One day, I looked out the window and saw a dog standing in the driveway looking towards the house. I didn’t think anything of it that day, but when she kept coming back, I knew something was wrong and that she didn’t just stray out of a neighborhood property. She was skittish, so we would not try to get too close at first. We walked slowly towards her with a bowl of food, speaking in quiet, soothing tones. We’d put the food down and walk back into the house, watching from there as she ate it. Eventually, she grew to trust us and would let us pet her. Then she felt comfortable enough to come into the house. She seemed healthy and was not injured. No one was looking for her and we assumed someone just dumped her.
At this time, I was on a dean search committee at the university. The College of Liberal Arts was looking for a new dean, so the committee members had to go throw a very strict process to get to the point of a job offer for someone. First we had to go through every application and assign a number for evaluation purposes. Then we got together to discuss our rankings and the field was narrowed down based on the final numbers. Then we did phone interviews, again giving numerical rankings. This narrowed things down further. Finally, there were five finalists who would be brought to campus, each for a few days, to give presentations, have in-person interviews, do some socializing, and those sorts of things. We were in this latter stage when the dog, named Missy by Daughter, came to live with us.
A few weeks after she showed up, it was my turn to take the lead with a dean candidate from New York. I invited her and the other committee members to our home for supper, making a huge pan of lasagna, salad, garlic bread, and some sort of dessert. As I was setting the table in anticipation of everyone’s arrival, I stopped to pet Missy, who had rolled over on her back, waiting for a belly rub. ‘Hmmm,’ I said to Bill, ‘Maybe she isn’t just gaining weight because she is getting more to eat since we started feeding her. I wonder if she’s pregnant.’ We didn’t have time to think about this, because soon our guests started arriving and we were occupied with the 7 or 8 of them. When they left, I made plans to meet the candidate early the next morning, so we could begin the day. I was to escort her around to various places and presentations. The next day started far earlier than I’d expected it to!
In the middle of the night, Missy insisted on going outside. Just before 4 a.m. I woke up to a weird noise and went to check. When I turned on the light, I saw her standing next to the porch. She was agitated. Then I saw a tiny little creature. Missy was having puppies! We brought her and the puppy inside. She was distressed and the other dogs and the cats were curious. We knew we had to get her somewhere quiet and where the other animals would not pester her or the pups. The only option was the small utility room out back. In order to get there, one had to enter a hallway that wrapped round part of the round house. At the end of that was the door to the utility room.There was not much free space back there. It was a small room anyway and we had our washing machine and an extra fridge freezer back there. We didn’t know there would be one in the house when we moved there, so we’d brought the one we had and ended up putting it back there when we found out we wouldn’t need it.
We put down a pile of blankets and brought Missy and the puppy back there, going back and forth to check on things. Once we heard a sort of mewling sound and realized one puppy was missing. We worried that it had fallen down through the hole for the dryer vent (we didn’t have a dryer) or had somehow gotten through the opening that served as a handle to lift up the board providing access to the crawl space underneath the house. Bill went down there and saw nothing. When I moved the fridge-freezer to get at the dryer vent, I saw a poor wee pup stuck in the coils. We puppy-proofed the room as best as we could.
We called the Humane Society for advice. They told us they couldn’t take the five puppies until they were at least 8 weeks old, so we wondered what the next 8 weeks would be like with 9 dogs and 4 cats! In the short term, I had to go escort a dean candidate around campus, so I left to do that. At least we had something non-academic to talk about!
We eventually got into a routine. It was still winter when the puppies arrived, but late winter, so by the time they were too big to stay in the utility room, we were able to put them outside. Someone who had lived in the house before us repaired snow machines and once got paid for a job with a pig. He’d built an elevated pen for this pig, complete with a pig house built up against the house. There was still straw there too, so it was perfect for the puppies.
When they were big enough to run around, we’d let them out of the pen and they would scamper about, much to the annoyance of Pearl, who took herself off to a neighbor’s house, where she would rest on their quiet porch. Inu, the 150-pound dog who had made the journey to Alaska with us, was an elder by then and was quite alarmed at the tiny creatures running around his feet. He tried to stay away from them.
I fell in love with the smallest pup, calling him Little Runt. Every time I would come home and they would all run to greet me, I’d call out, ‘Hello, Little Runt!’ and he would jump on my legs. The day we had to gather them up and bring them to the Humane Society was a very painful one. I cried and cried. I considered keeping Little Runt, but we already had 4 dogs and I knew Little Runt would not stay little for very long. Being a puppy, he had an excellent chance of finding a happy and loving home. So we gathered all 5 puppies up and put them in the truck. Missy was upset as we started to drive away with them, which was hard to watch. But she was OK by the time we got home.
I went to check on the puppies a week or so later. They’d all been adopted.
