Drinking from the Trough Read online

  When we arrived, we left Keli in the car to avoid potential conflicts with the protective mother husky. Donna met us at the front door, delighted that we’d brought Keli. We were more than happy to show her off.

  Donna led the way back to our car and immediately spied Keli, who was in the back seat, poking her grinning face through the open window. Despite that welcoming face, I doubt Keli had any idea who Donna was; after all, she hadn’t seen her for fourteen years.

  When we let Keli out of the car so Donna could get a closer look, Donna immediately recognized Keli as one of her pups and remembered who Keli’s dam had been, thanks to the reddish spot on the top of Keli’s tail. All of Alika’s puppies had a red spot there, Donna explained. Not only that, the new pups we were here to see were Alika’s great-great-grandpuppies. The puppy we chose from this litter would actually be related to Keli!

  Reintroductions done, we put Keli back into the car and followed Donna to her basement. Husky puppies were everywhere, playing, lapping water, running around, coming up to us to investigate, running around some more.

  We were in heaven!

  We noticed a red female pup that was tremendous in size for a four-week-old. We couldn’t hold her—mom was still very protective of her brood, and when I carefully tried to touch the pup, mom nipped my hand. The nip wasn’t a big deal; vets are used to getting bitten. She didn’t break the skin, so I knew I was okay.

  That nip didn’t stop me from examining the litter with a critical eye as the puppies romped around the room. I watched the huge red girl closely, thinking she might be the one. Earl and I dubbed her Moose and told Donna we were interested in her. We’d come back when Moose was older and her mother wouldn’t get upset with a little handling. We’d see how Moose was getting along then and make our decision.

  Two weeks later, we made our way to Donna and the puppies. This time, we could handle them without upsetting the mother.

  I turned Moose over to examine her tummy and discovered a large umbilical hernia. These hernias are pretty common, and they have an easy fix. When spaying the dog, you simply make a longer incision than usual, then spay the dog, prepare the skin bordering the hernia, and tuck the hernia back into the abdomen where the contents, such as the small intestine, belong. A long incision sounds scary, but I always remember my surgery professor talking about them: all incisions heal from side to side, not end to end.

  Unfortunately, Donna wouldn’t pay for the hernia repair, so we decided not to take Moose.

  I scanned the room again. Would another female puppy catch our interest?

  There, off by herself, playing with some insulation left on the floor, was a wolf-gray puppy with two crystal-blue eyes, a cloverleaf mask, and a cute little upturned nose. We played with her and quickly fell in love.

  We also noticed that she had an extra dewclaw on her right hind leg. I remembered seeing her sire, an astoundingly gorgeous and friendly red husky named Sir Nicholas. He too had an extra dewclaw on each of his hind feet. This is a heritable trait, so he should never have been a breeding sire; he should have been neutered instead. Even though we weren’t interested in dog shows or becoming breeders ourselves, this meant the puppy could not be considered defect-free. Yet Donna was charging full price for her pups, whether or not they had a defect. And that was on top of the increase in puppy prices—our new pup’s price was double Keli’s.

  But we were madly in love with her, faults and all. We didn’t quibble over the price, and Donna promised to cover the cost of the dewclaw removal, which would happen at the same time we spayed our new puppy. When the time came, she didn’t, but we knew by then that our purchase was a good one, and we weren’t going to argue.

  Before we left, we went over every inch of the puppy, using our stethoscopes to check out her heart and lungs, an otoscope to examine her ears for parasites, and an ophthalmoscope to examine her eyes for birth defects. Other than the dewclaw, she was perfect. Vaccines and deworming would be all that she would need at the appropriate age.

  We put a deposit on the little puppy with the turned-up nose and headed for home. We’d be back in just over a week to retrieve her, when she was seven weeks old.

  We chattered all the way home about the new addition to our animal family. How would Keli react to a new dog in the house? What about the cats? We were buying a winter puppy again, and we knew the cold and snow made housebreaking more difficult. We had our work cut out for us.

  We puppy-proofed the house again. The new way to train puppies included crate training, so we bought a crate, which turned out to be a godsend. The dog thinks the crate is its wolf den, and it won’t soil its home.

  We investigated the local puppy kindergarten schedules to make sure we could sign up for a class with the teacher I wanted, Dr. Gail Clark. Her license plate read, “K9SHRINK.” I knew her through teaching her two kids in PE when they were little.

  Finally, the seven-week mark arrived—in the midst of one of the harshest Januaries ever. Donna called and said not to come, because the long driveway from the road to her house was impassable, and the road wasn’t much better. She promised she’d deliver the dog to us as soon as she could.

  Days passed, ferocious storms pummeling us one after the other. Finally, Donna called to say she was coming to town, bad weather or not.

  My vet tech and I were in the exam room with a patient. It was late afternoon, already dark outside. I heard the clinic door open and shut. The tech and I grinned at each other; we knew who it had to be. I wrapped things up with my client and her cat as quickly as I could.

  I opened the door to the reception area and there was Donna, holding a puppy in her lap, waving the puppy’s little paw at me.

  Whoa! Back up the delivery truck! This wasn’t our puppy! I didn’t recognize her at all.

  Donna pointed to the dewclaw, and then I remembered her, and everything clicked into place. Yes, this really was the right puppy, our new gorgeous, ridiculously cute puppy, with that sweet nose and those crystal-blue eyes.

  I scooped her up, paid Donna the balance due, and she was ours.

  As part of our puppy preparations, I held a puppy-naming contest among my students. The kids submitted some pretty cool names.

  The day after Donna dropped her off, I ignored veterinary convention and took her to school with me to introduce her to the students. She was so tiny I tucked her into a cat carrier for the trip. The kids were thrilled with the puppy, but we agreed that none of the names quite suited her.

  Because she had tips of color on all of her fur, Earl and I decided to call her Tipper until we could come up with something better. It’s a common dog name, utterly unoriginal. What I hadn’t expected was how many people assumed we’d named her after the wife of then-Vice President Al Gore.

  I tried and failed to come up with a unique name, so Tipper it was, and Tipper it remained. It didn’t take long before we realized it was the perfect name for her after all.

  She was a rambunctious little puppy who ran circles—literally—around and under a very patient Keli. Her personality was bright and upbeat and often silly. A more serious name wouldn’t have fit this little tyke.

  Tipper often joined me in my classroom, to the delight of both dog and students. She was so young and active that she needed a rest every hour or so, so we set up a small crate for quiet timeouts.

  There’s an old saying, “Never turn your back on the ocean,” that my teaching colleagues and I used as a reminder to keep a close eye on our middle school students. Tweens and young teens could shift from gentle waves to exuberant surf or crashing tsunami in a heartbeat. Having huskies requires the same attention; it’s like having an entire room full of my middle school students. After Keli’s mad dash from the fishpond into the street, I was always on guard for a runaway pup.

  I posted a sign on the doors outside my classroom saying, “Puppy inside. Please keep door closed.” I warned my kids to keep the classroom door shut and to watch for a puppy escape if anyone needed to leave t
he room.

  One afternoon, a boy left the room without checking to see where the puppy was. Tip was right there, and by golly, true to husky behavior, she zoomed out of the room and raced for the open back door to the parking lot. I panicked, remembering Keli’s close call as a puppy.

  I learned somewhere that if you drop to the ground, wave your arms and legs, and howl crazily, “Oh where, oh where is my puppy, ah-woooo!” the runaway pup will return out of curiosity. I fell to the floor in the hallway in break-dancing movements, howling for all I was worth.

  It worked like a charm.

  Tipper skyrocketed back and started licking my face. Two colleagues were standing nearby, watching the whole episode. They had never seen such bizarre silliness in their lives. They burst into laughter—and so did I, still lying on the hall floor, with my puppy safe in my arms.

  Tipper went to puppy school too, of course. She made it through puppy kindergarten just fine, but the novice obedience course was a different story. She was “retained” to repeat the course. As a teacher, I knew what that meant: she’d flunked and wouldn’t be allowed to advance to the next level unless she retook—and passed—the novice class. I was pretty sure repeating the course wouldn’t do much good.

  The one takeaway she got from her formal training was a trick where she’d high jump over a raised dowel rod for a snack. I called it the “Pupperoni trick,” after the name of the snack. I thought it was a hilarious thing to show visitors because it was so incredibly stupid. Tipper didn’t think so; she was a willing participant.

  The visitor held the dowel rod straight out in front. I stood on one side of the rod, holding a bag of Pupperoni treats. Tip was on the other side.

  “Pupperoni?” I asked; then I’d tell her to sit. She sat stock-still. Then I said, “Wait!”

  She quivered in anticipation, her paws ready for the command she knew was coming.

  “Jump!”

  And she’d sail over the rod and sit down right in front of me. I’d give her a small piece of Pupperoni—which she quickly gulped down—and then I’d tell her, “Go back!”

  And boing! She jumped back over the rod and sat down again, ready for another go ’round. Two tricks for the price of one!

  Despite failing novice obedience class, Tipper did learn a decent repertoire of tricks, most involving food.

  One of my vet techs, Manda, taught her to guzzle a Slushy from a straw.

  Earl and I trained Tipper to shake one paw, then the other paw, then both paws at the same time, a trick Keli had learned early on too. Then Earl added what became known as the “banana trick”: both paws on the couch, head down, good doggie. Then he’d give her the first piece of banana and eat the rest himself.

  They repeated this trick every single morning. Years later, I had the couch reupholstered, and it finally dawned on me that the large discolored area on the middle cushion was where Tipper had always put her paws and head to get her precious bit of banana.

  Tipper loved fruit. When I ate an apple, she stared at me the whole time. I always gave her the apple core. Okay, I confess; under that unblinking gaze, I would bite off chunks of apple and give those to her as well. And yes, sometimes I’d give her a whole apple. I was well trained; all she had to do was sit and give me the husky stare, and I’d give her the treat. It was a good trade; watching her eat a whole apple was a source of great amusement to me.

  One of the most valuable lessons she’d learned in puppy kindergarten was the “wait!” command. It’s an important command in its own right, but it’s also necessary for the “biscuit trick,” one of the hardest tricks to learn and one that most dogs don’t master.

  I would balance a Milk-Bone dog biscuit on Tipper’s long nose and command her, “Wait!”

  She would hold her head very still until I said, “Okay!”

  Then she’d turn her head and snap the biscuit from midair right into her mouth. What a genius! Who needs novice obedience training when you’ve mastered such an advanced trick? She was such a super-star that we began calling her Tipper the Wonder Husky.

  Like Keli, Tipper was a gifted singer. I used the same training technique I’d used with Keli, crooning to her, “Tipper, can you go ah-woo?” and she’d join right in. Two singing dogs; if we’d adopted another two, we could have had the world’s first canine barbershop quartet.

  Tipper’s signature song was “Ragtime Cowboy Joe,” the fight song of the Wyoming Cowboys, University of Wyoming’s football team. Earl was a rabid UW fan who never tired of the Tipper and Mary Duet serenading him with his favorite song.

  All huskies have a big smile when their mouths are wide open. They just do; they are happy dogs. Some dogs, Tipper included, can smile with their mouths closed, with just their choppers showing. This isn’t something I taught her; I just happened to notice it one day when she was sitting in the family room. She had a big grin without snarling when she lifted her upper lip to show her teeth. It was hysterical, and she soon learned to do it on purpose. “Smile, Tipper, smile, smile!” I would sing to her. Her nose would come up, and there were her closed front teeth, a shining white grin.

  That grin changed over time because Tipper had trouble with bad teeth, leading to many dental surgeries. During one of these, she had all of her upper incisor teeth extracted. Her toothsome grin was no more; it was all gums. I called her Banjo Dog as though she were a redneck from Deliverance, but I was happy that she could still smile that open-mouthed husky smile.

  Not every trick was one we taught her; she came up with a few herself.

  When I came home from school, I noticed the couch in the family room was warm. Who was warming up the couch? No humans were home. Surely the cats weren’t big enough to leave that much heat. That left Tipper—but she wasn’t allowed on the furniture, and she knew it. Or at least I thought she knew it. Was she being a b-a-d d-o-g?

  One fine day, with the last of the autumn leaves on the ground, I arrived home earlier than usual. Aha! I thought. I will sneak up to the window and look in! I will catch that criminal canine in the act. I placed my purse and school bags softly by the driveway. I crept along the ground, tiptoeing to avoid the crunchy leaves. I approached the window like a CIA operative spying on an international criminal.

  I peeped into the window.

  There she was, my dog child, lying spread out her entire length on the couch, joined by the cats, all sound asleep. I knocked on the window, waved, and said, “Hi there, Tipper!”

  She looked at me with those crystal-blue eyes without a hint of guilt. I could imagine the wheels turning in her canine brain, figuring out what to do about finally getting busted.

  I scurried around to the back of our house, unlocked the four locks on the two doors, and pushed my way in, anticipating catching my dog in the act of couch surfing.

  No such luck.

  In the time it took me to unlock the doors, not only was she inside her crate, she was faking sleep and looked surprised to be awakened! What could I do? Two points for The Wonder Husky.

  13

  The Hundred-Dollar Horse

  Tracy, burbling with glee, sat proudly in the saddle on Marcie’s back. Tracy’s dad, Scott, walked beside them, holding on to Tracy to keep her secure, while her mom, Linda, led Marcie slowly around the corral. I was proud of them, especially Marcie, who was so gentle and giving.

  Tracy had been born with multiple severe handicaps; she was mostly blind and deaf, didn’t speak, and was developmentally delayed. To walk, an adult usually needed to be alongside, holding her hands.

  She adored horses, but even though she was now an adult, the local special needs riding programs would not allow Tracy to participate for two reasons: helmets and shoes. She couldn’t tolerate wearing the mandatory helmet and constantly picked at it to get it off her head. She could manage socks but refused to wear shoes (not surprising, considering how much information she had to gather through sense of touch alone), and it’s risky to be in a barn with nothing but socks to protect your feet.
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  Her parents were fellow teachers and friends of mine, and I’d suggested that we try having Tracy ride Marcie. We wouldn’t worry about helmets and shoes; I wouldn’t worry about liability, beyond the usual notice posted on our property that states the Colorado revised statute about the liability of a horse professional and how people can’t sue a horse owner for any accidents.

  The three of them arrived one sunny morning for their first lesson. They learned how to saddle Marcie, what to do to help Tracy ride safely, and where we stashed the key to the corral. Tracy and her folks now had our permission to saddle up Marcie and help Tracy ride whenever they wanted, whether Earl and I were home or not.

  Tracy’s way of telling her parents that she wanted to ride was to bring them her jeans. After helping her change into her “riding clothes,” they headed to the corral and saddled up Marcie and then, outside the corral, settled Tracy into place. Usually, you’d mount up inside the corral, but inside meant horse manure and occasionally hardware on the ground—no place for stocking feet. As soon as Tracy was mounted comfortably on Marcie’s back, they’d enter the corral and ride. Throughout every session, Marcie stood and moved quietly; she was very gentle with Tracy.

  Marcie was a great teacher for people without disabilities too. Her calm demeanor allowed me to let almost anybody ride her, especially in the corral. When we had houseguests who wanted to ride, Marcie was their horse. She was mellow enough to help those who were nervous around large animals get comfortable with her and patient enough to let future veterinarians poke and prod her. On top of all that, she was gorgeous.

  Not bad for a hundred-dollar horse.

  She was our bargain “extra,” purchased for an extra hundred dollars when Earl had bought Franny, the little sorrel mare who’d captivated his heart. She’d been known as our hundred-dollar horse ever since.

  She was also known as The Pig, The Snout, and Miss Piggy—and eventually (though not often) as Liberty Sunshine, her formal registered APHA name. By the time we learned her “official” name, we’d been calling her Marcie—the name Dr. Greene used and, coincidentally, also the name of one of my stepsisters—for so long that anything as fancy as Liberty Sunshine didn’t seem to fit.