My Life in Dog Years by Gary Paulsen Page A

go. I ran to help him, worried that the electricity would kill him. Though his eyes had rolled back, with only the white showing, he had the wire clamped in his teeth in a vise grip and was slashing his head back and forth.
    Just as I got there the wire snapped, disconnecting the circuit. Fred stood there, his hair still on end and his chest heaving. Thenhe spit the wire out, growled at it and walked away, still looking like a bottle-brush but with a great deal of dignity.
    In the great wire war, only I was the loser. Pig continued to eat well and stayed happy I reconnected the wire to hold him in.
    Fred did not want to do battle again and stopped visiting Pig. But one morning I looked into the garden and saw him walking casually through the tomato patch, picking and eating only the good, ripe, full tomatoes. Fred had won.

He did not
look
like a dog that ought to be named White Fang and come from a Jack London story. Indeed, he did not look like much of a dog at all. When I first saw Quincy he looked like a dust mop that had been dropped in grease and rolled in old coffee grounds.
    It was, in the long line of dogs that have come into my life, one of the few times I had misgivings about taking on a new dog.
    But sometimes joy comes in convoluted ways, and the way Quincy came to me was so complicated it didn’t seem possible.
    Briefly (as I pieced it together later):
    I had decided I could not live unless I ran the Iditarod. I lived in Minnesota and began acquiring sled dogs and training them for the run north. It seemed an impossible dream. I had no money, not even a vehicle, no dog team, no chance of getting to Alaska.
    At the same time somebody—either a fool or somebody truly evil and demented—left Quincy at the side of a freeway going into Anchorage, Alaska. Considering that I later found he had no car sense at all, it’s a miracle he wasn’t run down at once. A truck came along being driven by a dog musher. He saw Quincy and stopped and picked him up.
    Meanwhile the town of Bemidji, Minnesota—or a large portion of it—decided to help me run the Iditarod. They had potlucks and raffles, and many people sponsored me. One man gave me an old truck, another a battery. Yet another man gave me a tire. A woman stopped me on the street and handed me ten dollars. “For the dogs,” she said. “Spend it on the dogs.”
    In Alaska, Quincy was taken to the home of the dog musher. The musher lived well back into the bush—thirty miles from the nearest neighbor. Thirty miles of rivers, swamps, wolverines, wolves and black and brown bears. Quincy promptly ran off. He was approximately nine inches high at the shoulder, had four-inch legs and a long tail, and his whole body, including the tail, was covered with ratty, curly hair.
    In Bemidji, I was loaned and given dogs. One of them came to me by devious means.A family had a Siberian husky that their child loved, but the dog had killed just about every pet and squirrel, chipmunk and rabbit in the vicinity. The neighbors wanted the dog shot—several had threatened to shoot it themselves. The owner smuggled the dog to me to try on the team and told his child the dog had run off. The dog was a love and she could pull—or so I thought at the time—like a truck. I was glad to have her. (She was, incidentally, the only purebred dog—a registered Siberian husky—I had on the team. The man who came in dead last in the race had a team of purebred Siberian huskies.) I plugged her into the team and began training in earnest.
    At the same time, Quincy journeyed through thirty miles of wolf-, wolverine- and bear-infested wilderness on four-inch legs— it’s hard to believe he could even get through the swamp grass, let alone the forest and predators—and showed up on the doorstepof a single woman in the process of building a log cabin and living in the woods with her two children. The woman had no idea where Quincy had come from but she took him in and loved him, after a fashion.