How to Keep a Human, as told by Amaruq

Portrait of the Patriarch as a Young Mutt

I guess I wasn’t the cutest of the bunch.

After that I hid under the bench in the corner whenever any humans but our own harmless ones came near us. I turned my face to the wall. If being cute and licking one of these young apes with my sweet little tongue meant I was going to be kidnapped, well then, I was determined to be the ugliest, snarliest, most stubborn pup ever. I’d even bite one of these young apes if I had to. Anything to stay with my dear mother!

My father—your great-grandfather—was also a mixture of wolf and husky from the far north of Canada, what humans call the Enn Double You Tea. My mother was one of the famous Father Brown Huskies, the pure white pack who befriended a big fur-faced human called Father Brown, and his mate, Margaret, or so they say, far away in the northern lands. When my mother was just a pup like you, some tourist human came by the fishing resort near a big lake called “Cop, You’re Mine”. The tourist stuffed her into a crate and loaded her into a great noisy flying monster.

Next thing my mother knew, here she was, scared to death, in this huge, hot Big Ape City, adjusting to a pack consisting of a strange mix of creatures. She’d seen humans before—but two cats? A gerbil? The gerbil was the hardest to endure—they smell so yummy! And they’re easy to catch—just ask me. (Yeah, I was spanked for that snack.) But hunting was not allowed. She would have been a Bad Dog, exiled to the back yard, had she followed her instincts. She and the gerbil eventually bonded, but my mother refused to sleep near the creature’s cage—its delicious scent gave her twitchy dreams.

Listen up—I’m not even into my story and already there’s a life lesson for you, Puppies! It’s one of the many peculiarities of human apes that you must learn about if you want to become a good keeper of humans.

Bizarre as it seems, some of them like to live with rodents in the den. Usually it’s the young humans who bring the scrabbly little mammal home, whereupon their dam begins screeching as you’ve never heard her screech before. Female humans and rodents, apparently, are seldom the best of friends. Next, the ape pup begins to howl. You can expect the exchange of screeches and howls to continue for awhile, until the alpha male comes home and settles the matter. If the kid has left the gerbil unguarded, you might be able to settle the argument by grabbing it for yourself. I don’t recommend this action, however: the kid invariably retaliates by putting something nasty and even dangerous into your dinner bowl, like a snail.

Yes, Taku, snails may be easy to catch, but they are dangerous. Their slime will make you very sick. Don’t ask me how humans can eat snails—another peculiarity of humans is that they can eat almost anybody and get away with it. A wolf-husky should stick to eating meat, fish, and a few grains, greens and berries. Not snail meat—or gerbil meat. Rule Number One: stick to birds and mammals, no matter how your nose may tempt you.

Whenever Mother told us the story of how she got here, I started to shake, terrified the same thing would happen to me. In my long wolfy life, I never have gotten over my fear of the big flying monsters. “Car-car in the Sky”, Pack Leader calls them, usually when she’s trying to persuade me to get into a crate, which means we’re off on another trip away from the True Woods. Hmmmph! I even escaped Car-car in the Sky, once, but that’s another story.

As Mother told her story, my sister Suzy kept interrupting with the same pesky question: “So who’s our daddy?”

“I’m so lucky,” Mother sighed, laying head on paws, the better to dream. “Once in Big Ape City, I was so afraid that I would be forced to mate with an awful dog—you know, these nasty dobermans and unpredictable shepherds (handsome brutes, but I don’t trust them) or even worse, an overgroomed city dog like an afghan or poodle, or some poor beleaguered pit bull who’s been forced by his human to pretend to be mean every minute of his day. I had nightmares about mating with an awful black lab down the street. You could hear him having a nervous breakdown every time someone passed his yard. There are no bad dogs, just ill-bred humans, but there are some ugly wannabee dog-daddies out there!