Accidental Dog
And the book he inspired
My novel Wolf, Moon, Dog launches today in the US, thanks to the lovely folks at Pegasus Books. To celebrate the day I want to tell you about the dog who inspired the book. His name is Sam, and he was never meant to be.
After our previous dog Boo died, I told myself, and my wife Sharon, that was it—no more dogs. I didn’t want that heartache of loss again. But after a year I realized how much I missed having that reassuring canine presence at my side. I caved in, and we went looking for a dog. We heard about a nearby breeder of Border Collies who had a litter of puppies up for sale, so we went to meet them. The thing was, the puppies were not purebred. One of the male breeding collies, the dashing Whip, had somehow pulled off a brief, unplanned dalliance with Lacey, the family’s pet Shih Tzu. The result was Sam and his siblings.
Yes, you’re right, Shih Tzu and Border Collie is an improbable combination of two very different ideas of what a dog should be. Our joking name for this accidental “breed” is Shit Collie.
When we arrived at the breeder’s, one of the three bouncy, supercute puppies ran over to greet us. No surprise then that he was the one we brought home. We named him Sam, after Samwise Gamgee. One day not long after, while playing with Sam in the yard, I thought how strange and miraculous it was that this carefree little goofball was descended from the badass wolves of the Ice Age. The little bulb in my writer brain flicked on, and the novel Wolf, Moon, Dog was the eventual result. Just like Sam, then, the book was the result of an unlikely connection. I’d never written about dogs before, even though they’d been part of my life for many years. I’d had no plans to write about dogs. But once I started to weave a playful fable about an Ice Age wolf named Wolf who becomes the very first Dog, I knew I’d found a happy confluence between two things I love.
And so I really wanted this book to be a special treat for two groups of people: book lovers and dog lovers, and especially for those of us who are both.
The original publisher of the novel, Random House Canada, wanted that, too, and so they went above and beyond to make sure the physical book itself featured elements that dog people would enjoy, including the flipbook image at the bottom of the pages, the chapter that’s nothing but pawprints, the text set in New Baskerville font (as in “Hound of the”) and all the other little touches meant to delight readers. I’m very happy that Pegasus chose to keep all of these witty design elements so that American readers can enjoy them, too.
The novel begins in the long ago Ice Age I tried to imagine while playing with Sam that day. Here’s a taste.
…
The pack raced across the frozen lake in the moonlight. They were following no scent, chasing no prey. They ran because it was a night of frost and stars and the snow was thick and powdery and they were together.
Wolf stopped in his tracks.
His eyes had caught something on the far shore, among the dark pines. A bright flickering, as if the sun had risen too early and was hiding in the forest, unwilling to reveal itself.
When the rest of the pack noticed Wolf was no longer with them, they circled and trottedback to where he stood gazing.
What in World is that? Alpha asked as she came up beside Wolf. Alpha was their leader, thewisest and bravest among them, and Wolf was just Wolf. As the youngest and least of the adults he had no other name.
I’m not sure, Wolf said. I thought it was the sun.
Alpha’s soft fur brushed ever so lightly against his, and Wolf felt his heart glow. She wasquick and strong, and her coat was nearly all white, like the Great Mother wolf who lived in the moon. Alpha had led them wellthrough the difficult days after her mate died in a fight with a cave bear over an aurochs carcass.It was only thanks to her that they had survived and stayed together. Wolf would do anything for her.
Wrong time, said Alpha. And the wrong place, for that matter. The sun doesn’t hang around in the forest.
At that moment their noses caught the scent of burning wood. This was not the sun. This was something stranger. Trees only burned when lightning struck them in the heat of summer. They didn’t burn in winter when snow was thick on the hide of World.
Quick shadows danced across the flickering brightness.
The fur rose on the back of Wolf’s neck. There are animals in the fire, he said.
He ran through his inner checklist of hunters and hunted. Cave bear, brown bear, otherwolf, big cat, smaller but still scary cat, lynx, wolverine, fucking hyena. Deer, elk, bison, aurochs, horse, ibex, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth. Did any of them live in fire? No. Nothing that was alive lived in fire.
Alpha said, This isn’t World but something else. It’s not for us. Let’s go.
She bounded off and the pack fell in behind her.
Wolf watched a moment longer, then he tore himself away and ran after them.
…
Spring returned, soggy and blustery, leaving its muddy paw tracks on the clean white snow, which shrivelled and sank and disappeared. The low places filled with water and then clouds of mosquitoes.
Alpha’s mate had died before the pair could make the spring’s new litter of pups, and she had yet to choose a new mate. The beta male seemed the obvious choice, given his size and vigour in the hunt, but for reasons she kept to herself Alpha hadn’t let him step into that role. Whenever he made advances she warned him away with snapping fangs. As for the other males, they didn’t dare betray an interest in mating with her. With this lingering state of uncertainty about the pack’s future, it was left to the beta male and female to deliver, and they got to work on it. One morning the beta female came out of her den under a ledge at the far end of the cave followed by six fluffy, toddling wolf pups who blinked in the dazzling new light of World.
Something was wrong with beta female, though. She was distracted and irritable, sometimes snapping at her pups as they nursed, sometimes batting them away. Eventually she crawled off alone into a hollow she scraped among some thorn bushes. They heard her writhing and whimpering as if there were a fire burning her from the inside. Any wolf who tried to approach received a growled warning.
One morning they heard nothing at all from the hollow. The beta female’s mate ventured in and found her dead.
From then on it fell mostly to Wolf, as the least of the adults, to keep a watchful eye on the pups while the others hunted. The pack ranged far and wide through the hills and narrow valleys, across the greatness of World, to find food for the hungry new mouths. For his part Wolf kept the pups out of trouble, while showing them what they would need to know to become hunters themselves. He taught them stalking games and wrestling games, and how to play tug-of-war with sticks and bones—all the skills they would one day depend on for their lives.
At last the pack wandered back to the dark lake nestled in the hills, where the prey herds had often been found in the past. Another wolf pack lived here too, one that they sometimes fraternized with and sometimes fought.
There were no herds. There were no other wolves. Instead there was a new animal.
It was the creature they had seen in the fire.
The new animals had established themselves not far from the water, on a rise above the pines and near a swift-running creek, with a view all around.
They were busy animals. And in odd ways clever, too.
They had constructed several small caves out of branches and prey skins and went in and out of them several times a day. The little caves were also where they slept at night.
And they kept fire, penned in a ring of small rocks. It leapt and smoked as all fire did, but it wasn’t allowed to race out hungrily to eat World. It stayed submissively in its ring, warming the strange new animals and giving them light in the dark hours.
The new animals had done the unthinkable. They had made fire a member of their pack.
…
The new animals ate meat.
They ate berries and roots, too. Things the wolves ate only when there was nothing else available. But mostly they ate meat.
It was another reason they kept the fire. They burned the meat over the flames before they ate it. Despite this bizarre custom, the meat still smelled wonderful.
They’re our competition now, Alpha said one wet and windy spring evening as the pack sat on a grassy hillside not far from the place where the new animals lived, watching them burn meat on their small, obedient fire.
Competition, scoffed Beta. Look at them. They can’t run worth a damn. When they spot one of us they flock together and make all that jabber, like panicked ducks. They’re terrified of us.
Since his own mate had died, Beta had been making it clearer than ever that he was after the top job. He’d been standing up to Alpha, taking the lead on minor matters without permission, defying her in small ways that weren’t quite enough to get him driven out or killed. It was plain to everyone that Beta was destined to become the new top male, but Alpha hadn’t mated with him yet. The one time he tried mounting her she sent him packing with his tail between his legs. He’d been so humiliated he’d taken it out on Wolf, chasing him out of camp and giving him a few painful nips on the flanks for good measure. It was his right as senior male, but Wolf knew that with Beta this was more than pack tradition at work. Wolf was no match in strength for the bigger male, but he was better at noticing the unusual and at puzzling things out. Beta hated him for that.
I don’t see the threat, Beta went on. They’re just a new kind of prey we haven’t figured out how to hunt yet, that’s all.
They kill what we kill, Wolf said from where he lay, with pups crawling all over him and nipping at his ears. On rare occasions, usually when his betters missed the point, he dared to speak out of turn.
The rest of the pack stared at him.
They eat what we eat, he added.
So what? Beta snarled, baring his teeth at Wolf. There’s plenty of food to go around.
For now, Alpha said.
Image ID: 1) A photo of Sam at the dog park 2) the front cover of Wolf, Moon, Dog