How to Keep a Human, as told by Amaruq

Teaching Post Sick-and-Airy Ed

Listen up, puppies! Your mother, bless her furry heart, wants Grandpaw to tell you what’s in store for you at school.

What’s school? Oh, Seelah, you are my favourite little fluff ball! Questions, questions! School is where you teach your human how to be good. Now pay attention, pups—there’s a lot more to school than your mother ever knew!

In two or three moons, you little jokers will be off to Obedience School. At first, classes may seem like glorified walkies, but really, it’s serious business. Obedience School is your first chance to teach your human to get along with others and practise good manners. That’s hard enough, since good manners go against basic human nature. Without training, humans spend most of their time fighting over food, mating, and shiny things. But remember, there is a heart and even a pretty good mind deep inside every human. It’s up to you puppies to turn on your human’s mind and get that heart working properly.

Your mother has told you there are no bad humans. That’s not quite right, puppies—your dear mother has led a protected life with our Pack Leader and hasn’t had much to do with that fearsome variety of ape, the Bozo Human. No need to mention this to your mother, but your Grandpaw’s stories have more than a few Bozos in them.

Don’t be scared, Seelah—a little knowledge goes a long way to protecting a good dog.

At obedience school, most of you will have a beginner human to train. Some humans have been through the course before, with another dog. They might even remember a few teachings from their previous dogs. Don’t count on this: usually humans don’t remember much. If you get a beginner, like Pack Leader when I met her, that’s your opportunity to train your human the right way from Day One.

You want an obedient, responsible, courteous human who will be your pride and joy, but remember: communication skills don’t come easily to the human ape. Just like us, a human must learn to earn a place in the family pack.

That’s right, Taku—very good question! Our dear, silly favorite human wasn’t always called Pack Leader. Back in my teen-wolf days, I called her Mom. She earned her Pack Leader degree the hard way, during the fiasco with Post Sick-and-Airy Ed. Now there was a hard-to-train character…he wanted to be Pack Leader, himself! Not only did he think better of himself than anyone else ever would, he almost lost us our chance to find the True Woods.

Was he a Bozo? By the end of my story, you can tell me.

It all began when Mom decided she had to go back to school for a degree before we could move north to the True Woods. That didn’t exactly make me happy.

What’s a degree? Oh, Chimo…! One more question and I’ll pull out my dewclaws! That’s the problem with this story—there’s so much to explain!

I know about degrees. Pack Leader showed me hers, you see. A degree is a thick piece of paper with a shiny, dark, round eye stuck to it, and maybe a ribbon to roll it up, like a treat. It smells all right but tastes like glue brittle. Yuck. But humans fall for them. Wave a rolled-up degree in the air, call their names out loud, and they’ll dash across a slippery floor, dressed in special pelts and silly hats, as excitedly as you puppies sprint for the din-din bowl. It’s true. I’ve seen this happen with my own eyes. Dogs are not usually allowed at these secret rituals, you understand, but handsome wolfdogs like us can often get around the silly human rules.

When she suggested going to school for that degree, I looked at Pack Leader as if she were nuts as a squirrel. I cocked my head to the side and whined a little to let her know I was more than ready to move north without a degree of any kind.

“A degree will get me a good job,” Pack Leader explained.

What, you ask, is a job? Another good question. There’s a lot of vocabulary to learn for this story, isn’t there?