Read an Excerpt
Love
Cookie usually had puppies easily, but they were always so wonderful and special that I worried excessively each time. Considering that she had five litters of never less than eight pups and twice twelve—altogether over forty pups—this constituted a large measure of worry.
She deserved the effort and concern. Cookie was my primary lead dog for something close to fourteen thousand miles—trapline, training, and one full Iditarod—and had on several occasions saved my life. But more, most important, she threw leaders. Sometimes as many as half her pups tended to lead and a few had, like their mother, become truly exceptional lead dogs; dogs with great, unstoppable hearts and a joy to run. It didn't seem to matter if they were male or female—they were all good.
And so I worried.
This time the breeding had been accidental. We had been on a long training run in early fall, and Cookie had temporarily and with great enthusiasm fallen in love with a big, slab-sided half-hound named Rex. Cookie was running lead. It was a first-snow run—the snow was thin and melting rapidly and would be gone in two days, three at most—and it was so warm (thirty degrees) that I was wearing only a jacket and wool watch cap. We were running at night because of the heat (the dogs were most comfortable at ten or twenty below zero) and I had looked down at something on the sled when the whole team stopped dead.
I knew Cookie was in season and would not normally have run her during her time. But I had young and new dogs—Rex was one of them—and I needed her good sense and steadiness to control them while we ran.
Cookie, overcome bywhat could only be described as wild abandon, stopped cold, threw it in reverse, and backed into Rex. If he was surprised, he recovered instantly, and before I could react, they were romantically involved.
I pulled the other dogs away from them to avoid any fights, tied them up to trees, and made a small fire to have tea. Usually these things took time—lasted five or ten minutes—but with Cookie and Rex both in harness she would be anxious and stressful about wanting to run, and I wanted her to see that I had settled in and wanted to remove some of the nervousness so she wouldn't start to fight.
Normally I would have controlled the mating situation better, would have selected a male more to my liking. Rex was very much a question mark. I'd only had him a few days and didn't know much about him, and had I known that this would be Cookie's last litter and that it would be seven of the best dogs—two leaders—that I had ever seen or heard of, I perhaps would have paid more attention.
As it was I ignored them, or tried to. It always seemed to be such a private time for the dogs, the time of mating, and though they were quite open, I in some way felt like an intruder and did not like to watch them.
I turned away and heated snow for tea. The night was still and, consequently, I heard the dogs more than I usually would have. I "heard" the puppies being made.
In truth, much of what dogs are is based in sounds. They are quiet, wonderfully silent, when they run; mile after mile in soft winter nights I have heard nothing but the soft whuff of their breath and the tiny jingle of their collar snaps as they trot along.
But almost all other times they live in sound. They bark, whine, wheeze, growl, and—wonderfully—sing. When they see me come out of the house with harnesses over my shoulder, they go insane, running in their circles, literally bellowing their enthusiasm—some barking, some crying, some yipping, and some emitting a high-pitched keening scream that leaves the ears deaf for hours.
When it rains there is a song, and when it snows or when they want food or when something dies—sad songs, happy songs, duets and trios, sometimes all the dogs trying to harmonize, except the young ones who think they can sing but can't and throw their heads back to try to look adult but sing off-key and with the wrong timing.
They live in sound, always in noise. Perhaps because it is so constant, the art of listening to them falls off, and so many things they say are not heard, are swallowed in the overall sound. (An interesting aside: people know the sounds of their own dogs the way mothers know the cry of their babies. At one checkpoint during the Iditarod during a mandatory layover, some seven or eight hundred dogs were all in an area not much larger than a football field. The din was constant, deafening, and yet if a man or woman inside the building heard the sound of his or her own dog in the cacophony—even if the person was fast asleep—they were up and out the door instantly.)
But this quiet night with the wind gone and even the fire muted somehow by the dark I could hear, and for the first time I think I truly listened to them.
There were some growls, low and soft, envy from the young males who wanted to fight and show they had shoulders and thick necks; quiet whines of interest from others; and then, above all, the soft sounds from Cookie and Rex.
I thought of the word love.
There are, of course, many who would dispute it, many who would say dogs simply mate and that only people love, and it is perhaps true that I would have said the same thing before that night.
But the sounds were sweet, soft, gentle—not whines so much as terms of endearment, courtesy, and hope. They made me think of all the good parts of living and loving; how two can honestly become one; how we have made it all seem pointless with posturing and fashion and frills but that it is not frivolous, it is as old and meaningful as time, and it has all to do with the one thing that we are on earth to do—to make more, to make better, to bring new beings into it, into life.
All there, sitting by the fire while two people—I still cannot think of them as dogs—loved and were, in some way that I could not understand, sacred. All there listening to God making puppies.
Copyright 2002 by Gary Paulsen
