Evolution Part I: Chapter Twenty-nine
I spent the better part of a week assisting Lopside in great leaps of verbal cognizance and vocalization, although to my doggish sense of time, the long daily efforts felt more like months. As I mentioned before, Lopside seemed suddenly possessed by a...
Evolution Part I: Chapter Twenty-eight
I spent most of the day worrying about possible discovery by humans of our transgressions; minor though they might have been. To me the signs were obvious, naturally, and after receiving my brief physical, I felt for sure that it was only a matter of...
Evolution Part I: Chapter Twenty-seven
He didn't mention the fact that i was getting to be 2/3 taller than a golden retriever had any right to be, and that spoke highly of where his priorities were. "i picked on you for a long time because i saw him in you.
Evolution Part I: Chapter Twenty-four
I'm not sure why I was so hesitant. Perhaps it was all the strange things I'd experienced since stepping out of the yard for the first time. But right then the thought of another pack of dogs being around the corner frightened me more than it enthused...
Evolution Part I: Chapter Twenty-three
Not wanting to press Lopside too much at a time, I left him and decided to give myself some time to spend with my brother. He greeted me fondly with a "Hi Topsy!" and a pounce against my chest. He licked my face and I licked his head back. He whipped...
Evolution Part I: Chapter Twenty-two
A week after I'd first started hanging around Lopside, I finally felt like we'd started making progress. He now understood that when I was making noises at him, I was trying to communicate and he was picking up some nouns, like "food" and "water." But...
Evolution Part I: Chapter Twenty-one
Lopside was going to be a long-term project. That much was clear almost from the start. It was a struggle to cross that gap as he seemed just as intent to teach me the meaning of his drawings as I did trying to get him to understand my alphabet of...
Evolution Part I: Chapter Nineteen
I awoke several hours later in the middle of the night. The storm was still raging outside and the area around the portal to the house was damp and abandoned. It looked like it was going to go on the rest of the night, but I had to whizz so I braved...
Evolution Part I: Chapter Eighteen
It took more time to bring Pink Nose, Terrier-face and the shepherd-lab up to my level of understanding of language. During that time, life was busy but fairly uneventful save for another litter of male pups being delivered and three more dogs being...
Evolution Part I: Chapter Seventeen
A week after the shepherd-lab returned, Pink Nose and I were beginning to share simple conversations. He'd mastered the basics and was steadily gaining vocabulary. Watching him learn was probably the best thing for Terrier-face, Fatty and the...
Evolution Part I: Chapter Sixteen
And so terrier-face and fatty became my betas. A plus side to dog politics was that once everyone knew who was in charge, people readily accepted the roles assigned to them and there was only very infrequently any bad blood between us. Promoting the...
Evolution Part I: Chapter Fifteen
I went to go lie down in the shade under the canopy over the fountain. Several dogs lay nearby, eager to lick the wounds covering my body. They were already trying to worm their way to better positions in the hierarchy by subservience to the new Alpha....