Page Nineteen
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puppies. six. a source of high anxiety, a totally new experience, a quandary for which Mugsy didn’t have an answer. or he did have one: me. I myself was the real and responsible mother of those puppies, and it was my job to look after their needs.
I suppose you could say they were my fault. I prefer to decree my daughter as the guilty party, as I had been asking her for two years to get one of her dogs fixed. to no avail. so that when we moved in with her, I was often in charge of two dogs who very much wanted to mate, and one of my jobs was to prevent this.
please bear in mind that I knew nothing about dog mating thingies. I was a cat person. I knew how it went with cats in these situations. when my daughter’s female rottweiler, Indy, came into estrus a couple of weeks after I moved in, I expected it would be a monthly event, as it had always been with my cats. once again I pleaded for daughter to get one of the dogs fixed. no, no, no, says she. it’s no big deal. she only gets it twice a year. just take Mishi off her when he gets up there, and it’ll be fine. oh, she’ll do some bleeding, too, by the way. bye. and out the door she goes.
my assignments, as I saw them, were to take Mishi off when he got up there, and to clean up the blood. these things I did. however there came this afternoon when I was talking on the cordless telephone, pacing around in that nervous way that I have. and when I turned my body back to face the dogs, there was Mishi on top of Indy… again. so I walked over, put the phone between shoulder and ear, firmly grasped Mishi’s hips, and pulled. and nothing happened. I kept trying. nothing happened. I might as well have tried to move a rockface. and then I remembered some vague and misty remark out of my teenage years: hadn’t some friend of mine once said something about dogs getting locked together when they mate?
in due course there were puppies. on tuesday 20 july 1999, to be exact. seven were born, but one did not live. I had a number of worries concerning these children, and one of those was Mugsy. what will he do? will he see them as rivals to his alpha status and murder them? for a while I would not let him near them. they and their mother had a room to themselves. when Indy would tire of her family (very quickly) and scratch on the door to come out, Mugs would sniff her entire underside with great thoroughness and intense concentration. the smell of milk was there, of course, but the most life-changing smells were the scents of SIX OTHER DOGS.
Indy was a most excellent dog in a number of ways, but alas she was not much in the motherhood department. there had been the matter of the youngest puppy (Braon), whom Indy repeatedly pushed away from the breast until I taught Braon to suck properly. maybe most dogs would’ve pushed away a weak puppy, but Indy just wasn’t into the mom thing. where some female dogs are very protective of their litters, Indy didn’t give a flying fig if we picked up her nursing kids and carried them off. and she never, ever let them nurse as long as they wanted to. when she decided she’d put up with all that sucking long enough, up she would stand, six puppies hanging down from her teats like some surreal fruit. too bad, says Indy, and starts walking. and keeps walking until every single pup, one by one, has given up, released its grip, and fallen to the floor. and I swear to you that that dog would literally smile with joy when the last puppy dropped (usually Braon) and she was free.
after a couple of weeks of observing Mugsy’s very concerned behavior, I decided that his fretting came from a clearer understanding of the situation than I’d thought he would have. Mugs was a deep thinker (laugh all you want, but he was), and I knew this already, so I should have known that he would grasp the gravity of new life. aside from the methodical sniffing of Indy’s udder, Mugsy would lay every morning right up against the door to the puppy room. it was my job to let Indy out, and to go in and check on the puppies. later it was also my job to take in a bowl of water and a plate of canned food, as they were sloppily learning to feed themselves. well, some mornings I’m efficient, and some I’m not. one morning when I was not, I happened see Mugsy shaking, from head to toe, as he lay there against the puppies’ door. it was well past the time on the clock when he expected me to go in there. I’d already let Indy out, but apparently that wasn’t enough. I had to go in there, all the way in, and check on them. he was worried about them. he knew, by means of alpha-male, dog-pack genetic programming, that 1. they were babies and needed to be cared for, and 2. that Indy was less than a joyful, dedicated mother. he didn’t trust her to do the job right. and this anxious insistence of his that I myself should constantly monitor Indy’s children persisted until the day she almost totally stopped the nursing (eight weeks or so I think). after that he relaxed a good deal. however, if I was “late” going in morning, noon and night with their plate of canned food, he would lie at that door and shake until I went in there. he would also lie against that door listening to every single micro-sound the entire time.
I don’t recall exactly when it was that I started letting him come in with me for a few minutes. when they were two weeks old, or three. as soon as I got it that he was worried about them, rather than waiting for a chance to murder them.
there were a couple of relapses into complete panic for poor Mugs. the first time he went into that room and saw them crawling, dragging their six black bodies around with their arms, he looked up at me in sheer dread. as if to say: “Now what mom? How are we gonna keep ’em safe if they go out the door?” the next time was when they walked. wobblingly, to be sure, but it was definitely four-legged walking. I think it was too much for him. I think he scurried to the door with his head down and asked to be let out of the room.
the day they conquered the couch was yet another blinger. Mugsy was lying there beside me, as he nearly always was. instead of waiting for me to lift them, about three of the puppies crawled up the front of the couch. reaching the top, they looked at me with eyes full of the pride in achievement. Mugsy’s eyes, on the other hand, were absolutely stunned. then sadness: “They’re gonna go wherever they want now, aren’t they?”
we ended up keeping two of those dogs, two girls. he had to discipline them, naturally, to show them who was boss, but he never hurt them. and they were his girls, always. he showed a certain fatherliness to them that Mishi, their actual father, never did. but Mishi was your typical black-lab dunderhead, and a very dear dunderhead to boot. you couldn’t expect too much deep thinking from him. he was an epileptic, and we didn’t know it then. he’d had one grand mal as a puppy, and never another one for five whole years. he could have been having petite mals all that time, and I didn’t know to look out for them. he did the best he could with the faulty brainwaves he was given.
puppies. and my fears that he would be aggressive towards them. it was all more than fifteen years ago now, but in spite of all those flipped calendar pages, I look back rather shamefacedly on my worries during Indy’s pregnancy. I knew how intelligent Mugsy was, and how sensitive. I should have had more faith in him. those puppies were never anything to him but new members of the family who needed to be taken care of. I’m so proud of him. still.
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read… Lucked out... Cutting the pie…
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2014 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.
mugsy's book 