has taught two and it wasn't an accident, couldn't be that deliberate and be an accident. And if there was any doubt, William ended it by not being satisfied with only two.

  He did it twice more until two more pups had learned and the rest were figuring it out, did it exactly the same, and when he was done he let the pups have the skull as their own and moved back to his house to sit and watch them trying to get into it.

  The dogs always left me with wonder, but any fur ther lingering thoughts that I might be superior to them were dissipated by William and his school.

  The pups learned in so many ways. There were other direct teachers. I saw a female named Guidon teaching the pups how to clean their feet. She was more pointed and would hold the pup down with one paw while licking at its foot, then wait for the pup to lick at it, turning it over to get at the pad. Again, when I first saw Guidon doing this I thought it might have been an accident, but when she repeated it with several pups, I knew she meant to be teaching them.

  Tiny Tim—a hulk of a dog with so much power that he'd once single-handedly pulled a sledge loaded with sixteen hundred pounds of dog food forty feet to win a pulling contest (he got the dog food as a prize)—taught them how to step over a chain without tripping. And again, doing it repeatedly and slowly so they would understand how to handle the chain. He would cause his chain to go slack enough to lie on the ground, then step over it carefully, then nudge the pups to do the same. (Tiny Tim was extraordinarily strong; on one occasion a rabbit who could have been either insane or related closely to Evel Knieval ran through the length of the kennel. Or tried to. Tiny Tim slammed against his chain and caught the rabbit, swallowing it nearly whole. When I examined his chain—a chain strong enough to pull a car—I found that he had stretched and flattened the links with his lunge.)

  They learned how to dance from a dog named Whippet. Thin and long, she was as lovely as a ballet dancer and did a wonderful loop-over-loop-over-loop dance that made me think of the Bolshoi. The puppies were clumsy, would not get grace and true strength until well into their second full year, but they tried to dance just the same, and in their stumbling imitation of Whippet's elegant demonstrations it was possible to see the grace and beauty of what they would become.

  It was when they learned to sing that the puppies became truly hilarious and even the dogs laughed at them.

  Puppies can't sing. They want to, they die to sing, but they simply can't. Until they are approaching a year, they can't make the notes work right, can't control their throats or shape their mouths to make the round sound that is so eerie and hauntingly beautiful on a moonlit night.

  But they don't know they can't sing. Adult dogs try to teach them, sometimes one at a time, sometimes all at once, and the puppies throw back their heads, their little ears—which don't stand up straight until they are several months old—flopping to the sides and their little mouths trying to make the O shape so important for the song, and they emit a yipping caterwaul that will loosen teeth.

  I once watched an adult dog named King wince and go in his house to avoid puppy singing, his head jammed back in a corner and his rear end raised to block the opening in his house to keep the sound out.

  But even with the poor quality the singing is infectious, and if one puppy starts and another picks it up the whole kennel usually joins in—perhaps to drown them out—and I have often sung along with them, trying to harmonize, while I was cleaning the kennel.

  They learned of harnessing by watching me harness and drive teams, learned of sleds and mittens by chewing on them and stealing them, learned of running by watching the dogs, and learned of love simply because of what they were—puppies—and it is impossible not to love them, even when they are eating your favorite parka that you left on a doghouse for just a minute while you ran to the bathroom.

  The Home Wreckers

  THE PUPPIES GREW with the kennel, grew with the dogs, became dogs with them—just as I grew and learned and became dog. And in truth, that might have been enough.

  But on a cold February morning I saw them watching the house. The kennel was located out in the middle of a forty-acre field, near a line of trees that provided shelter from the wind and shade in the summer afternoons. The house was positioned at the edge of the field, one hundred yards from the kennel, so we could see the dogs but still avoid some of the kennel smell (which was helpful for those people who came to visit who were not accustomed to such things as week-old buried meat and the ammonia from the dogs' urine marking of their houses).

  The running trail led out of the kennel and away from the house, back into the forest and up some shallow, long hills into wilderness and, consequently, the dogs rarely came toward the house and, of course, never went inside.

  I knew of the dogs, how they lived, what they were, but they didn't know anything of me, of us, except what they saw in the kennel or on a sled.

  The puppies changed all that. I saw them sitting as I walked toward the kennel, seven fat little blobs all across the small rise between the house and the kennel, sitting with their heads and ears cocked, watching me come. And when I moved closer I saw they weren't watching me but were looking past me, back at the house, their faces full of curiosity.

  "It's the house," I said. "Where we live..."

  I walked down into the kennel to put antibiotic ointment on a cut one of the dogs had from a minor scuffle and was surprised to see the pups hadn't followed me. Normally they would have been right on my heels but they stayed at the top, watching the house, and when I had finished tending to the dog I walked back past them.

  "Come on," I said as I moved by. "Come visit us..." I had a thought that it was a shame to waste all that joy on just the kennel, that it would be nice to have them in the yard—just an errant thought—but I didn't really think they'd come.

  But they did. It was all very informal at first. They started to tag along but as they moved farther from the kennel and what they thought of as safety they moved slower, two of them stopping and sitting while the bolder ones—the ones who would become leaders—forged ahead. One of the stoppers, later named Crackers, gave a long howl as we moved away, and I stopped and waited. In a moment he started to move again and caught up with us, and that made the other one come and they all followed me to the house.

  We had a small home, wood sides, with small windows to reduce heat loss. We heated by wood and also had a wood cookstove and kept dried and canned food from the gardens in the kitchen, including smoked venison, smoked and dried fish, and ropes of garlic. When I opened the door, the aroma that came out always made my mouth water, especially if there was a stew cooking on the woodstove—which was almost all the time—and the same aroma to the puppies, with their elevated sense of smell and taste, must have been irresistible.

  As soon as I opened the door the odor caught them—all their noses went in the air, seemed to be caught the way cartoon dogs and cats are caught by odors that pull at them.

  "We have company," I said to my wife, Ruth, who was at the stove thawing out a large bucket of meat to feed the dogs.

  They trooped in as if they'd been doing it all their lives and hit the house like a horde of huns. Their arrival and enthusiasm—they dispersed in all directions—was appreciated by everyone except Tudor, a large tomcat who had always viewed the kennel as something of a leper colony and thought of the house as very much his private domain. He nailed two of the pups immediately, but they simply changed direction slightly and went around him and kept going.

  They were in the house not more than three minutes and in that time pulled all the covers off the beds, tore my son's room apart, ripped a hole in the couch, growled at and then sang with the radio, wagged a greeting to Ruth, ate bits of meat from the thawing dog food, made pud
dles on the floor, and roared out the door and back to the kennel like a runaway train.

  In spite of the damage, all minor, their happiness added to the house the way it did to the kennel and we all decided to make it part of our training program, showing the dogs how we lived.

  It was a wise decision because the pups had already arrived at the same conclusion. Early the next morning, while I was lighting fires and taking the night chill off the house, I heard a scratching sound at the door. It was pitch dark and I turned on the porch light to find all the pups on the back step.

  We had become part of their ritual, their day. I usually arose first, Ruth and my son Jim staying under the covers until the house was warm, and I opened the door and let them in before I thought of the consequences.

  They streamed past me with a wagged greeting and went straight for the bedrooms. I heard screams, thuds, and growls, and four pups went by me, pulling a quilt and blankets, being chased by one extremely irate tomcat and a woman in a flannel nightgown. They made the corner by the entryway, dropped the blankets, slammed against the storm door (I had left the inner door open) and barreled back to the kennel.

  "You're up?" I asked Ruth. "The house isn't even warm yet..."

  She grabbed the blankets, wrapped herself in them—the kitchen was well below freezing, cold enough so her toes curled under on the linoleum—and without speaking stomped back to the bedroom. Her reaction was not quite as dramatic as the time I dropped the rubber frog on her when she was in the tub—that was record breaking; water from the tub could be found in the living room, two rooms away, and the geyser went up so hard it flooded out the ceiling vent fan, which I had to replace—but it was close and, I decided, well worth repeating.

  From then on every morning the pups came, and as they grew and there were other litters, they passed the ritual on to the new ones. All this culminated a year later in what came to be called The Great Kennel Invasion. We had massively expanded our breeding program to prepare for a future Iditarod. In addition, we had bought four litters of puppies from other kennels and our puppies quickly educated them and we were, as people say in the sled-driving business, "getting very doggy."

  I went to the door one soft spring morning and there were thirty-six puppies there, waiting to come in.

  To show that I am not completely callous, I did hesitate. After all, we had a very small house, Tudor was fast becoming neurotic, and Ruth was approaching each morning with something close to paranoia. But they looked so sweet, all atop each other looking up at the door, that I thought, Oh heck, just this once, and I opened the door.

  Legends, Norse sagas are born this way; marriages are ruined this way; cat lovers are made enemies this way; housework is changed this way.

  It was wild. Thirty-six puppies jn a small house does not seem like thirty-six but more like two hundred. There simply wasn't room for them all. Even sitting still they would have filled the place.

  But they did not sit still. Every corner, every crack had to be investigated. They hit my son's room first—giving me time to yell a quick warning to Ruth to cover up—and tore all the covers off his bed and then jumped on him, licking and nuzzling, tickling him until I thought he was convulsed and would die. I have never heard anybody laugh so hard. Then they hit Ruth. She had clamped down on the covers and that might have worked with ten, fifteen pups. But this was a battalion and they had the covers off in an instant, climbed on the bed, and attacked the flannel nightgown, the pillows, the wall, digging under and tickling, pushing and pulling until Ruth and Jim were both on the floor covered with puppies and I honestly do not know what would have happened except that one of the pups found the pantry.

  A signal, some silent message passed, and they all left the bedrooms and went for it. I grabbed two, put them outside, then two more, put them out, and two and two and two until we thought they were mostly outside only to find there were still two in the back of the pantry, crouched with a venison ham in a dark corner behind the sauerkraut crock, bound and determined to set up permanent quarters.

  Puppies.

  Young Run

  THE PUPPIES GREW, became a year then a year and a half old, and then, finally, became dogs.

  We trained by "logging," starting them at four months to get used to the feel of weight pulling behind them. First they get a plain harness to wear around for half an hour each day, just loose and running. Then a four-foot piece of rope is attached to the harness for another few days, and finally a short, light piece of firewood—the "log"—is tied to the rope and they run with that bouncing and skidding along behind them.

  They genetically know how to pull, want to run and pull, but going at it slowly lets them build confidence and have more fun in the process.

  The first runs with Cookie's last litter were chaotic. I put Cookie on the front, because she is so solid, and then King and William, who are steady and big and do not suffer nonsense.

  Then three pups. The pups know what it's all about, had watched us harness a thousand times, and knew what was coming. There was a new four-inch layer of snow on the old snow pack for a cushion and I hooked them all up to a light—fourteen-pound—racing sled with new plastic on the runners.

  When I popped the quick-release it felt like the sled left the ground. They flew, the puppies firing up the adult dogs as we roared out the back of the kennel into the woods.

  The trick is keeping the puppies running with the sled. They have lived in the kennel, never been out of sight of the adult dogs except to run in the house and wake Ruth, and suddenly they are allowed to run into the forest with the big guys.

  There is a whole world to see, to learn, and like all young they want to see and do it all at once. A hundred yards into the woods we spooked a snowshoe rabbit that shot off the trail to the right into a thick stand of red willow.

  The pups went after him. And they went with such boundless enthusiasm that they infected the team and we all went after the rabbit, even Cookie.

  We didn't catch him. We caught willows and trees and brush and deep snow but we didn't catch the rabbit and it didn't matter.

  I pulled everybody back on the trail and we took off again and hadn't gone sixty yards when a red squirrel jumped from the base of a small tree and with the speed of light snaked up a balsam next to the trail.

  We went after him. We caught brush and tree limbs and more deep snow and tangled harnesses and our own feet—by this time I was laughing out loud—but we didn't catch the squirrel and it didn't matter.

  A quarter mile farther on a mouse blew out of the snow in a small clearing and skittered across the surface before diving back in.

  We went after him. The snow was easily three feet deep and the team, pups and all, poised, bounded in the air, and dived beneath the snow, burrowing after the mouse and going so deep they seemed to have disappeared.

  We didn't get him. We got more deep snow and grass and the grand sight of a young doe's head poking up through new snow so that it looked disembodied and we got wet and covered in powder but we didn't get the mouse and it didn't matter.

  Fifty yards farther along a ruffed grouse got up, thundering in a shower of snow, and the young dogs tried to fly and catch the grouse and I swore for a second they'd make it—Poppy got tail feathers—but they didn't get the grouse and it didn't matter.

  We ran for two hours and we saw more mice and deer and grouse and rabbits and birds in the sky and a moose and a car when we crossed the road and a farm dog that ran with us for a while and a coyote and a weasel and a porcupine, and we went after every one of them, laughing and snorting and falling and tumbling, but we didn't catch any of them and it never did matter.

  Nothing mattered but the day and the sun and the snow and the celebration of the first glorious run with the young dogs.

  Older Run

  "HELP."

  It was, in an impossible situation on an impossible night in an impossible life, the only possible thing to say.

  I had never been in such an untenable,
completely bizarre situation.

  The night had started easy, ridiculously easy, and I should have taken warning from the ease. Generally, when running dogs and sleds, a good moment or two will be followed by eight or nine hours of panic and disaster.

  It was early on in training Cookie's pups. They were already trained, knew how to run, where to run, when to run and were having a ball. I was still in that phase of my life when I thought I had some semblance of control over the team, did not yet understand that the dogs ran the show—all of it—and, if I was extremely lucky and didn't hit a tree, I was allowed to hang on the back of the sled and be a spectator. The problem was that my education was coming so slowly that I had fallen behind the dogs—say a couple of years—and it was becoming very difficult to keep up.

  This night had begun cleanly, wonderfully. It was midwinter, clear, fifteen or twenty below, a full moon—absolutely beautiful. I put Cookie on the front end and took three of the seasoned dogs and six of the pups, a total of ten dogs, counting Cookie.

  Exceeding seven dogs was risky—more than seven dogs meant it would be difficult to stop them or control them, in fact it could not be done unless they wanted to stop—but I knew that and loaded the sled heavily with gear and four fifty-pound sacks of dog meat to help me control them.

  Cookie held the gang line out while I harnessed the rest of them, the pups last because they were so excited they kept jumping over the gang line and getting tangled, and when I popped the quick-release holding the sled to a post near the kennel we snapped out in good order.

  That's how I thought of it—almost in a stuffy English manner. Ahh yes, we left the kennel in good order, everything quite, that is to say, quite properly lined up.

  The weight of the sled did not seem to bother them at all. This, of course, should have been a warning to me, a caution that I had exceeded my limits of ability and understanding, but it was a smashing night (still in the English mode), clear and quite, that is to say, quite beautiful, and I gave them their head (as if I had any choice).