If you are a perceptive human, you may have twigged to the fact that the fur persons in your life have come to you for a reason. Companionship. Service. Training (yours and ours). Love. Entertainment. Cats often take this principle a little too far, treating their humans like staff. Many of my smaller K9 buddies focus on love and companionship; some of them get so good at their winsome ways they become TV stars, traveling around in purses held by their humans, even on Car-car in the Sky. Such lifestyles of the Bitch So Famous, however, are not the usual lot of German Shepherds, which is half of me. Sheps live to serve and protect their humans. If, along the way, they get to learn every trick in the book and have their own TV show, that’s fine but it’s still just part of service to humankind.
I want to tell you what my wilder half was sent to humans for. Why does Silva, Goddess of the True Woods, send humans great big K9 galoots like me—a wolf hybrid?
From the start, my four siblings and I were not like other pups. Our mother, a beauteous but romantic young Shepherd bitch, had fallen in love with a wolf, a big black guy, who used to leave offerings of freshly killed rabbits, mice, and, unfortunately, chickens, just outside the puppy pen, for our nurture and edification. I say unfortunately because, not only do chicken feathers make puppies sneeze and choke, but my mother’s human would do a tarnation dance, a shotgun brandished in both front paws, every time a chicken was left for breakfast.
What was his complaint, really? He ate most of the chickens, and rabbits, too. The mice he left for us.
As you may imagine, Daddy made himself scarce during daylight.