CHAPTER 24

Special Delivery

If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world ablaze!

ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA

THE TEXT MESSAGE FROM LU CAME RIGHT ON TIME, EXACTLY SIXTY-TWO days after Daisy and Patriot got to spend some quality time together at Gracie-the-dog-breeder’s house in Connecticut.

“Daisy’s delivering,” Lu’s message said.

Lu had told me to expect Daisy’s litter sixty to sixty-three days into her pregnancy. And yes, Tuesday and I had been ticking off the days. In that litter, I hoped, would be Tuesday’s protégé and successor, my next service dog. To call this major would be a major understatement, given how much Tuesday has meant to me.

Hopes were super-high all around. Lu was excited. So was Dale, her husband, and PJ, their grandson. So was Gracie, who had been the first to suggest the Daisy−Patriot match and promised to check in frequently when the blessed day finally arrived. But no one was more excited than Tuesday and me. We both appreciated how much one puppy from this new litter could change our lives.

As these puppies were born, so too would our future be.

This was to be Daisy’s first litter. She’d been medically checked and declared fully ready to mate. Lu needs a steady stream of potential service dogs, and the Daisy−Patriot pairing had all the earmarks of potential success. “Both of them have excellent bloodlines,” Lu told me back in April as she and Gracie were making plans for the breeding rendezvous. “They’re both strong and smart and healthy.” Though this would be Daisy’s first go-round as parent; Patriot had been bred three and a half months earlier with Gucci, another of Lu’s golden retrievers. Six weeks in, the results of that coupling looked quite promising, everyone agreed. And besides all that, Lu reminded me of something else I already knew: “Daisy’s related to Tuesday.”

That last point, not surprisingly, was the one I found most persuasive, other than the fact that I fully trusted Lu. She’s a phenomenal trainer who understands the importance of starting with exceptional dogs then getting the best out of them with the most rigorous training she can dream up. If Lu said, “Daisy and Patriot,” then Daisy and Patriot it would be.

As many times as Lu had been through this, she had the birthing routine down cold. A big part of this, I would learn, involved not flipping out even when crises occur along the way. When the big day arrived, Dale shoved aside some of the furniture in the breakfast room, which was right off the kitchen of their two-story colonial house. He and PJ dragged in a large, square “whelping box,” four-feet-by-four-feet, designed to protect the puppies during the delivery, which could take hours or days, and in the period immediately afterward. No one knew yet how many puppies there could be, but it might be six or eight or ten or more, and all of them would need to stay comfortable and safe. The litter could also be smaller. But looking at Daisy’s belly, Lu felt confident the puppy total was more than two or three.

The box had three-inch rails around three of the sides, creating a little hideaway where the first puppies out could huddle when their mom decided to press her back against the box wall while giving birth. “We don’t want anyone getting crushed or smothered,” Lu explained. A smaller rail across the front would keep mom and babies from wandering around the rest of Dale and Lu’s house.

There was a thin pad on the box floor. “If I put a thick comforter down,” Lu explained, “the mom might not feel the puppies underneath her. The thin pad will absorb what it has to and be a whole lot safer for everyone.” I knew enough about human births to imagine that delivering this many puppies could not possibly be a tidy affair. “Of course, we’ll have to change that pad three or four times a day.”

Of course.

Despite her no-nonsense attitude about dog training, Lu, I discovered, also has an artistic side. She had decorated the walls of the whelping box with brightly striped nursery cloth with drawings of little animals. “I do that for my own pleasure,” she told me. “I’m sure it doesn’t matter one way or the other to the dogs.”

With the box in place and fully prepared, Lu was ready to go just as soon as Daisy was.

I wasn’t there for the birth, which started just before dinnertime on June 27 and went past dawn the next morning. But I pressed Lu for every last detail, so I kind of felt like I was there.

The first puppy popped out at 5 P.M., a precious, gurgling male with squinty eyes, the tiniest wisps of light-brown hair, and a body no bigger than Lu’s right hand. He greeted the world in what looked like a wobbly water balloon, really a thin membrane of placenta. The sack burst immediately, and the fluid leaked all over the pad in the whelping box.

First-time mom Daisy looked utterly stunned, as if she had no idea on earth what she had just done. Did she think she was pooping? Was she just feeling sick? Lu leaned toward the first theory, but who knows? Never having given birth before, Daisy certainly seemed to be having trouble grasping the basic concept of what was going on. She had a troubled look on her face that seemed to say, “Oh, my God, I’m in trouble now. I just messed up the house.”

Lu and Dale immediately launched their happy voices, hoping to reassure the startled new mother.

“Oh, look what you made!” Lu declared. “So beautiful!”

“You are such a good girl!” Dale said. “Yes, yes, yes.”

Even PJ joined in. “Look at the beautiful puppy!” he said.

It’s pretty much impossible not to be joyful when witnessing a birth.

All that delight and encouragement worked. The affirmations seemed to ease Daisy’s concerns. She didn’t yelp at all—just a little whimper and then a small coo as she glanced at her firstborn and then quickly turned her head away. Normally, dogs don’t make much noise while they are giving birth, something they’ve learned from their ancient ancestors. It’s biological. It’s for self-protection. A delivering animal who makes a racket in the wild is only calling attention to herself at a highly vulnerable time. She’d be easy prey and so would her offspring.

Lu watched and waited for Daisy to lick the newborn clean. But Daisy didn’t seem to know about that important step in the canine birth process. The little puppy was lying there right on the whelping pad, dripping with fluid and birth. Daisy just stared. After a couple of minutes of encouragement and waiting, Lu took a soft rag and wiped off the remaining birthing fluid. She watched as the puppy stretched his tiny legs and blinked hard, getting used to the unfamiliar light.

Usually, Lu tries not to touch the puppies too much in the first three or four days. Their nerve endings are just settling down, and it’s good for them to get used to connecting with their mother. That’s part of the bonding process. But Lu couldn’t leave the puppy dripping, and there were important things to do.

The first puppy looked healthy. His breathing was strong and steady. As Daisy instinctively concentrated on the birth of her next puppies, Lu got to work. The puppy’s weight was good, one pound, one ounce on Lu’s kitchen scale. His color was right, about halfway between medium gold and light brown. Lu wrapped a thin, red collar around the puppy’s tiny neck so she and everyone else would be able to tell this one apart from all the others that would be coming next. She had a bagful of collars in other bright colors—yellow, green, blue, orange, pink, and so on—enough for however many puppies the litter might comprise. As she placed the baby back in the box, Daisy looked like she was about to deliver puppy number two.

The fun had only begun. Daisy’s next two offspring, a male and female, arrived at fifteen-minute intervals. Lu gave the boy a blue collar. The girl got pink. Then, after a short break another boy eased out. He got a black collar. One by one, the mother and her babies huddled together in the whelping box—finding warmth, getting comfort, honoring their ancestral traditions as pack animals, not sure where else to go. There are few sights more precious than that, and the heap would soon get larger.

There was a two-hour break between numbers four and five and a three-hour break between five and six, though number seven came twenty minutes after that. The puppies all looked healthy. They all weighed within an ounce or so of one pound. Everything seemed right on target—except for Daisy’s initial clumsiness as a mom. As the puppies piled together in the whelping box, Lu was growing concerned about Daisy—what was it? Inexperience? Confusion? Standoffishness? “She’s not licking her babies,” Lu said to Dale.

Licking is important. It’s instinctive for most delivering animals. Besides cleaning the offspring, that close physical contact also stimulates the newborns to pee and poop. For the first few days, their muscles aren’t sufficiently developed to get things moving inside on their own. The muscles need that extra stimulation. Otherwise, things start backing up. Even in these earliest hours, Lu was noticing that the whelping pad didn’t need changing as often as she expected, and that was not a good sign.

Lu tried to show Daisy how to lick, demonstrating the action with her own tongue on her finger. Daisy seemed to catch on, but only a little and only temporarily. Daisy licked one of the puppies, then she stopped. She wasn’t much of a nurser, either. She would nurse a puppy for a few minutes, then she would stop. Lu was happy when Gracie arrived at 2 A.M. to have a look.

The women agreed that this was not a crisis yet, but that they should pay close attention. Even in the midst of birthing a litter, this was not usual. Maybe a little more human intervention would help.

By then, two more puppies had arrived, the final two, for a total of nine: six boys and three girls. And despite Daisy’s early adjustment issues, everyone really was looking good. The heap was now a full-fledged pile, and there was constant noise and movement inside the whelping box. Squeaking. Tumbling over each other. Purring and moaning and just incredible-looking cuteness. With Daisy lying down beside them, the ten of them really did look like a family. Or was it more of a football team all diving after a fumble? The ball had to be in there somewhere!

It had been a very long night. Everyone was excited but tired. Every two hours, Lu and Dale—with additional help from PJ and Gracie—gave each of the puppies a thorough ten-minute massage. It wasn’t exactly the equivalent of being licked by mama, but it did the trick of stimulating the little ones’ nerve endings to get things moving inside. With nine puppies at ten minutes each, this took a while. It didn’t leave much rest between the cycles. The humans took turns on massage duty and relieving each other for short naps. And slowly, even Daisy seemed to catch on. Her nursing picked up, and so did her licking. She seemed to finally be grasping that something very big had just occurred and she had a major role to play. Young, inexperienced Daisy, it seemed, was finally grasping the idea that she was a mom.

Things were looking up for almost everyone, human and canine, as the first twenty-four-hour cycle was completed and the second began. Then came the really tough news.

Lu had been keeping a special eye on one of the puppies, a female who had an orange collar. She looked fine—good weight, decent color, nice-enough coat. But the inside of her mouth, Lu noticed, felt a little chilly. In the whelping box scrum, she didn’t seem quite as active as some of the others. Lu made a point of taking some extra time with Orange Girl, cuddling her little body, checking her more frequently and giving her some extra belly rubs.

By 6 P.M., Orange Girl seemed more, not less, lethargic. She still didn’t feel warm enough. At 7:00, Lu was happy to see her lying on her mother’s belly. That would be good for both of them. But the puppy wasn’t nursing—just lying there. Lu checked on the litter at 9 P.M. and again at 10. Orange Girl was struggling. Everyone else was fine. That’s where things stood when Lu, who had hardly slept in thirty-six hours, finally went in for a post-midnight nap. Gracie said she’d keep a special eye on Orange Girl.

Gracie woke Lu at 3 A.M.

“She isn’t doing well,” Gracie said.

Lu got up immediately.

By that point, the puppy was hardly breathing. She seemed to be fading in and out of consciousness. She definitely wasn’t thriving like a second-day puppy should.

At 4:30 A.M., Orange Girl died in Lu’s loving hands, leaving her mother Daisy, her father Patriot, and eight brothers and sisters behind. She just didn’t have the strength to keep going.

This wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened. Lu had been through it before. But it never gets easier seeing a beautiful creature not make it. “Poor Orange Girl,” she told Dale. “She was just a little baby. She was born and lived for less than two days.”

Lu couldn’t help asking herself if there was something else she or anyone could have done, even though she knew the answer was no. Not all newborn puppies are meant to live. Darwin, Mother Nature, God—explain it however you want to. Lu didn’t have the answers. She just understood it’s the way things are.

“I don’t like it,” she reminded herself. “But we can’t always prevent it, no matter what we do. This is nature’s way—or God’s way—of protecting the species and helping to keep the breed strong.”

If a puppy is going to fade like that, it usually happens in the first ten days. But not always. One time, about four years earlier, one of Lu’s newborns lived for four weeks and then succumbed. That puppy had been the smallest of the litter. She never made the transition to eating from a bowl. For four long weeks, Lu had been worried while also learning to love the small dog. That was much harder than this time. It threw Lu into a genuine funk.

“What are you doing?” Dale asked her. “You know better than that.”

She did. Lu realized that she had to be strong. She’d done all she could, and there were so many other pups that needed her attention. She pulled herself together and learned a lesson from the experience.

With Orange Girl, she allowed herself a few minutes of genuine sadness. How could she not? Then she mostly let it go. She couldn’t afford any more than that, she told herself. The others puppies needed her. Daisy did too. She had to move on.

In those early hours before the sun rose, Lu went to the whelping box and gently lifted each puppy. One by one, this strong, experienced dog trainer held each baby retriever to her heart and whispered her love. She pulled each one to her cheek and pressed soft kisses the way only a mother can. Finally, she leaned down and, being careful not to wake Daisy, kissed the mother to them all. Lu then went back to her bedroom and exchanged tired and tender smiles with Dale.

There were eight darling pups in the room just off the kitchen. One day, she knew, she’d be sharing their love with eight wonderful people whose lives these beauties would almost certainly change for good.