Like I say, born pure white you usually don’t stand a chance, but me, I took my mama’s advice. After all, I was the son of a blend of dogs stretching back to the beginning of time on this continent. We sprang up here. We had no need to cross on any land bridge. We know who we are. Us, we are descended of Original Dog.
I think about her lots, and also about my ancestor, from way way back, the dog named Sorrow who drank a human’s milk. I think about her because I know it was the first dog’s mercy and the hand-me-down wit of the second that saved my life that time they were boiling the sacred soup.
I hear these words — Get under the house, Melvin, fetch that white puppy now. Bam! My mama throws me in the farthest house corner and sits down on me. I cover up with her but once Melvin is in play distance I can’t help it. I’ve got that curious streak of all the Indian dogs. I peek right around my mother’s tail and whoops, he’s got me. He drags me out and gives me to a grandma, who stuffs me in a gunnysack and slings me down beside the fire.
I fight the bag there for a while but it’s warm and cozy and I go to sleep. I don’t think much of it. Just another human habit I’ll get used to, this stuffing dogs in sacks. Then I hear them talking.
Sharpen up the knife. Grandma’s voice.
That’s a nice fat white puppy. Someone else.
He’ll make a good soup for the ceremony, but do you think enough to go around? Should we kill another one?
Then, right above me, they start arguing about whether or not I’ll feed twenty. Me, just a little chunk of a guy, Gawiin! No! I bark. No! No! I’m not enough for even five of your big strong warrior sons. Not me. What am I saying? I’m not enough for any of you! Anybody! No! I’m sour meat. I don’t want to be eaten! In response, I get this tap from a grandma shoe, just a tap, but all us dogs know feet language. Be quiet or you’ll get a solid one, it means. I shut up. Once I stop barking all I can do is think and I think fast. I think furious. I think desperate puppy thoughts until I know what I’ll do the moment they let me out.
A puppy has just one weapon, and there really is no word for it but puppyness. Stuck in that bag, I muster all my puppyness. I call my tail wags and love licks up from deep way back, from the dogs going back to dogs unto the beginning of our association with these predictable and exasperating beings. I hear them stroking the steel on steel. I hear them tapping the boiling water pot. I hear them deciding I’ll be enough, just barely. Then daylight. The bag loosens and a grandma draws me forth and just quick, because I’m smart, desperate, and connected with my ancestors, I look for the nearest girl child in the bunch around me. I spot her. I pick her out.
She’s a visitor, sitting right there with a cousin, playing, not noting me at all. I give a friendly little whine, a yap, and then, as the grandma hauls me toward the table, a sharp loud bark of fear. That starts out of me. I can’t help it. But good thing, because the girl hears it and responds.
“Grandma,” she says, “what you going to do with the puppy?”
“Gabaashimgabaashimgabaashim,” mumbles Grandma, the way they do when trying to hide their actions.
“What?” That gets her little-girl curiosity up, a trait us dogs and children share in equal parts, what makes us love each other so.
“Don’t you know, you dummy,” shouts that boy cousin in boy knowledge, “Grandma’s going to boil it up, make it into soup!”
“Aaay,” my girl says, shy and laughing. “Grandma wouldn’t do that.” And she holds out her hands for me. Which is when I use my age-old Original Dog puppyness. I throw puppy love right at her in loopy yo-yos, puppy drool, joy, and big-pawed puppy clabber, ear perks, eye contact, most of all the potent weapon of all puppies, the head cock and puppy grin.
“Gimme him, gimme!”
“Noooo,” says Grandma, holding me tight and pursing her lips in that terrible way of grandmas, when they cannot be swayed. But she’s dealing with her own descendant in its purest form — pure girl. Puppy-loving girl.
“Grandmagrandmagrandma!” she shrieks.
“Eeeeh!”
“GIMMEDAPUPPY!GIMMEDAPUPPY!”
Now it’s time for me to wiggle, all over, to give the high-quotient adorability wiggle all puppies know. This is life or death. I do it double time, triple time, full of puppy determination, desperate to live.
“Ooooh,” says another grandma, sharp-eyed, “quick, trow him in the pot!”
“Noooo,” says yet another, “she wants that puppy bad, her.”
“Give her that little dog,” says a grandpa now, his grandpa heart swelling up. “She wants that dog. So give her that little dog.”
That is how it goes pretty much all the time, now, theseadays. In fact I’ve heard even grandmas have softened their hearts for us and we Indian dogs are safe as anywhere on earth, which isn’t saying much.
My girl’s doll-playing fingers are brushing my fur. She’s jumping for me. Spinning like a sweet maple seed. Straining up toward her grandma, who at this point can’t hold on to me without looking almost supernaturally mean. And so it is, I feel those ancient dog-cooking fingers give me up before her disappointed voice does.
“Here.”
And just like that I’m in the most heavenly of places. Soft, strong girl arms. I’m carried off to be petted and played with, fed scraps, dragged around in a baby carriage made of an old shoe box, dressed in the clothing of tiny brothers and sisters. Yes. I’ll do anything. Anything. This is when my naming happens. As we go off I hear the grandpa calling from behind us in amusement, asking the name of the puppy. Me. And my girl calls back, without hesitation, the name I will bear from then on into my age, the name that has given so many of our breedless breed hope, the name that will live on in dogness down through the generations. You’ve heard it. You know it. Almost Soup.
Up to the Present
Having introduced myself, I believe that it is now appropriate to bring time and place back into the picture. Time the judge has released Augustus Roy to easy death. Zosie and Mary have also trudged with their brothers toward the spirit world. Peace lived quietly, like her name. She was a shy old woman married to a shy old man named Waabizii, The Swan. She bore one son and feared to have more children lest they turn out twins. Her mothers always made her enough trouble. But her son grew up safely in her care and then fathered twin girls at too young an age. Their mother disappeared and Peace raised them. Until Zosie and Mary died, Peace was caught between two sets of yoked wills. At least she had the numbers, the bank, her father’s desk, and a changing array of colors that flowed beneath her pencil. Her father had taught her to love the sun on her shoulders and wind in every mood. She named the twins for these pleasures, Giizis and Noodin, hoping for happy spirits. But they turned out shrewd, sour, and sometimes ferocious, like their great-grandmothers. In the end, Peace just gave up.
There was a wave of giving up, and then there was a new government policy designed in the kindest way to make things worse. It was called Relocation and helped Indians move to cities all over the country. Helped them move away from family. Helped them move away from their land. Helped them move away from their dogs. But don’t worry. We followed them down to Gakaabikaang, Minneapolis, Place of the Falls. I will return. But I am sorry to say that I must leave you now.
I must give the story over to one particular descendant, Klaus, a man whom we dogs have failed to shape. Though named for the German, an industrious man, Klaus was a sorry piece of work from the get-go. Even though his elderly father counseled him with care, Klaus was lazy, needy, skilled from a tender age at self-deceptions, according to impartial dogs. He was always pining for something over the horizon. I am only letting him speak because he is, unfortunately, and to his own shame, best qualified to tell what happened next. Though sky and space divided the oldest daughter of Blue Prairie Woman from her sisters, her tribe, her family, and the descendants of her rescuers who walk this earth, it only took one drunken idiot to reconnect.