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soaked her fringed ears and tail in bitter-apple spray so he was less tempted to swing from
them. That second night, she used her entire sticky body like a caterpillar's to hunch her foam
bed as far as possible from Solo's crate in the bedroom, inch by inch. I. Do. Not. Like. That.
Puppy.
Solo didn't care. Megan was just a dog. Dogs weren't his people. Solo had no litter to miss.
We had no need to put a clock in the crate to mimic the sound of siblings' beating hearts. He
slept through the night. He was at home alone.
Over the next two days, David and I tried to teach Solo the international language of
ouch, something he'd missed out on with no other puppies for interaction. Joan had taught
him, of course, but Solo found it convenient to forget, with new hands to bite. We screeched
every time a sharp puppy tooth hit skin. Solo didn't relate, though he did cock his head when
he heard our howls. Since he'd never experienced pain in exchange for his excesses, because
of his kind and patient adult shepherds, he had no idea what it meant to cause it.
On day four, Megan stopped drooling and looking betrayed. She gave Solo a brief,
queenly play bow. Permission to engage. She started to teach him a few basic commands to
quell his most brutish tendencies. No more mounting. No humping at all. No more stand-
ing over her when she was lying down. No more massive puppy paw placed on the shoulder.
She would move sideways a fraction so that Solo's leaps ended with him splayed on the floor
rather than on her gorgeous setter body. She glanced over at us and opened her mouth slightly
to show her small white teeth, smiling. Within a couple of hours, her tail returned to its
former high-flying flag position, though her long silky feathers had gaps torn in them. For
the first time since we had brought her home from Oregon three years before, David and I
were in awe of Megan. Our space cadet had disappeared. We watched her, trying to learn
from her engagement and disengagement, her covert and canny manipulation of this emo-
tionally stunted puppy. We wanted to know what Megan knew.
We also watched Solo. I began to understand what Joan had meant when she repeatedly
mentioned “scent drive” in her e-mails. David went out to work in the garden, and I left the
house with Solo five minutes after that, wanting to avoid accidents in the house. He wasn't
interested in peeing; instead, he put his nose just above the warm stones of our courtyard and
started moving fast. Then he was on our crabgrass, skimming the ground, his pointed ears
making his head look like a shark snout. He didn't lift his head until it butted hard against
the legs of a startled David working behind the greenhouse. Solo had tracked him a hundred
feet from the house, around two bends, on three different surfaces. Solo's whole body wiggled
in pleasure, and he bit David's jeans happily until David “ouched” him. Solo had done his
first short track. I had a new command that he loved: “Go find David.”
We'd had Solo just a few weeks when my father and stepmother, Angie, came to visit from
Oregon. Dad, his skin increasingly loose across the big bones of his hands, sat blissfully strok-
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