“You’re the alpha, Shep.” Blaze looked straight into his muzzle. “Never forget it.”
She sat up and stared out the window in the ceiling, up at the Silver Moon. “On the beast farm, there were strict rules about who could give commands. Each man to his dog, and one man to all the other men. One sun, two men had a disagreement. They gave conflicting signals to their dogs, and the stupid mutts drove two groups of stray cattle into one another. The herd stampeded, and the two dogs and one of the men were trampled. The man was healed. I never saw either of the dogs again.”
Blaze looked away, at the dark corner opposite Shep. “I lost a good friend that sun.”
Shep wasn’t sure why she was telling him about this. “Was he your mate?” he asked, waving his tail in what he hoped was a sensitive and caring way.
“That’s not the point,” Blaze snapped, turning her muzzle to face Shep. A deep sadness was visible in her shining eyes. “Dogs are not meant to follow two masters. They need an alpha to guide them. Without that, we’re all as good as trampled.”
She looked fiercely into Shep’s muzzle, waiting for his reply.
“Callie and I are a good team,” Shep woofed, finally. “We’ve protected the pack for this many suns. We’ll all be okay.”
Blaze’s jaw was set, like she was about to argue, but then she flopped onto her chest and curled in her paws. “I only hope you’re right,” she snuffled.
The dogs assigned to the defense team rambled out of the boat and sat in the plaza. Shep watched them from the shade of a collapsed wall held up by a leafless palm tree. There were ten dogs assigned to the team, all chosen by Shep. They were the toughest of the pack, by the smell of them — some big, like Hulk, some small, like Daisy — but Shep had no idea if any of them knew the first thing about defending a den. He wasn’t quite sure himself what the job entailed.
Daisy strutted her way across the stone, lifting her paw pads high off the already steamy pavement. “So what’s — snort — the plan?” she yapped, collapsing into a sit with one hind leg splayed.
What is the plan, indeed, thought Shep.
Two big dogs — a stout black short-haired dog with red-brown markings Shep had only smelled the other sun and a sleek black and brown Doberman girldog Virgil liked, named Ripley — began to play with one another in the shade of the boat. Shep watched one bat at the other’s head, then tumble on the ground and start up play again. He thought of what he would do if he’d been playing with those dogs, how he would’ve reared for a better angle of attack, how a glancing swipe at a muzzle isn’t worth a ripped toy if it isn’t a feint toward a better hold on the scruff.
It was like Shep had uncovered a buried bag of kibble. These were just the kinds of tips these dogs needed to know. They all knew how to play, but now they needed to know how to turn play into defense.
“Dogs!” he barked, standing tall. “Come over here by this tree.”
Shep divided the dogs into pairs, matching each with a dog of similar size. The dogs loped into their assigned groups, then looked at Shep with vacant expressions or stared off over the canal. A strange bird with loud, whirly wings chopped through the air high overhead. It was the loudest thing Shep had heard since the storm, and he had to raise his bark over the sound until it flew away.
“We need to think of defense as play, but play with a bite,” Shep woofed.
“I haven’t smelled anything bigger than a rat in suns,” the black short-hair barked. “What do we need to defend this den from?”
Some of the others snorted and wagged their tails in agreement.
Another Rufus, Shep grumbled to himself. This pack needs another tail dragger like it needs a flea infestation.
“What’s your name?” Shep asked.
The black dog stood tall, feeling a little more sure of himself now that Shep was barking directly to him. “Panzer,” he woofed. “Anyway, I’m a rottweiler. What’s going to mess with me?”
“Well, Panzer, have you ever fought a rat?” Shep snapped. “What if one came into our den to scavenge our food? What would you do?”
Panzer sneered at Shep’s domineering tone. “I’d tear the thing’s tail off. I’m a trained guard dog.” He looked at Shep with a smug smirk on his jowls.
So this dog has some skills — I’ll let him think he’s got something over me. “Oh,” woofed Shep, feigning awe. “Would you be so kind as to show me?”
Panzer strutted forward, nose in the air and tail flat. Shep sank into a slight crouch. When Panzer was a stretch away, Shep lunged forward, hitting Panzer with his forepaws and knocking him onto his side.
“Hey!” yipped Panzer. “I wasn’t ready!”
“No dog or rat or flea who’s invading our den cares if you’re ready,” Shep growled, standing over the toppled Panzer. “A fight — I mean, a defense dog is ready every heartbeat of every sun.”
Panzer got to his paws and shook his fur. “That was a cheap bite,” he snarled. “If you’re just going to nose us around, I’m heading back into the den.”
Daisy gave Shep a concerned head tilt.
Shep lowered his stance and wagged his tail. “You’re right,” he woofed. “I’m sorry, Panzer.”
Daisy wagged her knot of a tail. “Let’s — snort — get this play-biting started!”
Panzer licked his jowls, as if thinking about whether to challenge Shep any further. “Apology accepted,” he grunted, finally.
Shep decided that maybe he would do better with some in-the-heartbeat instruction, as opposed to leading a general lesson. He told the pairs of dogs to play with each other.
“Just go with it,” he woofed.
Paulie the pitbull dove for Hulk’s scruff, latching on with a fierce grip of the jaws.
“Shep!” Hulk whimpered. “It hurts!”
Shep pounced on Paulie, knocking his hold.
“What?” Paulie whined, licking and smacking his jaws. “You said fight.”
“Play fight,” Shep woofed, panting with exasperation. “I know you’re an ex-fight dog, but don’t actually tear any dog’s ear off! For the love of treats, we’re all in the same pack.”
The dogs began playing, some more timidly than others, a mere paw slap here and there. Shep began to wonder if this training plan was going to work after all.
Shep trotted up to Bernie and a midsized girldog, who were just sitting looking at one another. “What’s wrong?” he woofed. “Why aren’t you playing?”
“The border collie keeps nipping at my paws,” Bernie grumbled. “I don’t like any dog touching my paws.”
“My name’s Jazz,” the girldog snapped. “And that’s how I play, dainty-paw.”
“Call me that again, fur-for-brains,” Bernie growled.
Shep stuck his snout between them. “Whoa,” he woofed. “Let’s just back away.”
Bernie and Jazz stepped back, lowering hackles and tails, and taking less hostile stances.
“Let’s smell if we can’t use this,” Shep woofed. “If rats were attacking, they’d probably go for your paws. What would be the best defense?” He lowered his snout to the stone and looked up at Bernie. “Come on,” Shep yipped. “Take a swipe at my snout.”
Bernie, confused, took a feeble swipe at Shep’s snout with his paw. Shep snapped at Bernie’s claws, careful not to land a tooth on his pads.
“Hey!” Bernie cried, jerking his paw away.
“I wasn’t going to bite you,” Shep woofed, “but that defense was terrible. You protected one paw by opening the other to attack. It would have been better to have come down with your fangs and attacked my head from above, away from my jaws. I couldn’t have defended myself from that without backing away from your paw and changing my head angle.”
Bernie raised his ears and tilted his head, impressed. “And if you were a rat, I could have grabbed you and tossed you away.”
“Exactly!” Shep barked. “That’s the kind of thinking we have to start doing. Team!” Shep howled. “Let’s all practice this move Jaz
z and Bernie worked out.”
The teams practiced over and over the paw defense, as the dogs called it, and by midsun, all were expert rat catchers. Virgil and Ripley even came up with the double-trouble paw defense, an attack from above with fangs, and from the side with hind claws. Shep felt like he was finally on the right scent with training the team.
The pavement was getting unbearably hot, so Shep brought the team into the shade of the crushed floor where at least the sun wasn’t burning their fur. They woofed about the practical aspects of defense — setting up watches, how to protect the two entrances — then Shep had the teams nose some of the more dangerous scraps of wreckage away from the door holes. As Shep was helping to dig a pile of sticks out from under a plastic cushion, Oscar came wriggling out from the main den.
“Watch it, pup!” Shep woofed. “We’re moving sharp stuff. I don’t want to have to send Boji another injured paw to lick.”
Oscar dropped his snout and sniffed at the floor, eyes scouring the surface in front of his paws, so that he walked right into Shep’s hind leg.
“Sorry!” he yipped. “But I was careful, just like you said!”
Shep panted lightly. “Careful of one danger, but you walked right into another. What if I’d been an enemy intruder?”
“But you’ll never let an enemy get into the den, Shep,” Oscar woofed, tail swinging. “You’re my Great Wolf! Defender of the weak dog! Protector of the pups!” He leapt in little circles, yipping and growling and tackling imaginary foes.
Shep grinned at the pup’s display. “All right,” he woofed. “What’s got you scampering out of the den?”
“Some of the other pups saw the defense team fighting. I was wondering if we could all come out and watch?”
Shep glanced around the crushed floor. They were almost done clearing the entries and arranging the rubble. “Sure,” he barked. “I’ll take the team out and work on some real fight skills.”
“Ha-roo!” Oscar howled. “I have to tell every pup!” He scrambled back into the main den. Just as he was about to disappear through the hole, he looked over his tail. “Did you see, Shep?” he yipped. “I was looking at my paws and in front of me that time!”
Shep barked that he’d done a great job, then bayed for the defense team to move out to the street again. The sun was low, as it was nearly sunset, and the surrounding buildings shaded the plaza.
They divided into pairs again and Shep began barking about how to defend against a dog attack.
“The key is to keep your stance loose,” Shep woofed, bouncing lightly on his paws. He glanced at the small pack of pups huddled in the shadows near the crushed floor and gave Oscar a quick flick of the muzzle. The pup nearly knocked himself over, his tail was wagging so hard.
Shep continued, “And to use any attack to your advantage by mastering the roll.” He fell onto his side, rolled, and sprang back onto his paws.
Several of the defense dogs tilted their heads in confusion. Shep rolled again, slower.
“Do you tuck your paws before or after you hit the street?” whined Ripley.
“Just roll, like this,” Paulie barked.
He rolled masterfully, as did Panzer — but they were both trained fight dogs. A fight dog couldn’t survive without knowing how to roll. The others simply flopped onto their sides, then scrambled to get back onto their paws. There was no rolling involved.
“No!” barked Shep. “Don’t push against the street with your paws, Mooch. Throw them over your belly.” Mooch was gigantic, and when she fell over, Shep felt the vibration in his paws.
The team looked like a bunch of beetles flipped onto their shells. Paulie tried to explain how to roll, but he didn’t have the patience for every dog’s clumsiness. His instruction degraded into a series of nasty barks.
Shep heard the pups panting and saw them tumbling over one another like Balls in a basket. What am I doing wrong that I can’t get these big dogs to do what they naturally did as pups?
The defense team just could not get the concept of the roll. Shep tried demonstrating the move in slow-motion again and explaining how he used his muscles: Nothing worked. Waffle, the brown and white spotted mutt, could roll like a Ball when lying down, but fell like a stone when he tried to do it starting on all fours. Most of the team, though, couldn’t have rolled in any position for all the cheese in a cold box.
In his frustration, Shep thought of Zeus, of how he’d known all of these moves without thinking, as instinctive to him as panting. Shep imagined training these dogs with Zeus. Zeus would have known just what to bark to get a pant out of the pack. Zeus would have made this fun.
Of course, Shep reminded himself, that was the old Zeus. That dog had become the wild Zeus, the dog who tried to kill him.
As the sky turned from orange to deep blue, Shep called off the practice. He could smell that the team was in a foul mood — no dog liked feeling like a failure.
“Great work, team,” he woofed, a happy grin on his jowls and a light wag in his tail. No dog responded; not a single tail wagged back.
Mooch and Panzer offered to take first watch. Shep told Virgil to dismiss the rest of the team.
“Excellent work,” Virgil woofed, as he loped back into the main den at Shep’s flank.
“What do you mean?” groaned Shep. “Every dog was ready to scratch my fur off after that terrible practice.”
“Let them whine,” woofed Virgil. “They’ll be thanking you when they can roll away from an attack. You came up with a good method. That’s why you’re the alpha.” Virgil trotted off, sniffing around the main den, barking at any dog who was taking up too much space.
The alpha. The words slipped off Shep’s coat like raindrops. His idea had worked because he hadn’t tried to be the alpha; he’d let the whole team work on the defense tactics together. But then, Shep wondered, could that also be a way of leading the dogs? Was sharing power one way of being an alpha? Blaze would have barked absolutely not, that this was exactly the kind of thinking that got her friends killed. But that was a human-dog, maybe a human-dog-beast, problem. Maybe when it was just dogs, it was better to work as a team. It certainly smelled better than trying to bark orders to every dog.
Honey trotted straight up to Shep with Fuzz perched, as usual, on her back.
“We had such a great sun!” she woofed. “Five new rescues! I’m sorry to report that we haven’t had much luck getting any other species to join us, so it’s just dogs, but Fuzz and I will keep trying! Fuzz nearly convinced this very poofy white cat named Ares, but he hissed something so rude that Fuzz wouldn’t even translate it for me. I almost got a pet hamster to come with us, but she seemed to misunderstand Fuzz’s greeting and ran into a hole in the wall.”
Honey waved her tail, waiting for Shep to praise her efforts. Shep wasn’t sure exactly what to bark. He didn’t want to go back on his word to her, but he was also immensely grateful that no other cats or — Great Wolf forbid — hamsters accepted her offer of protection.
“Great job,” he woofed, finally. “I’m sure you’ll have better luck next sun.”
“Me, too!” Honey barked. “Fuzz and I are going to spend all night working on our pitch.”
Fuzz didn’t say anything, but as Honey turned, he stared at Shep with his strange, green cat-eyes, boring into Shep’s fur like a tick. Shep had a feeling Fuzz knew that he had no interest in any more cats or rats joining the pack. Shep just hoped Fuzz had the decency not to share this insight with Honey.
Honey was a perfect example of how forcing an idea down every dog’s throat came back to bite you in the tail. Shep should have let every dog vote on Fuzz joining the pack. Then the decision wouldn’t rest entirely on Shep’s back. Note to self, Shep mused, if every dog votes for it, no dog can blame the alpha!
With each sun’s practice, the defense team improved. On the third sun, Shep divided the group into two teams and had them take turns either defending the den’s two entrances or attacking them.
Shep watched t
he exercises from the shade of an overhang. “That’s it, Waffle!” he cried. “Roll, then kick with your hind legs.” Waffle had Ripley in a good scruff hold, and managed to keep her from sneaking up on him over the steering counter.
Snoop stuck his skinny head out of the stairwell hole and nearly got his nose bitten off by Panzer.
“Agh! Shep!” he yelped, dodging Panzer’s fangs. “Higgins-sent-me-to-get-you-there’s-trouble-with-the-kibble-and —”
“Shut your snout!” Shep howled. He scrambled over to Snoop. “Never woof that there’s a kibble problem,” he snuffled. “Do you want to cause a frenzy?”
Snoop cowered. “Sorry-Shep-I-just-woofed-what-Higgins-said-to-bark.”
Shep sighed. Snoop wasn’t exactly the sharpest tooth in the jaw, though he always meant well. “Just tell me what the problem is,” Shep woofed.
Snoop explained that Higgins had noticed a few missing kibbles from the pile. When he investigated further, he found that the window in the floor had cracked under the weight of the food. Some bites had fallen under the boat and attracted rats.
“He-thought-maybe-the-defense-team-could-get-the-rats?” Snoop yipped. “The-hunters-are-all-out-hunting.”
“I couldn’t have planned a better first test for the team,” Shep barked.
Shep called the defense dogs together. Virgil and Ripley were left to guard the crushed floor, while the rest all shuffled down the stairwell to the kibble room.
Higgins was practically frothing with worry when the team arrived. “What took you so long?” he snapped. “The nasty squeakers have been trying to creep out of their hole, but I’ve whapped them back, the scoundrels!”
Higgins and Snoop had rolled the food away from the window. The hole in the window was much too small for the majority of the team to get more than a paw or snout through. Even Daisy would have trouble jamming her fat neck through the hole.
“We’re all too big,” Shep grumbled. “I think we have to wait for the hunting teams to return. Maybe Callie and some of her small hunters could fit down there.”