Dog Food

Sleep deprived I notice the head of a wolf, mid ferocious snarl, is printed on the bag of dog food my wife bought our puppy. I make my coffee and study it. I wonder what it would feel like to look up from some outdoorsy activity and find one of those animals staring at me. I look into that ancient hunter’s face printed on that bag and think of the link between it and the dog I allow free range of my home.

Gerdie came to us from the pound. I feel good about this. She’s a rescue. We saved her life. A decision I regret on occasion when I catch her hunched down eliminating a stream of hot stinky urine into the carpet. At these times I do consider commuting her pardon from death row.

I probably won’t.

She has the potential to be a good pet. I see it even when she is in the midst of destroying a flip-flop, puppy piddling on the floor right in front of me, or digging a hole through the carpet. Before cleaning up what probably could have been avoided all together if I had been paying closer attention, I yell, “No!” and to her credit she will immediately stop, cock her head and give me a look. A look, I swear, that’s asking, “do want in on this bro?”

We were given two pictures of her online. That was all the marketing we needed. Like a fish glimpsing an easy meal we bit and drove up to North Jersey to finish the process of adopting her we started online.

The woman running the kennel told us, “She is great with people.”

We were not lied to, though being great with people, we soon learned, meant, “She will attempt to abandon you and run to anyone or anything she sees on every walk. It will seem like you, as her owners, do not matter and she is looking to trade up.”

If known beforehand I don’t think it would have mattered. If somehow that information was available to us, we would have still run straight into the puppy trap. The hook sunk into soft tissue when we meet her for the first time and she jumped from the little girl’s lap holding her and ran right into my wife’s open arms.

We try and repress the idea she would have done this to anyone.

We really wanted it to be special.

We know the truth, whether we chose to accept it. Universally, no longer do these furry little pee monsters need snarling teeth to capture their prey, just a sticky warm tongue. Such an appendage caressed my wife’s face as she fell like any animal in the wild would fall if trounced on by a pack of wolves.

Somewhere along the four months of her little puppy life she got tagged with the name Dottie, probably something to do with the cute little black dots dappled on her body. We veto’d that one before we picked her up. We debated and finally chose. We decided we would call her Gerdie. The ‘d’ sounds like a ‘t.’ The ‘ie’ was added because she is a girl. Mythologically, Gerd, was the world god to the Vikings and was prayed to for fertility. As if for a joke recently our Gerdie got fixed.

I think it’s funny.

In this house, I am the only one.

Back to that snarling wolf on the dog food bag, big canines glistening as if in anticipation of being buried into the soft warm entrails of a furry woodland animal, a look of hungry murder glinting in snarling eyes. Everything about that animal was so it could be an efficient killer. It killed so it could mate. And once mated it killed so its puppies could eat. Once it stopped being able to kill it died a long slow painful death of hunger, or perhaps when weakened, it was eaten by its brothers or some other scavenger, bones scattered, life forgotten forever.

With steaming coffee poured and waiting I give the mutt a cup of the triangular shaped food pellets and stand back and watch all 30 pounds of puppy devour the calories in a flurry of twitchy not yet completely controlled muscle.

Yes, I guess, once they may have shared an ancestor, that wolf and this dog. Maybe the same ancestor I share with the rest of humanity, some poor slob hunkered down in the dusts of Africa, hundreds of thousands of years ago, gave her the first scrap of meat which started it all. Whatever the deal was at the end of the day my ancestor didn’t kill her ancestor and eventually Gerdie’s paternity earned a position in the pack of man and slowly over time no longer needed to look ferocious to eat, just cute.

But I wonder deep within this puppy I pet and play tug of war with and struggle to keep from being distracted by every living thing we pass on the semi-hourly walks needed to avoid staining the carpets I know she has that beast in her called survival and this bag of dog food reminds me if I don’t feed her three cups a day I might wake to find that growling visage looking down at me ready to take a deep satisfying bite.

Later, near mid-day, giving the pup yet another cup of food, I notice it wasn’t a wolf after all emblazoned on the bag, but a seemingly happy husky.