Today’s the day! Pack Leader says my ebook is out!
I sound excited but actually, I can’t find it. I sniffed all around the Den for this ebook thing, which is supposed to have my picture on it–no luck. Maybe my ebook is outside? I went to the door and whined, because it opens inward and I haven’t mastered how to do that by myself…yet.
Pack Leader tells me humans live seven years for every one of ours.
In that case, I told her, I expected seven times as many treats for my eighth birthday this month—however many that is! (I don’t do timeses.)
Little did I know I had an extra-special treat coming my way…on four cute little bitchy paws!
We were visiting my favorite set of neighbors. Deb and Scotty are my personal faves because Deb always has goodies going on in the kitchen and she is one of the most generous humans I know when it comes to feeding wolves. So there I was, being petted and feted by half a dozen humans around a backyard barbecue, when a good-looking, aromatic young miss poked her ears above the garden wall.
I heard myself whine with longing.
Darned if she didn’t come down to our level, followed by her human. Wow! She smelled terrific! It was love at first sniff. I couldn’t stop following my overactive nose.
Pack Leader and I had a great good time howling along with CBC tonight in the kitchen, my favorite section of our den. She gets pretty crazy, banging away in time with the ape music on various pans and lids with a spoon or spatula, waggling her rump and thumping her feet on the floor, all this while howling—and cooking! What could be finer than a Saturday night in our kitchen?
A Sunday morning in our old kitchen in Belcarra, grumbled Toyon. Now that was a kitchen fit for wolves! We even had our own breakfast bar, a rabbit’s height above the floor and so near the stove and dining table that all the leftovers landed in our bowls. He sighed a big, gusty malemute sigh. By Silva, I miss that place!
What’s his complaint? I thought. Ghost wolves don’t need to eat, anyway, dispiriting as that reality may be.
Ghost wolves don’t need to eat, anyway, dispiriting as that reality may be. Click To Tweet
Sila caught my thought. Love and food go together, silly wolf. My son had a limitless appetite for both.
You can say that again, Blue chimed in. Not to mention his appetite for sex. My first litter—eight pups!
You can’t complain about Toyon as a daddy, though, Sila replied. My son brought those babies lot of food.
Blue sighed. Regurgitated kibble. Yes, wonderful. He was a good daddy wolf, if a touch on the ornery side.
Oh, dear. Everyone seemed a little embarrassed, as I am the only wolfdog in the pack who is missing an essential part of the usual puppy-making apparatus.
I was about to reassure everyone that, really, life without the patter of little paws can be quite fulfilling, when Amaruq, the senior among us, broke the silence. Our Yukon cabin was all kitchen—all one room. There was always something good simmering away on the woodstove, most of the year. Pack Leader preferred the woodstove to the propane because one morning when we came back from Dawson City, we opened the door, just about the time the sun broke the horizon, and the whole place exploded. Lucky, Pack Leader had a whatchamacallit…a….
Fire extinguisher, growled Sila. We have heard this story, ’Ruq. Also the one about how good the baby mice in Pack Leader’s dresser drawers tasted, too.
Posted on May 2, 2017
1Pack Leader gets some squirrelly ideas into her long-haired brain. She turned from the computer to tell me about a new device that fits onto dogs’ heads and helps them see in the dark.
“I can already see in the dark,” I remind her. “Much better than you.”
“But here’s the thing, Wolfydog: this invention could be an extra pair of eyes for both of us—at the same time! Imagine: infrared vision. We could take walkies in the woods at night. You could see where the bunnies are hiding. Every so often the armed forces invent something useful, wouldn’t you agree?”
I opened one eye to show a little healthy skepticism. “Next you’ll be wanting me to get a voicebox implant and prosthetic ape paws, like those dogs in Lives of the Monster Dogs—remember what happened to them?”
Pack Leader had read Kirsten Bakis’ book to me as entertainment, an odd category for a book about a mad human scientist, named Rank, enslaving dogs with technology, as expendable equipment for humans’ favorite sport, war. The dogs rebel, kill a passel of humans, and decide to explore the world. Winter is coming and who knows what we’ll find Out in the world among humankind. Being three parts wolf to one part dog, I intuited immediately what those rebel dogs would find—disease and death. Nice ending.
Pack Leader has also read me her play War Dogs, about six historic dogs in search of a heroic human. That’s how I heard about the Russian army, which trained German Shepherds—my relatives!—to crawl under enemy trucks with bombs strapped to their backs—but these canine sacrifices crawled under their own humans’ trucks, instead. Oops!
Yah. Gotta love those techno-apes. Human boys must have their toys, no matter who pays the price.
I gave her the full Golden Gaze, hoping my amber eyes blazed with wisdom.
Pack Leader’s old friend Major lies buried in our back yard, near my favorite wallow. His spirit keeps nagging me. “Hey, Kid! Written anything yet?” Kid, he calls me. Grrr. I’m almost two, now, taller than Pack Leader when I place my paws on her shoulders. “He’s still a teenager,” I hear Pack Leader tell … Continue reading →