The TypeTwoFun Club

“…and how many of them are you keeping?!”

Origin Stories

A key duty of my Sled Dog Auntiedom was keeping alive two imminently-arriving litters of puppies. Here is was my stance on puppies: they’re fine. Sure, they can be very cute. When I see a puppy, if the owner is amenable, I will get down the the ground and play with and snuggle and love all over the puppy and speak to it in the highest-pitched most ridiculous baby voice. Then I will give the puppy back. I will go on with my life, and not think of the puppy again. I will go back home to my adult dogs, whom I love. I have a soft spot for older dogs. I didn’t get either of my dogs as puppies, one being a rescue and the other a retiree. I never even saw a picture of either as a young one. I don’t feel I missed out on anything from this. So the prospect of helping raise some puppies was, again, totally fine, but not a dealmaker in my book.

The first litter came on a Wednesday. I was going up at 5am Thursday. Have you ever tried to log in to work and join your silly little zoom meetings (no offense, coworkers) when there are 24-hour old puppies right beneath you? I know I just said puppies aren’t totally my thing, but one-day-old puppies!? Total Auntie brain fog. The mom of litter 1, Squanny, was incredibly proud of her two offspring and out-of-her-mind neurotic about them. I opted to give her the space she so clearly wanted and not try to come close to either pup or touch them that first week. I visited the doorway a fair few times, quietly cooing at the little puptatoes, and took full advantage of when I had to enter the space to leash Squan up and take her out for bathroom breaks.

A few days later, Venus popped and six additional pups joined the party. Venus bumped Squan from the kiddie pool room, so the ‘big kids’, now like 5 whole days old, moved outside into a family pen with a family-sized dog box. Mild spring temps were everyone’s friend, and I got to meet all eight of my new friends. Sally opted not to ‘theme’ the litters (sled dog litters are often named in self-similar groupings or themes), but instead to use favorite individual names from a bunch of unrelated litter theme ideas. The big kids were easy to remember–there was only two and they were, how do you say, contrasty? One was white and the other dark brown. The little kids were immediately impossible–they were all just various iterations of Oreos. It took me weeks to lock them in.

Learning to Puppy

In retrospect, it is mind-boggling to me that I couldn’t tell them apart. This is because of what I learned about puppies: they’re all incredibly different, and they develop little personalities(?!) that you get to watch them figure out in real time. It’s magic! I hadn’t ever connected this about them since I hadn’t spent an extended duration with a puppy. They went from undifferentiated blobs to slightly differentiated blobs with opinions to very much completely different animals with agency and preferences and friends and weird little habits…all of it uniquely theirs.

For the first few weeks, there wasn’t all that much to do for the puppies besides enjoy them. When it was time for the pups to be weaned from the moms (aka the milk machines), they were combined into a SuperGroup and both moms were moved back to the dog yard. This physical separation took some adjustment for Squan, who was an incredibly doting **ahem cough cough neurotic cough** mother and mourned for a few days with some miserably sad-sounding hows. I’m happy to report her puppies couldn’t have cared less, and dove into bullying their new-found tiny cousins. Clipper (the yellow-lab looking pup) was, without a doubt, the most giant sled dog puppy who ever lived. Nearly twice the size of every other pup, he would plow through the pack like a bowling ball to candlepins. It was around this time I started calling the two litters the sharks and the monsters, as their enthusiasm outstripped their bodily control and they began to principally investigate the world teeth-first.

Going into the SuperGroup pen was taking your life into your hands. Check for any unsecured accessories or gear, hide zippers and shoelaces, tuck in your hair to your hood–anything projecting was a weak point. Have you really lived until you’ve removed a dead and partially dismembered vole from the mouths of mouthy, excited pups, all teeth and elbows and floppy flailing joints and limbs? Yes, the answer is probably yes and you shouldn’t seek this experience out, but as dedicated Kennel Auntie, you will roll up your sleeves and do what needs to be done. As they got bigger, balance and stance also started to be a factor: wide plant of the feet, slight bend in the knee, and brace for impact on approach. 3 pups could nearly take me out if the enthusiasm level was there (it was always there).

Three Chaos steps of puppy walks

A highlight for the SuperGroup was getting to go on walks out of the pen, either up the trail or up the hill through the apple orchard field. It really wasn’t that tricky to walk eight puppies, there are surprisingly only three specific parts of a puppy walk that are chaotic:

Chaos Part 1: Releasing the Hounds.

Chaos Part 2: The Entire Walk; also known as ‘Obsessively counting to 8’.

Chaos Part 3: Recapturing the Chaos Vectors. I may have lost Swarm for 120 seconds once. Or twice. Who’s counting, really?

It became even tougher to recapture them when as they grew. At first, I would set up a gate to block the dog yard off so the pups couldn’t enter. Once they were big enough, the pups were allowed to go into the dog yard and intermingle with their future teammates. To a puppy, there is absolutely nothing cooler than playing with the big dogs. I had to physically extract a few of the pups from underneath their larger playmates and carry back to the pen, every dang time. Mattock was a particularly enraptured–I compared her to a 16 year old sneaking out after curfew and getting into a bar with a fake ID. She thought she was the coolest. Little shit.

Wait…slow down.

Whether their obsession with ‘the big kids’ is nature or nurture, it serves them well. Sled puppies learn to be sled dogs through observation. From living in the dog yard to running on harness, the eight awkward tweens were already picking up life skills that will serve them through their whole careers. Seeing them out there, half-grown, half-formed, still figuring it all out…gave me a pang of preemptive nostalgia. ‘No, little puppies, you’re already growing up way too fast. Don’t accelerate it!’

It was endlessly entertaining to sit outside on the roof of a doghouse in their pen, just observing. Who had learned to climb that ramp when they couldn’t the week before, who was leading the group rough-house, who was feeling emo and pensive in the corner (BUSTER), who wanted a little extra love that day, who was jealous of the one getting a little extra love that day (EVERYONE). Puppies became not an abstraction, but a collection of beloved little beings, who sometimes needed encouragement, attention, and most of all patience, to grow and develop into something astonishing: themselves.

I counted down the few remaining weeks I had to watch them grow and learn. My initially-inadvertent “Take a Selfie with Mattock Every Week” project formalized and continued, getting more slapstick each week as I could barely lift her and she couldn’t hold still for more than 0.02 milliseconds.

The signs of fall piled up, as the leaves started changing and the mushing gear came out of storage. I loved observing their pack dynamics as their place amongst their peers solidified and as they prepared to graduate from puppydom, I began to grant them their Graduation Senior Superlatives.

Puppy Senior Superlatives

Buster‘s came first–his annoyance with his boisterous peer group was boiling over and he would get so annoyed when the thundering hoard interrupted his brief moments of solitude. He won “Most Excited to be Tether Trained so He Can Finally Have Some Goddamned Peace”. He tether-trained first and enjoyed every second of it.

Bumpus was dubbed “Most Unstoppable Force”- like an undirected missile, always plowing into things and nearly knocking me over. Bumpus was the first male to overtake Clipper in the category of ‘giant sled teen’, weighing in at 54lbs at only 6 months.

Mr. Zebra, named after a Tori Amos song, was christened “Most Likely to Break Hearts”. A gentle and caring soul, Mr. Zebra was always first to check in on his siblings, whether they were calling for help, attention, or reinforcements for an ambush. While he was around the whole summer with me, Mister Zebra is the only pup who did not stay at Shady Pines. He’s now off in a new home, assuredly breaking hearts wherever he goes.

Slayer: I toyed around with several monikers for Slayer, But kept coming back to “Most Likely to Become President”. I ultimately concluded that one could only ignore her star power and raw potential at their own peril. Slayer was my other favorite puppy, due to her endlessly inquisitive and fearless nature. She was always observing me when I was doing chores around the yard, sitting along the fence-line staring as her siblings and cousins tumbled and played behind her. She’s going places.

Swarm: “Most Likely to Never Be Heard From Again”. Also, most likely to skip the graduation ceremony. Swarm repeatedly ducked me on walks, and was usually the last one to come running out of the bushes, always a few seconds longer than my heart would have preferred. Even my camera roll is largely bereft of Storm pics, she never stuck around long enough to be captured in arms or on film (this puppy pic below is Sally’s).

Purlin: most ‘just happy to be invited’. Purlin is the easiest, happiest, go-along-with-the-flow-iest boy to ever live. He’s a delight in a dog suit.

Clipper: “Most Likely to Succeed”. From world’s biggest sled pup to world’s first Alaskan Labrador, Clipper is breaking glass ceilings with every wrinkly, wronkly bounding leap. Clipper is my mom’s favorite–Ironically, because she saw the 1-day-old clipper picture and was worried he’s been abandoned by his mother (hah!) and was too small and hungry (HAH!!!!). An absolute giant, Clipper was 99.9999th percentile at every puppy size milestone. He ultimately let everyone else catch up, which is probably for the best. If he’d kept growing proportionately, he’d be a 90lb sled dog.

Mattock: in stark contrast to her brother Clipper, Mattock won “Most Likely to Get Arrested”. You may not have been able to tell from this narrative (you could very clearly tell, I know), but Mattock is one of my favorites*. Fittingly, shortly after my weekly visits ended, Mattock managed to break her own leg in a freak accident and had to spend 8 weeks on house arrest…er… house rest. She’s made a full recovery now and still is on track to be a sled dog if she wants to.

*That’s why I stole her**.

A Reminder to Say ‘Yes’

In Mid-September, I said my ‘goodbye for now’s to the puppy SuperGroup. A few short weeks later, they were tether trained and added to the main dog yard–their tween puppy dreams coming true. Just a few weeks ago, six of them had their first runs in harness, and in snow with a sled, no less! They’ve had so many firsts in their short lives, and are set to have so many more firsts and adventures.

They also gave me a lot of firsts, many of them more enjoyable than extracting that dead vole. My anxiety-prone, ‘control everything’ brain got to let go and open the pen for eight vectors of chaos to take off in every direction…and we all survived. It quickly became something to look forward to!* (* I can say this now that I successfully kept them all found and undamaged).

Most of the firsts can be grouped under the development arc of puppydom. Getting to experience their growth and development from literally one day old through their early lives, was a unique kind of first for me. It ultimately changed my opinions on puppies… somewhat. I don’t necessarily feel the need to get a puppy for myself, but I can much better appreciate the bond that people have with dogs that they’ve had and raised since birth: from all those little moments, watching and helping them find themselves. I know I will feel an extra connection to those pups as I see them go off and do great things with their lives, and I was only around part-time through their childhood. That connection, as well as that new insight, are both unexpected gifts that I got from my Sled Dog Auntie Summer. Gifts I couldn’t have possibly anticipated as I made my mental pros and cons list in my yurt back in February. That’s a pretty good reminder that saying “Yes” to opportunity can enrich your experience in unexpected ways. It certainly did for me.

And you haven’t even met the adult Sled Dogs yet.