Tails on the Hill: Stories about a Family and Its Dogs

Fillene

53 A ida’s name should have been Lolita, Daddy said. I wanted to know why but he’d just grin and say, “because.” Aida was mommy to Fillene and lots of others. She acted like she cared about her puppies until weaning time-after that they were on their own. She was through being “mommy.” Aida’s last litter was about six weeks old when the weather turned so cold their water froze in the pan before all eight puppies could get a good slurp. Even though they slept on top of each other in their house, I guess they decided it was warmer back under the rocks on the edge of the Hill. Maybe that’s why they decided to stay there instead of their doghouse. They came running up to the house at meal call, but the rest of the time they enjoyed romping and rolling out of the wind on the side of the Hill. We started missing one, then two. Because it was so Fillene 54 Tails on the Hill cold, we really couldn’t spend a lot of time crawling around and through the rocks looking for puppies that didn’t want to be found. We were going up to Colorado to ski for a week and the Herrings would have to look after everything. I didn’t want to go off and leave the missing puppies. Daddy said they would be all right, and we certainly weren’t going to cancel our plans because of a pack of puppies, and that was all there was to it! Daddy wasn’t wrong many times, but this time he was. When we drove up the Hill a week later, not a puppy in sight. Aida was perched on her throne; she did bother to raise herself up, fan her tail at us, lift her ears like she knew we were home, but ho-hum, so what. Daddy muttered something about her being a “blue-blooded watchdog all right” and opened the garage door. I ran over to the edge of the Hill, calling, “Puppies! Puppies! We’re home. Here, puppy, puppies!” The only sound was the wind clicking the icy weeds together. No puppies. “Aida! Where are your babies?” I screamed. Like in slow motion, she stepped down, sniffed a few spots, and then climbed back on her throne “like the Queen of the Nile,” Daddy said. Neither one of us found any sign of a single puppy; they had all disappeared. I got down on my hands and knees for one last look in the doghouse. Two little shiny eyes were bulging out at me. Daddy came running and stuck his arm in and finally managed to pull a squealing, growling little puppy out. It quivered and hunched into a tight furry ball. He couldn’t stand, and there were dark stiff patches of fur and great big holes in his back. The soft puppy look in his eyes was gone-now he looked like those cornered rats Pobre used to catch. What had happened to him? What had happened to his brothers and sisters? Was he the only one left? Why was he alive if the others were dead? Daddy tried to calm him down, telling him he was safe and we weren’t going to hurt him. Aida sat on her throne watching us with half-closed 56 Tails on the Hill wouldn’t waste any time getting to the good stuff once we got in the house. As we drove into the garage Fillene was standing on the other side of the screen, in the kitchen, wagging his tail-I thought I had put him outside-I did put him outside before we left. How? And then I saw his feet, his sides, his tail-most of him was not black any more but different shades of yuck. The minute she saw him Mother bailed out of the car, tore through the kitchen, and started screaming, “My house! My beautiful house is ruined!” And it was. Fillene had taken a mud bath in Daddy’s ditch, torn open the screen, then turned cartwheels and jumped from couch to couch, skidded on the waxed floors, and slung mud on woodwork and windows and curtains. Then he crawled on top of my bed and rolled from one end to the other, evidently ran out of mud, dashed out for more, came...