Wolf and Fuzzy

Alpha Bitch has been doing more than her share of barking lately. I'm not sure what has caused most of it, but she has somewhat exceeded my idea of warning me that something is moving around outside and veered right on over to irritating the bejeebers out of me.

A couple of nights ago, this went on to the extent that I sent her to her kennel for time out. She's been there enough lately that I can tell her to go into her time out, and she'll sit in it patiently until I have time to put down my laptop, slush across the room, and shoot the lock for her.

Tank usually gets the idea and climbs back up on the couch to wait for the end of her sentence, but this week he was loath to leave the window where she had been barking. He wasn't as noisy as she was, but he was clearly interested in the unusual activity, so he hung out for some time at the front windows.

After a bit, Number One Son went out to the front porch for a date with a coffin nail and came back reporting that two black Labrador puppies who didn't have collars or tags were the focus of the racket. "They're just puppies, Mom, but they're as big as Tank!" he said. "Do you have any idea where they live?"

I remembered hearing that a neighbor up the street—who doesn't happen to have a fence around his yard—had told me recently that his daughter had adopted a new black Lab puppy, and since Dad also has Labs, I thought two could possibly have moved in. NOS strolled up the street to ask about them, stopped at a house or two on the way back, but came up empty. Alpha Bitch stayed in her kennel.

Tank kept a fairly close vigil at the window, checking in periodically with the pups outside, especially when NOS went out later for another coffin nail. Tank has a bad habit of knocking on a back window when he wants in, especially at night, and after a couple of hours, the window knocking began. I fussed at Tank, who turned around to see what I wanted, but the knocking didn't stop; the mutts outside must have been doing it.

I hollered upstairs at NOS to get his help: "Come see what you can do with these dogs!" NOS is one of those people who just seems to know how to get along with animals, so I figured he could come up with a plan; we had already agreed that they had to belong in the neighborhood and we weren't about to call the animal shelter.

A couple of minutes later, NOS came scrambling down the stairs with the kids' friend Shrek, who is living with us while he settles back in from several months on a mission trip to Africa. Shrek grew up on farmland near the edge of town, where he frequently had to shoo stray or feral dogs off the property, and he was confident that he knew what to do.

The next thing I heard was Shrek making a lot of really ugly noises to frighten these puppies into leaving, so I followed the guys outside to try to negotiate a different solution. One of the puppies had taken off into the darkness, but the other was stubbornly still on the driveway, and I saw in a flash that NOS was right; this animal must have been pushing 60 pounds, but he was almost as raggedy as squishy stuffed toy. I wasn't convinced that he was a Lab, but he was definitely a big dog, and to me he looked lonely and scared.

Our dogs are perfectly happy to go to their kennels when we send them to time out, the office, or night-night, but usually they spend nights on our beds. While Alpha Bitch's kennel was occupied at the time, Tank's wasn't, and it was marginally big enough for two somewhat outsized puppies. I dragged it outside, and the boys set it up next to the curb behind Shrek's car where the puppies would be far enough from the house to stop annoying our dogs but caged up so they wouldn't take off toward the highway a couple of blocks away. If owners came looking, they'd be visible and safe.

These guys clearly hadn't been trained to get into kennels; we managed to grab enough of the first one's scruff to push, pull, and drag him into it. He wasn't eager to get in, but he seemed eager to please, and as soon as he was inside, he lay down and looked pretty comfortable.

By that time, Tank had let us know where to look for the other one; although Shrek had seen him take off in a generally easterly direction, I had sent Tank out to the back yard while I dragged the kennel out, and Tank's barks let us know the other pup had headed west.

NOS grabbed a flashlight in hopes of spotting a black puppy in a dark yard and was just about there when a neighbor showed up in the street with a pair of leashes in her hand. "Have you seen a couple of—?" was as far as she got when she spotted the first one in the kennel. "Omigosh! What is he doing here?"

A few seconds later, NOS came back up the driveway with the other pup in his arms. The neighbor explained that the dogs were part bloodhound and part setter and should reach 150 pounds or more. The daughter's boyfriend is planning to train them, like their sire and dam, to be search and rescue dogs, but mom and dad were puppy sitting with their big, fenced back yard. The fence didn't slow the puppies down too much; they had clearly dug their way under it and lost their special, see-the-black-dog-in-the-dark collars somewhere between there and my house.

"What are their names?" I asked her.

"Wolf and Fuzzy," she answered.

Go figure: exactly the name most people called my ex and the pet name I used for him.

He hates dogs.