My world used to be the perfect life, Puppies.
I had my very own truck, a proper beat-up Yukon pickup with “Dog is my Co-pilot” lettered on the door, referring to me, of course. All summer I sat on the box in the back, and during the winter I had my human trained to fit out the navigator’s seat for me inside. I even had a shaggy sheepskin to sit on.
I had a nice log cabin in the woods—more properly, we had a cabin, since my human did most of the work inside it. She even made me a woolly rug to lie on, in front of the woodstove, while the fire she had trapped in there roared like a miniature forest fire, warming my back. When the heat got to me, I could move to my sheepskins on the sofa.
Best of all, I had the best human a husky ever had. How I would smirk when my buddies told woeful tales of being tied up all winter, forgotten even at minus forty-five degrees, or of being flogged along the trail by fanatical mushers until their paw pads were in shreds, or of shivering through the winter on a skimpy diet of stale kibble and the odd fish head. What a life! Some, like my girl Chimo, even get kicked or whacked when they howl. Now I ask you, how can a self-respecting husky refrain from howling at certain phases of the moon, huh?
Not my Pack Leader—she’ll even join me in a good howl (although it’s all I can do to keep my muzzle straight at that pathetic sound, a human trying to howl). We go everywhere together in my truck, and she never whacks me—never since I was a naughty pup, anyway.
By now, I’ve got her trained to buy enough bacon for both of us, and lots of roasts and steaks with bones in them. All I have to do to get dessert is drag her over to the ice-cream stand or the drugstore and give her my best winning look, and bingo! I’ve got a cone or a chocolate bar.
She’s a great pack leader. I was especially proud of her the day she beat up the human who was about to steal my truck, with me in it, from a parking lot. She’s very brave, for a human. She chases the wild horses out of the garden with only a little help from me, and once she even stared a bear down, a situation I usually avoid by pretending not to see the bear. But not my fearless leader. “Bear,” she growled, “this is my property—go find your own!” And he did, muttering to himself. Lives just up the hill now, and I don’t go near the place.
I boasted about my brave human to my buddies for months after that.
Little did I know that my idol had feet of clay. Everyone’s got a patch of fur missing somewhere, as my dam used to say. One late-summer day Pack Leader’s fatal flaw was revealed, and my happy husky life changed forever.
We’d been away from home for awhile, rattling up to Dawson City and back to take care of our store. I’ve always liked Dawson. I can get into a good fight there about four times a day, because there’s no dogcatcher and every dog has his territory well marked, especially me, the king of downtown. Cute bitches there, too, mostly Mackenzies and malemutes and a couple of half-wolves like myself, but also some more exotic, titillating types—there was a slinky, silky Afghan up for the summer who really had all the guys going until her hairdo fell apart in the Dawson City mud. Anyway, an excellent trip it had been—I was happily exhausted when we drove up to the cabin.
My nose woke me with a start the instant Pack Leader opened the truck door. It was still summer, and something had happened to the rodent population around our cabin in the weeks we’d been gone. Wow! I could smell a zillion mice! I dropped all thoughts of Dawson, bounded out of the truck and began pouncing, using the famous Perpendicular Bounce technique: you hold your forelegs absolutely stiff and come down repeatedly along the little morsel’s path until whammo! Your paw coincides with its plans for escape. Easy! Pack Leader laughed. She loves to watch me perform the Bounce.
She stopped laughing when she opened the cabin door. I noticed her hesitate, and even her dull nose appeared to twitch. Maybe there’s hope for her yet, I thought as the rich musty odor of a full mouse clan wafted out the door. Well, let her have that lot. I’ll concentrate on the country cousins outside. I left her to it.
I’d caught three plump mice sneaking out from under the deck, and was about to investigate just how large the subfloor colony was, when my human screamed.
She screamed my name, and there was such urgency in her voice that I bonked my head on the decking in scrambling to her aid. I couldn’t imagine what terrible danger confronted her in the cabin—the bear from the hill? Another human, like maybe our pesky male neighbor?
I charged into the cabin and skidded to a paw-screeching halt as Pack Leader, still screaming from the loft above me, dumped the contents of the linen drawer on top of me. I was inundated with the scent of an exquisite delicacy: baby mice! Pounce! Munch! At that size, they don’t even crunch on the way down—just a bite apiece. There were at least eight of them—yummy! I sniffed hopefully through the tangle of flannelette sheets for more of this appetiser, but no. Evidently the parents had scurried away in time.
Awfully nice of Pack Leader to let me have this special treat, I thought, and then I noticed that she had stopped screaming. She was shaking and crying, instead.
I was shocked, I must say. I put my paws up on the loft ladder and nosed her foot, and that’s when I caught the whiff of fear from her.
I couldn’t believe it. My human afraid of a mouse? Surely not!
It was true. Pack Leader slid down the ladder and collapsed against me, crying, her arms a damp trap around me. “Oh, Amaruq,” she sobbed, “they’ve ruined our beautiful cabin! Look!” She pawed at the sheets where the little wretches had gnawed their nest in the fabric. “All the sheets! And my only cashmere sweater and my longjohns and my Turkish skiing sweater….” I was rather uncomfortable in this salty embrace. “And they’ve shat all over the kitchen and eaten our food and they’re into everything!”
I surveyed the kitchen. Yup. Mice had had a gourmand’s feast there: cereal boxes with holes, mice in the sugar, mice in the rice—even a mouse drowned upside down in the narrow-necked cooking-oil bottle. I frowned: this could seriously interfere with the continued high quality of my meals. Not good. I noticed, however, that Pack Leader had turned on the oven, and I could smell the mice in the stove beginning to cook. So maybe she had decided we should make the best of the situation and have mice for dinner?
On second thought, it seemed unlikely.
I did some deep thinking, sitting there patiently with my soggy human clasped around my neck, crying, “Oh, Amaruq, I hate them! They’re awful, they’re horrible, they’re filthy! Oh, Ruq, please help me get rid of them. Oh, I hate them!”
I felt glad that my buddies could not see my human now. How could I ever hold my tail up again if they knew that my brave human, of whose exploits I had so often boasted, was afraid of a critter that is nothing more than a snack on four paws? I was deeply ashamed, and determined that my friends should never know.
It occurred to me, as I sat there enduring the storm of human misery, that Pack Leader probably didn’t even realise that she was cooking up mice for dinner in that stove. I’ve often observed that human noses are worse than useless. What dog has not flushed with embarrassment when one’s scentless human fails, once again, to pick up the most obvious social clues? Every husky has endured the humiliation of being dragged past an important communications post without the chance to perform even the most perfunctory politeness. No doubt, on this occasion Pack Leader couldn’t smell the mice in the stove, incredible as it seems, much less the mice in the bookcase, the mice in the floor.
I sighed. Humans are a trial, sometimes. I would have to show her where the mice were.
I turned to lick her face clean of the wet salty stuff as if she were a pup. (I’ve never figured out, by the way, why humans produce this liquid, but I have found that a dog who can learn to squeeze out a tear at will has found the greatest device there is for teaching humans appropriate behavior.) I love my human, after all. I could never find a better Pack Leader, even if she does have a fatal flaw. Never mind, I told her, I’ll help you. I’ll kill them all for you.
“Oh no!” She leapt to her feet. “The stove’s on fire!” She ran outside the cabin to those big tanks of gas that smell the way your back end does when you’ve eaten too many mice at once, and frantically turned the taps. Then she ran back in and grabbed a long cylindrical thing out of the cupboard.
I beat it out the door. There was dark smoke pouring from the back of the stove now and I figured it would be a lot healthier outside. Pack Leader made a lot of thumping noises inside the cabin, and the drift of black smoke out the door dwindled to grey wisps. I heard her crying again, and slunk cautiously back in.
The stove stood in the middle of the floor, dismembered, its side walls propped against the nearest furniture. Pack Leader sat on the floor beside the stove, smudged with soot and smelly with fear and misery, crying very hard. I sniffed carefully at the burned sections of the insulation inside the stove. Each mouse nest held a whole family of barbecued mice, now reduced to crispy critters of no earthly use to anyone. A starving husky wouldn’t have touched them. Pack Leader evidently knew nothing about cooking mice. Equally obviously, she didn’t care.
I stepped gingerly over the stove parts, firmly nosed her grimy hands away from her face, and kissed her until her face was as clean as a newborn pup. There! Then I stepped suggestively onto the loft ladder and looked at her expectantly. She got the idea: “You want to hunt them down, Ruq?”
I pawed the ladder impatiently. She had a difficult time boosting me up there, but at last we both stood in the loft, panting with our efforts. I had always wanted to sleep in the loft, sleeping on my pack leader’s bed as befits a husky, and now I had a great excuse—I had to guard my human’s sleep from the Murine Invasions. What a howl! I began to hunt assiduously.
All that week I hunted inside. I must admit to having a terrible time. My big broad head wouldn’t fit inside most of the cupboards and bookshelves, and I kept bonking my skull. When I did get my face inside, I couldn’t move without knocking things over, and of course using the Perpendicular Bounce was out of the question. I tried it once and knocked over the whole kitchen counter, which was really an old door straddling two sawhorses, complete with pots and pans and cutlery—what a noisy mess! I did manage to catch four or five mice at night, by lying very still and alert, careful not to pant, and then letting them have it with the One-Paw Thwap as they scurried across the floor from one of their holes to another.
I showed Pack Leader where they lived, and where they entered our house. She followed me around with a small cylinder of white foamy stuff, and wherever I stuck my nose and sniffed emphatically, she’d stick the nozzle in and squeeze hard. Then she’d swear, all sorts of meaningless words strung together into one long angry yap, because the nozzle always came off and white sticky stuff kept spilling out of the cylinder all over her clothes and hands. It wouldn’t come off, either: I got some on my muzzle and had to scrabble at the itchy junk for weeks. “This had better be worth it,” she grumbled. “It costs a fortune and it’s the worst mess I’ve ever made, but if it works….”
I sniffed at the stuff where it had hardened into big white lumps at the junctures of logs. It smelled pretty good to me, and I figured the mice might like it, too.
They did. At night you’d hear them chomping their way through it energetically, determined to keep their major highways into the house open. No matter how many mice I ate, inside or out, there were always lots of volunteers to continue the invasion. I was tiring of the monotonous diet—that musky rodent taste seems to stick to your teeth after a while—and I was getting scratchy and irritable from having to sleep indoors on nice summer nights. The stove still stood in the middle of the floor, and Pack Leader didn’t cook any more. Every time I found her another mouse nest, especially behind her rows and rows of books, she’d cry again.
And the mice were only becoming bolder, even running across her face at night, so she’d wake up with a scream that nearly knocked me off the loft. The final indignity was their constant theft of my food. Lying up there in the overheated loft to protect my defenseless human, I could hear a squad of mice filching a piece of kibble each; then scurry into the oven with their booty and roll the marbles of my dog food down the slightly sloping surface of the oven. Every night, if you please, at one thirty a.m. precisely, as Pack Leader complained blearily, half awakened by the racket. The big Mouse Bowling League. I was not amused.
Poor Pack Leader! She was becoming depressed. She’d spent days under the cabin, after I had shown her how the mice had torn apart the subfloor insulation. Each trip, she’d crawl on her back like an animal with a broken spine, dragging a big square of shiny metal with her; then I’d hear a lot of hammering and swearing; then she’d emerge, still on her back, still swearing, and the whole process would start over. Not that this helped much once she had finished, as any fool could smell that the mice were coming in under the windows, mostly.
She had given up on the white sticky stuff, and was now stuffing the same holes all over again with black sticky stuff, a substance which, I soon had the opportunity to note, absolutely refuses to come out of one’s fur.
She was cleaning up the stove, a tiny bit every day.
But with all that effort, and me helping three shifts a day, the mice still ran across the floor at night and left little black pellets for her to find on the kitchen counter every morning. The midnight bowling team still raided my dish and used the oven as a private alley and fiesta hall every night. As for me, I had overdeveloped muscles from practising the One-Paw Thwap and the Perpendicular Bounce.
We were both depressed and tired. Winter was already on the crisping air, and the dratted mice seemed to want nothing more than to occupy our cabin with us for the cold season.
One day—it was wet and cold, and our driveway was a quagmire—Pack Leader stuck her left foot into a rubber boot, and then her right foot into its mate, only to find the boot half full of dog kibble. She looked at me quizzically, almost accusingly.
I could have told you, I shrugged. Used bowling balls—that’s where they put the rejects. Don’t look at me.
I expected another crying session at this latest evidence of rodent victory over human and canine, but she only sighed tiredly. Then, hunkering down beside me, she put an arm over my shoulder, and I knew trouble was about to invade my life in a serious way. “Amaruq,” she said sorrowfully, “I know you’ve tried your husky best to help me get rid of these horrid filthy creatures, but it just isn’t good enough. We can’t go on living like this.”
She poured the kibble out of her boot into the composter. “Come on,” she commanded, “into the truck!”
Had I imagined that stern new note in her voice? She motioned me into the back of the pickup, but I stood beseechingly at the passenger door. If this was about to be my last truck ride, my last wish was to take it in the navigator’s seat, not back in the driving rain and flying muck of the open truck bed. “Oh, all right!” she relented, but shot me a look which seemed to mean, but this is the last time.
My dread grew as we bumped off the highway, avoiding our usual supply-hunting area, downtown, in favor of the industrial area. I knew only too well what lay in store for dogs in that area—the pound. Once I had been incarcerated there, after a particularly mad escapade when I had felt too sexy for my fur and leaped a six-feet fence to reach a lovely Alsatian bitch, but after our wonderful date was too tired to leap out again before the Dogcatcher snaffled me. Pack Leader had rescued me that time, and I was gladder than I had ever been in my life—I could smell what happens to dogs in that place.
Surely she wasn’t about to bring me back there? Surely she loved me too much to count my mouse-hunting failures against me? I’d tried my husky best! Oh furry goddess of the huskies, maybe I should not have been so proud and stand-offish, as befits my wolfy heritage. Maybe I should have been more demonstrative, should have nuzzled and nosed her more. More of a dog; less of a wolf. Maybe I should do it even now!
Sure enough, we swung in at the pound yard, and now I knew what was in store for me. There was only one last-ditch tactic left.
Leaning against the truck window, I whined just a little, pathetically, and I squeezed my eyes shut so hard they hurt. Aaah, a trickle of a tear slipped down my white fur. Did she see it? I opened my eyes a slit.
Wasted effort. She was already slamming out the door, paying me not the slightest attention. She must really be mad. I could smell anger, as a matter of fact, like an afterburn of her presence. She disappeared into the building, to arrange for those guys in uniforms to take me over, no doubt. I could hear the desperate barks and howls and whines of the poor beasts in the back, dogs who knew these were their last hours, dogs who would shortly become my final buddies.
How I wished I’d taken up that invitation to ride in the back of my truck!
I had two very slim chances: escape, or further persuasion by means of more tears. I began to plan for the former. If I could just slither out of Pack Leader’s grasp as she opened the truck door, or maybe streak unexpectedly out the driver’s door, should she open that one….
I was still measuring distances when she came back out, heading for my door. It was true, then. I was to be delivered over to the dog-killers.
My heart sank and my ears drooped involuntarily. I felt so miserable I could hardly hold my escape plan in my head.
She yanked open my door. As I made my half-hearted attempt to bolt, she caught me by the collar and stuffed me back in, together with a rank-smelling piece of orange fur—a cat! A spitting, yowling cat!! I was never so surprised and disgusted in my life—was she going to trade me in for a cat, of all things?
Pack Leader grinned at me as she walked around the truck. She opened her door. I thought she’d reach for my collar, and braced myself, but instead she slid in so fast that the cat never even realised that escape was momentarily possible before the door slammed shut again.
She scrunched up to my side of the seat and flung an arm over my shoulders. “What’s this?” she wiped at the damp fur under my eyes, and grinned again. “Really had you going, hey, you dumb husky?” She kissed me, human style, a quick suction of lips applied right between my eyes. “You’re my friend forever, Stupid.”
I sighed explosively. She pulled my ear and slid back over to start the truck. “My best friend,” she said. “No matter what.”
And the rest, as they say, is history. The mangy cat squawked and squalled all the way home, much to our amusement, but the moment Pack Leader flung him into the cabin, he shut up and began hunting. She helped him with the worst parts: she’d beat the mice toward him and he would pick them off, one at a time. I had to admire him, grudgingly. His paws were twice as fast as mine, and of course he didn’t have my size problem. It took him three weeks to catch all the members of the midnight bowling team, though, keeping night-long vigil from the kitchen counter and flinging himself down on them. But I must admit he finally did it, laying out the last mouse as a trophy for Pack Leader, right in the middle of her favorite rug.
Pack Leader put the stove to rights and started cooking me up some real cuisine again. It took weeks before I got the taste of mouse out of my mouth, not until I caught a fresh young rabbit one morning (okay, okay, I admit it—I lifted it from our neighbor’s snare) and that refreshed me. Things were back to normal—except, of course, for that dratted cat.
Yup, we’ve still got him. All day he sleeps in the loft; all night he sleeps on my couch, and between times he sucks up to my human for cuddles. Keeping the mice out, hell! He’s a disgusting parasite. I look daggers at him, and Pack Leader laughs, which is good.
When she’s not looking, though, I get a bit of my own back. “Hey, cat!” I get him when we’re outside. “Want to play Cat-and-Mouse? You be the mouse!”
And I get ready to practise the Perpendicular Bounce.