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 other humans. Whatever teenagers are, it must be some kind of excuse for bad behavior. She always says it when I’m on the verge of being B-A-D.
Kid or not, I’m supposed to take over Major’s writing job. I don’t even have my first degree yet! I can’t spell human language—this iz wut it looks like wen eye trie. But Mayjur ashoorz mee pak leedr wil fiks up mie wurds.
“But…wut doo eye rite uhbowt?”
“Rite about munnee, Hunnee—it’s reellee kwite funnee. And yuze yer spel-chek!”
That’s the last I heard from that silly old ghost dog. So here goes, spell-check turned on.
The business of money isn’t funny. It seriously messed up my life. The facts all k9s should face is that (a) humans cannot seem to live without money, and (b) when they do not have enough of it, they do crazy things, things that wolves or dogs would never do.
I should be grateful to money—I met Pack Leader because of it. You see, my previous human never went walkies with me, being busy under the hood of his car; so we didn’t get car-car trips, either. I thought I’d do him a favor by taking myself for walks. My first few forays out into the big bad world went fine: if something spooked me, I’d sidle up to the nearest friendly-looking human, invariably a female, who would then feed me something nice and chauffeur me to the neighborhood dog hotel, called The Pound. A nice chap there, Bob, would talk into a little box, and eventually my human would show up, hand over some money, yank me out of my inelegant quarters—not a moment too soon as by that time I had usually managed to fill up one end with poop—and ferry me home.