My yellow lab had 11 puppies, one night. I was there for the birth of all of them.
“Allie Dog Woods,” as my youngest daughter called her, was sweet and gentle, and loved to chew the rubber on the gas grill. (Wait- that last one wasn’t a good thing.) But Allie refused to eat my son when he had his arm down her throat. She just gagged, gave me a piteous look: “Can you take this kids’ arm out of my throat?” (Eighteen years later, my son tried that trick with an American Bulldog, with disastrous results.)
Allie was not spayed, and I took great care to keep her inside when she was most attractive to the neighborhood thug-dogs. I failed, once.
A four-foot fence ringed our back yard. It kept out little dogs, but no cats, squirrels, nor that big black brute of a canine from down the alley. I’m not a dog-fearing man, but when I would come out of the back door to find this dude sniffing Allie’s spots in the yard, I would hesitate.
“Shoo,” I would whisper, positioned to leap into the house. The brute would raise his head, look at me, and saunter to the fence, which he cleared in one muscular bound. I’d bounce into the back yard and strut, whispering, “Yeah! You want some of this?”
Allie grew, swelled and blew up, until it was obvious: she was pregnant.
One evening, Lauryn said to me, “Daddy, something’s wrong with Allie.” Fat Allie, swollen with pups, was taking what I thought was a potty break in the back yard. I peeked into the dark, and could see a white bag bulging beneath her. I stepped out, came closer, and “Defcon 4! We’re in delivery!”
I coaxed Allie back into house, and she delivered her pup on the back porch. Lauryn and Chris peeked at the pup over the child-gate. There was licking and other dog-things, and when Allie wanted to go outside again, I didn’t let her. She rewarded my refusal with the delivery of — another pup! I realized that “litter” described dog’s deliveries, and I was in for a long night. I papered the back porch, and sat down to wait. Sometime around 5 a.m., Allie delivered the 11th pup. (I had fallen asleep, so the time is approximate. This pup did not live.)
I learned some animal husbandry that night, and about the defecatory habits of newborn pups. The cruds were crap machines, superb newsprint slimers. Allie also stressed my mathematical capabilities. She had fewer, ahem, spigots, than pups. I devised a routine. Wake up in the morning, put ten pups in a box and let Allie out, clean up the papers and the porch, let Allie in, put five pups in a box and five on the mom, flip Allie and plop 5 new pups on her. Puppy parenting is hard work.
We had lots of dogs. I have pictures: my eldest daughter sitting on the couch with a puppy peeking out of her sweatshirt; puppies crawling over two giggling kids on the floor. We named them. We even had a “Roly,” in honor of the 101 Dalmations.
We did not keep those 10 pups and Allie never commented on her loss. But I remember the births, and paper-sliming, the whimpers and suckling, the baths and the day when the dog family spread across the back yard, yapping and crapping.
The brute stood at the corner of the fence, looked in, and sauntered back down the alley. “Yeah. That’s what I’m talkin’ about!”
This column first appeared in June 2009.
cjon3acd@att.net