OTR
Agnieszka Krakowska Blind Puppies Can Swim One September afternoon, the year I turned thirteen, I came home to find a one-year-old German shepherd tied to the leg of the piano in the living room. It turned out my dad went to the farmers’ market for a bushel of potatoes to feed us over the winter, and came home with an eighty pound guard dog instead. My mom was not impressed but my two younger sisters and I squealed with excitement. My dad had never been the cool, spontaneous type, but then he bought an awesome, giant dog, on a whim! It soon turned out the dog was not a fun purchase after all. My dad, true to character, was being practical—my parents were building a house for us to move into on a plot of land outside of town and the dog was meant to live at the construction site as an old-fashioned alarm system. The dog, who was a girl, came from a military base in town (the military only uses male dogs), equipped with an independent spirit and a set of functioning ovaries. We didn’t have dogs spayed or neutered twenty years ago in my small town in Poland, because that cost money, and besides, it was a high-falutin’ idea for fancy city folk. We kept her as she was and nearly every autumn, when in heat, she managed to run away for a few days and come back pregnant. Every year she had a litter of seven to eight puppies. Some of them we kept for ourselves and at one point we had three huge, gorgeous German shepherds and were famous for it across town. Some we sold or gave to friends. But according to my dad, the mother doesn’t have enough milk to successfully feed a litter that big. The smallest runts would be pushed out of the way by their stronger siblings and starve anyway, so the reasonable thing to do was to choose three of the healthiest-looking ones to keep and dispose of the rest. What do you do about a handful of extraneous puppies a few days old and still blind? You might think you can supplement them with cow’s milk and a baby bottle. Or you might give up, take them to the vet to be humanely put to sleep. But no, feeding three kids and a dog while also building a house and holding down a full-time job was enough to keep my dad busy. He was an architect/engineer and designed the house and did much of the construction 36 KRAKOWSKA