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The back of a black dog's head as he looks down at a black cat eating from his food dish.

Wolves in the Kitchen

avatarPosted on May 10 by TyeeMay 21, 2017  

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.

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Posted in Half-Breed and the City | Tagged food, Hawaii, hunting, pack dynamics, Silva, strange ape habits, wolf-dog, wolf-dogs, wolves | Leave a reply

Cherchez la Chienne, Part 2

avatarPosted on October 12 by AmaruqMay 21, 2017  

Not long after I came to our den in Garneau, Pack Leader and Mistress decided to hold a Party. You’ll recognize it, Puppies—it’s like a Howling. Humans need to socialize, just as we do. They collect a lot of food and drink and bring it all to one place, where they stand around in clumps and talk out loud while music is playing, sometimes from sundown until deep into the night. Both the males and females will move from clump to clump, sitting down, then standing up; then sitting down again with the next person. At any Party worthy of the name, the music moves them to dance or at least jump around in pairs, leaving those without a partner at the edges of the group, pretending they don’t care. I used to think this was the human version of puppy play but now I understand that the Party is part of the mating ritual. Humans hope to find a mate at a Party. That’s also where they sort out their dominance issues. For us, it’s so simple: all we need is a place to roll and tussle, with maybe a stick or bone to play with. For humans, it’s complicated: a proper Party means ceremony, a big kill, and a lot of that funny flavored water that makes me sneeze.

Neither Pack Leader nor Mistress had chosen a mate yet and frankly, I hoped, in my puppy days, that Pack leader never would. I was selfish, as puppies are, and wanted my new mom all to myself. Fortunately, she didn’t seem too eager for mating rituals. “Meet my puppy,” she said proudly to several male friends in the first weeks of our relationship. I sniffed them all politely. No worries: all but one grizzled old dog, who smelled rather pleasantly of the forest, were less dominant than Pack Leader—or me. I could curl up at her feet and take a nap when they were around.

Mistress, however, was another kind of kibble. She was seriously into the mating game. “You don’t understand!” she wailed at Pack Leader as Chichi, alarmed at her distress, slunk behind the couch and hid. “I’m the poorest in the class! Those girls spend more money in a week than I have for the whole semester! And their clothes…they don’t come to class looking like hippies! You can do that in literature classes but you can’t pull that off in med school!” She began to sob. “I’ll never make it to the end of the year—I just don’t have the money! And I’ll never make it with the guys, either! You watch—not one of them will date me! Especially not…not Laird….”

Pack Leader made Mistress a cup of tea and sat her down. “Listen,” she said as I snuggled under the table near her and Chichi watched warily from his safe little niche, “we’ll get you some really nice clothes—”

“I can’t afford it! Have you seen my budget? There’s just enough student loan to pay rent and food.”

She began to wail again, all about how there weren’t enough milkbones to go around and nothing good would ever happen to her again. Pack Leader stopped her noise with a single question: “Have you ever seen anyone in our society starve?”

I guess Mistress hadn’t, because she shut up. “Well, then,” Pack Leader continued, “how likely do you think it is that you’ll starve if we spend a little of this money on making you look good?”

This must have been the perfect argument, to judge by Mistress’ lessening sniffles and her suddenly hopeful look.

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Posted in Book Excerpts, Wilderness Management | Tagged animals, city, excerpts, family, food, hunting, pack dynamics, parties, True Woods books, wolf-dog, wolf-dogs, wolves | Leave a reply

Garbage Day

avatarPosted on February 8 by MajorOctober 12, 2012  

The whole neighbourhood, street or forest, knows Garbage Day has switched to the second morning after the Weekend. Every Fur Person, whether in the Woods or in Town, knows when the Weekend is over, because that’s when the little apes toddle off to their school again.

We had just come off a huge Weekend, when the baby apes stayed in their dens and played with their parents and one another for more sunsets than I have paws to count with. If memory serves, they do this after every winter solstice. I’ve noticed that after any longish Weekend, Garbage Day changes—a habit that hasn’t escaped the notice of our Woods neighbors, either.

My den’s Garbage Gift is pitiably small—just one bag. But this particular bag was special. Pack Leader had packed some turkey bits in there, along with only slightly moldy cheese rinds and some sweets she said were Bad for Dogs and People, whatever that means. It seemed a shame, but Pack Leader feeds me so gloriously twice a day that I don’t ever quarrel with the offerings she sets on the curb on Garbage Day.

I guess she was still in a festive, generous mood from the big solstice Weekend, because she set our bag out on the curb just before we went to bed, offering our woodsy neighbors a chance to paw it over, as it were, before the Truck arrived in the morning to end the feast. She set it down; I blessed it with a bit of peemail as we ended the Evening Walk, and we went to bed.

Our snooze didn’t last long. Caterwauling, screeching, and a series of annoyed grunts woke us up in a hurry. Pack Leader hustled herself into some semblance of proper pelts and threw open the bedroom window, as I clambered stiffly onto the window seat. What a sight!

My furry friend Cranberry, who weighs about four of me, was grunting and weaving like a drunk, waving at our Garbage Gift with paws the size of my dinner dish. “I can’t sleep!” he complained. “All this noise! All this light! I need a midnight snack!”

“You think you’ve got problems!” snarled Princess Pusscat. (I tell you, if you haven’t heard a snarl from a cougar, you haven’t lived!) “I’ve got kittens to feed!”

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Posted in Back in my Day... | Tagged animals, bear, city, cougar, food, garbage day, Silva, wolf-dog, wolves | Leave a reply

Puppies of the Corn

avatarPosted on April 1 by MajorMay 11, 2017  

When we ran out of growlies on a recent trip to Nanaimo, I was close to crying like a hungry puppy. In case you humans don’t know—you all seem so plump and powerful, after all—it doesn’t take long for hunger to hurt. You can’t think about anything else.

Now, humans, for those K9s who have never yet observed it, are incredible hunters. They have cleverly built huge buildings where they accomplish their hunting in no time flat. Unfortunatelly K9s are not allowed in; so I’ve never been sure how the hunt is arranged. From where I usually am stationed, on a leash tied to whatever, I can see rows and rows of boxes and bins of foods that don’t run away, like spinach. The animals must be in another part. Pack Leader always emerges hugging several bags containing gift-wrapped bits of whatever she’s hunted down. She passes each package under my nose for approval. Not infrequently, she’s brought down a chicken, a cow, a pig, and a bison—all in an hour, not to mention robbing several nests for eggs.

Not this time. Pack Leader emerged empty-pawed. “Major, my love, you are one of millions of Puppies of the Corn.”

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Posted in The 7 Habits of Successful Wolf-Dogs | Tagged food, travel | Leave a reply

Los Lobos Locos

  • 1 Amaruq
    • Cherchez la Chienne, part 3
    • Cherchez la Chienne, Part 2
    • Cherchez la Chienne, Part 1
  • 1 Blue
    • Taming the Beast: dealing with apes when they first wake up
  • 1 Major
    • Cotacachi Butch
    • Escape to Doguador
    • Paw Prince of Profissey
  • 1 Tyee
    • A book in a cloud?
    • I Wuz a 56-year-old Virgin
    • Wolves in the Kitchen

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