Tag Archives: pack dynamics

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 by May 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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Cherchez la Chienne, Part 2

avatarPosted on by May 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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Cherchez la Chienne, Part 1

avatarPosted on by May 21, 2017  

Listen up, Puppies. Your mother wants me to tell you the facts of life. The origins of species, as it were—our species.

Trouble is, like any wolf, I know a lot more about the origin of feces than species, even our own. If we hybrids even are a species, which is another question entirely. Hmm…. Maybe we’re just mutts.

Just look at you—all perky ears and shining eyes and waggy tails! You’re as curious as a human about where babies come from! Irresistibly cute you are, you little monsters. In just a few months, you’ll be all skinny and lanky and juiced up on sex hormones and your brains will feel as if they’ve migrated to the nether end of the body—

Ow! Did you see that, Kids? Your mom just bit me! What was that for?

Okay, okay…. Darned bitches—they always have the upper paw! She wants me to tell you how to be good dogs and manage your sex life, so that your humans won’t take you to the vet to remove certain bits of you. Ha! As if I, of all wolfdogs, would have any idea how being good and having sex can ever co-exist in a society run by humans!

I could simply tell you a story, I suppose…. An edifying and proper story, it goes without whining. Two tailwags for yes—do I see two tailwags? A story about my first girlfriend? Universal tailwags. All right, then.

When I fell for Pack Leader, I wasn’t much older than you. I was just a dumb ball of white fur, with no idea how I’d come to be and even less notion of what life was all about. The only ideas rolling around in my furry skull were my family memories—that, and I wanted to stay next to Pack Leader forever.

I didn’t call her Pack Leader then; I called her Mom. We didn’t live in the True Woods, either—not then. My notion of the future was nothing more than a yearning to visit, some day, the True Woods my own mother had so often reminisced about, her eyes glowing with longing. Instead, she had somehow become trapped in the Big Smoke with her humans. That’s where she met my father, and that’s where my litter was born.

Pack Leader lived in the Big Smoke, too, in a big old creaky house near her school. Their school, I should say. Pack Leader’s sister lived there, too, studying to be a doctor. Among humans, doctors must be dominant. Mistress not only took up the biggest bedroom but also had Pack Leader bring her food every few hours so that she could keep her muzzle in her books.

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