manner I was astounded he would allow. The young male whined, and I regarded him blankly, then shut my eyes. I felt overwhelmed with a fatigue as heavy and oppressive as when I was a small puppy and my brothers and sister would lie on top of me, crushing me. That’s what I was thinking about as I began to sink into a dark, silent sleep— being a puppy. Then I thought of running wild with Mother, and of Senora’s caresses, and of Coco and the Yard.
Unbidden, the sadness I’d felt from Senora washed through me, and I wanted to squirm up to her and lick her palms and make her happy again. Of all the things I’d ever done, making Senora laugh seemed the most important.
It was, I reflected, the only thing that gave my life any purpose.
{ FIVE }
At once, everything was both strange and familiar.
I could clearly remember the loud, hot room, Spike filling the air with his fury and then abruptly falling into a slumber so deep it was as if he’d opened a gate with his mouth and run away. I remembered becoming sleepy, and then there was the sense that much time had passed, the way a nap in the afternoon sun will span the day and suddenly it will be time for the evening feed. This nap, though, brought me not just to a new time but to a new place.
Familiar was the warm, squirming presence of puppies on either side of me. Familiar, too, was the shoving clamber for a turn at the teat and the rich, life-giving milk that was the reward for all the pushing and climbing. Somehow, I was a puppy again, helpless and weak, back in the Den.
But when I took my first bleary look at the face of my mother, she wasn’t the same dog at all. Her fur was a light color, and she was larger than, well, than Mother. My brothers and sisters—seven of them!—shared the same light-colored fur, and when I examined my forelegs I realized that I matched the rest of the litter as well.
And not only were my legs no longer dark brown—they stretched out from me in perfect proportion to the rest of my body also.
I heard a lot of barking and smelled many dogs nearby, but this wasn’t the Yard. When I ventured from the Den, the surface beneath my pads was rough and hard and a wire fence abruptly ended my exploration after half a dozen yards. It was a cage with a wire top and a cement floor.
The implications of all this made me weary, and I stumbled back to the Den, climbed up on top of a pile of siblings, and collapsed.
I was a little puppy again, barely able to walk. I had a new family, a new mother, and a new home. Our fur was uniformly blond, our eyes dark. My new mother’s milk was far richer than what had come from my first mother.
We lived with a man, who came by with food for my mother, which she gulped down quickly before returning to the Den to keep us warm.
But what about the Yard, and Senora, and Fast and Coco? I could remember my life very clearly, and yet everything was different now, as if I had started over. Was that possible?
I recalled Spike’s outraged barking and how, as I fell asleep in that hot room, I was seized with an inexplicable question, a question of
Our enclosure didn’t offer much to look at, and there was nothing fun to chew on except each other, but as my brothers and sisters and I became more aware, we discovered there were more puppies in a kennel to the right: tiny, energetic little guys with dark markings and hair that stuck up all over the place. On the other side was a slow-moving female, all alone, with a hanging belly and distended teats. She was white with black spots, and her coat was very short. She didn’t walk around much and seemed pretty uninterested in us. About a foot of space separated the two kennels, so all we could do was smell the little puppies next to us, though they looked like they’d be fun to play with.
Straight ahead was a long strip of lawn that beckoned with sweet odors of moist earth and rich, green grass, but we were prevented from going out there by the locked door to the cage. A wooden fence encircled both the grassy area and the dog cages.
The man wasn’t anything like Bobby or Carlos. When he ventured into the kennel area to feed the dogs, he didn’t speak much to any of us, radiating a bland indifference so at odds with the kindness of the men tending the dogs in the Yard. When the puppies in the kennel next to us rushed over to greet him, he pushed them away from the dinner bowl with a grunt, letting the mother have access to her food. We were less coordinated in our attack and usually didn’t manage to tumble our way to the cage door before he’d already moved on and our mother let us know we were not to share her meal.
Sometimes the man would be talking when he moved from cage to cage, but not to us. He spoke softly, focused on a piece of paper in his hands.
“Yorkshire terriers, week or so,” he said one time, looking in at the dogs in the cage to our right. He stopped in front of our pen and peered inside. “Golden retrievers, probably three weeks yet, and got a Dalmatian ready to pop any day.”
I decided my time in the Yard had prepared me to dominate the puppies in my family, and was irritated they didn’t feel the same way. I’d maneuver to grab one the way Top Dog had grabbed Rottie, and then two or three of my siblings would jump on top of
One day the spotted dog next to us drew our attentions—she was panting and pacing nervously—and we instinctively hung close to our mother, who was watching our neighbor intently. The spotted dog ripped up a blanket, shredding it with her teeth, and circled around several times before lying down with a gasp. Moments later, I was shocked to see a new puppy lying by her side, covered in spots and cloaked in a slippery-looking film, some kind of sac that the mother immediately licked off. Her tongue pushed the little puppy over, and after a minute it groggily crawled toward its mother’s teats, which reminded me that I was hungry.
Our mother sighed and let us feed awhile before she abruptly stood up and walked away, one of my brothers dangling along for a second before dropping off. I jumped on him to teach him a lesson, which wound up taking a lot
