Schatzie's Puppies

When I reached the tender age of nineteen I experienced the miracle of birth for the first time. I suppose I could say that it was a beautiful and moving experience, but I’d only be telling half the truth. It was hardly beautiful but it was moving…mainly because I had to chase my dog, Schatzie, all around the house.

My family has always had dogs; from a Schnauzer named Schlitzie when I was born to our current German Shepherds, Boni and Maka, I cannot remember ever not having at least one furry, four-legged family member. We even bred our Cocker Spaniels when I was a child. So how I managed to survive until I was nineteen without actually seeing puppies being born I do not know, but am extremely grateful for. There are some lies people tell that children just should not learn the truth about too soon; and that birth is a “beautiful” and “miraculous” event definitely makes my Top Ten List of “Lies My Parents Told Me”, right up there with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

Schatzie was a great dog, especially considering that my mom had bought her from a puppy mill in Missouri. She was a strange looking German Shepherd; long-haired, black and cream and fluffy. She was definitely a fluffy puppy. She outgrew the fluffy stage but she never did look like a stereotypical black-and-tan German Shepherd. If I hadn’t seen her AKC papers myself when we bought her I would have sworn that there was no way she could have been a purebred dog. Now, years later, I have trouble looking at “Rin-Tin-Tin” type Shepherds and actually calling them “German Shepherds” because that look is more typical of the American breeding than the original Alsatian standards from Germany.

But that’s neither here nor there. My mom had bought the puppy for her boyfriend, Jim, who was a pilot in the Air Force. They’d been dating since my parents had separated when I was not quite five and I found him cold, domineering and unwilling to accept that anyone had a right to opinions other than his. He was also notoriously tight with his money, but perfectly happy to spend my Mom’s or to bitch at her on how she spent it.

He’d gotten a German Shepherd for free from a breeder who said her ears were too big…and she really did have the biggest ears I’ve ever seen on a Shepherd! He left Kizzie with my mom when he’d been sent to Costa Rica on a year-long TDY assignment. Mom got quite attached to Kizz and didn’t want to give her back to Jim. She thought that if she gave Jim another puppy he’d give her Kizzie; seemed like a fair trade to her. Kizzie had only been about six months old when Jim had to leave the country and he didn’t really know her. Mom thought he’d rather raise his own puppy into adulthood. Unfortunately he took one look at the fuzzball my mom brought home and wanted nothing to do with her.

His loss, because Schatzie was the most remarkable dog: sweet, even-tempered and happiest when with her people. She was so attached to my mom that if mom left her alone, she wouldn’t eat. My mom’s roommate, Danny, had actually given mom an airline ticket for Schatzie my senior year at Christmas when we went to visit my grandparents because he was afraid Schatzie would starve to death. And then Schatzie was so nervous after the plane ride that Mom had to feed her with a spoon. Plus, she gave us Maka, who gave us Blue, who was, without question, the dog who loved us most. We called him the “American Express Dog”…couldn’t leave the room without him.

But I digress again. My mom bred Schatzie in the late summer and we were expecting Christmas puppies. I was actually away at college and I missed seeing Schatzie gradually swell up. Each time I came home for a visit she’d be waddling her way through her pregnancy, getting really big. I mean, she was huge. Despite having bred dogs before my mom was concerned that Schatzie have a special diet, suitable for a pregnant dog, and commercial dog food just wasn’t up to her standards. We had a friend who ran sheep and cattle on his farm about an hour from us and he gave us hearts, livers and kidneys, which we fed to Schatzie. I’m not sure it’s a diet I’d want if pregnant, but she seemed to thrive well enough on it.

As I said, I was in college at Cal State Fresno, and I’d only been home for a day or two on Christmas break when my mom decided to work some over time. Her company worked twelve-hour shifts, from six in the morning to six at night or the reverse. At the time she was in Chem Process, but she was going in to work QA on the night shift. It made her fifth night in a row, though. She felt comfortable doing this because Jim, a self-professed know-it-all about dogs, told her at lunch that day that Schatzie was still days away from going into labor.

I should point out here that I disagreed with him. Schatzie had woken me up that morning pawing around in the whelping box we’d built for her. She stepped in, turned around in a few circles, pawed the blankets into a pile in the corner and then stepped out, presumably to survey her handy work. Evidently her efforts didn’t please her because she repeated this process for about two hours or so. And, because my mom was at work that night and Schatzie was doing all of this around three a.m., I was the only witness.

But, Jim knowing everything, assured my mom that I couldn’t possibly be right and then left to go home. I begged my mom. I practically got down on my knees trying to convince her not to go. I almost resorted to throwing myself on her to keep her from leaving the house. Despite my best attempts she was out the door at a quarter to six with a kiss, a wave, an “I’ll call you” and the snick of the door behind her.

As soon as my mom left I corralled Schatzie into the bedroom. I didn’t trust her for a second and knew that if she weren’t confined I’d run the risk of having to pull puppies out from under the deck or some other equally hard to reach place. This was before we’d put a doggie-door in and every time Schatzie went out, we’d go with her, or at least stand in the door waiting for her. And for about a week before she had the puppies, she’d been trying to wriggle under our redwood deck and despite our careful monitoring of her, she’d dug a sizeable hole underneath it. I had visions of taking an axe to the redwood deck to get at Schatzie and her puppies. We had a very small axe we used to split wood for the woodstove but it was hardly likely to be an effective weapon against the deck!

The Mom-to-Be wasn’t happy about being cooped up under my watchful eye. She prowled around the room, and wedged herself behind my mom’s Cal-king waterbed. She only stayed for a minute and as soon as she backed out of her spot I blocked off access with the laundry hamper. I closed the bathroom door and the door to the walk-in closet, figuring if there were no hidden spots she’d accept her lot and use the whelping box.

Because I am of a practical nature when I want to be, and because I didn’t trust that Schatzie would actually stay in the box, I began spreading newspaper all over the bedroom floor. I actually did it because I had a horror of getting up in the middle of the night and stepping in a pool of birth gunk – fluid, blood and who knew what. I also had the foresight to bring with me the one book in the house that said anything about delivering puppies and flipped through the pages while I waited for something to happen. According to the book (which I tossed in the woodstove the next day as a useless reference on delivering puppies!) I could expect Schatzie to settle down into her box as soon as she felt her first contraction. Nature would kick in and she’d do all the work. My role would be to count noses and praise her hard work.

Evidently Schatzie hadn’t bothered to read the book because around seven o’clock she began whining and pawing at the door. I crackled my way across the newspaper to her side, patting her. As soon as I put my hand on her distended belly I could feel the rippling of her muscles and I knew that she was in labor. I picked up her tail, not knowing what I was looking for, but looking anyway. All I could really tell was that yes, she was definitely a female dog!

I tried to coax Schatzie into the whelping box. When that failed, I tried to drag her into it. She was having none of it. I tried to cry her into the box, sobbing and pleading and trying to explain to her that she would be much better off having her babies in the nice box we’d built for her.

For more than half an hour I struggled to get her into that stupid box until I finally picked her front feet up and put them inside the box and then carefully picked up the back end and swung it in. She glared at me but didn’t snap or growl; probably because she was too busy with her own pain. I lifted her tail a second time. I still didn’t know what I was looking for but I figured since the puppies were going to come from that general direction I ought to just keep an eye out that way.

Much to my surprise there was a change. Instead of just the normal parts there was a shiny black bulge just beginning to show. It hung there, stretching the small opening of her vulva, pulsing and contracting as she tried to expel it. It had discolored the cream-colored hair around her tail, turning it green, matted and slimy looking. I could tell that Schatzie was having problems; she was practically screaming in doggy yelps. I began sobbing harder, convinced that she was going to die and that my mother would blame me and all because I had absolutely no idea what to do to help ease that black bulge out. I considered running for the Vaseline, pushing the sac back a bit and lubricating that poor, tortured flesh, but didn’t know if that would do more harm than good, so I did nothing.

Schatzie was standing and trying to get out of the whelping box. I suspect that she was trying to run away from the pain she was experiencing. While I couldn’t blame her, I still struggled to hold her in the box while trying to hold her tail up and watch the progress of things. I had absolutely no doubt that there wasn’t anything I could do but I figured if she was going to die, I was going to give my mom a blow-by-blow analysis of what a mistake she’d made leaving me, who had zero experience in delivering puppies, home alone.

There I was, crying and sobbing and trying to talk Schatzie through a process I had no clue about. There she was, crying and yelping and going through a process she had no clue about. We were a pretty pathetic pair.

As I was fighting with Schatzie to stay in her box and push the puppy out the phone rang. I figured it was my mom but I couldn’t exactly spare any effort to get up, go to the living room and talk to her. The closed bedroom door muted the shrill bells and I counted off five of them before the answering machine picked up. I took one hand of the dog to open the door so I could listen to my mother’s voice, vaguely making out my mom leaving a message, but her words were the least of my concerns because right at that moment Schatzie screamed, and I mean screamed and the black bulge slipped from under her tail to land with a splut on the blanket.

Schatzie didn’t so much as look at the thing. I was so surprised I’d let her go and she was gone out the bedroom. I was left there with this thing. The book had said that it was okay to break the sac but hadn’t been very specific on how to do it. I gingerly picked the very gross looking thing up in a towel. It was slightly rubbery and reminded me a bit of that plastic bubble stuff I used to play with as a kid. I remember that the towel was pale blue and as soon as I had the sac wrapped up in it the blue turned a green-black color.

There I was with a soiled towel containing a puppy that was going to die if I couldn’t figure out how to get it out of the sac soon and the phone was ringing again. My mother. She figured since I didn’t pick up the first time, she’d try a second time. And probably even a third and fourth if the first two didn’t work. I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk to her, but at the same time I definitely needed a little advice and comforting on the situation!

I dashed out into the living room and snatched up the phone, cradling it against my shoulder while I rubbed at the thing in the towel. The sac burst and soaked the towel as I began talking to my mom. The amniotic fluid was warm and the wet puppy was one of the ugliest things I’d ever seen. Its eyes were sealed slits and the tiny pink mouth gaped as it struggled to breath. It squirmed in my hands and I could feel the umbilical cord, a solid rope that still pulsed with the puppy’s heartbeat, against my palms through the towel.

“Mom, mom, mom, you have to come home! Schatzie had a puppy and it was in a sac and she didn’t want anything to do with it and now she’s gone and I put it in a towel and how do I cut the cord and oh, my god, she wouldn’t stay in the box and what am I supposed to do?”

I was beyond babbling and had definitely moved into complete hysteria. My mom couldn’t have gotten a word in if she’d wanted to, and it was clear from the way she shouted my name that she wanted to. It probably took her a good two minutes of yelling my name before I shut up so she could talk.

“Where is Schatzie now?”

I looked around and finally discovered that the dog had wedged her not inconsiderable bulk under the corner table. Quite a feat when you consider that the lowest shelf for the thing was merely six inches off the ground, twelve inches wide and yet all I could see was her nose.

“She’s under the corner table and she doesn’t want anything to do with the puppy and what if she has another one and how am I supposed to find it and she’ll get the carpet all dirty!”

My mom took a deep breath and tried to calm me down. “Has she seen the puppy?”

“No, she just ran out the door and the phone was ringing and it was you and I told you not to go to work! You have to come home right now!”

“Everything’s going to be fine, just fine,” my mom tried to reassure me. The puppy was making squeaking noises that must have appealed to Schatzie because she wiggled out from under the table and came over to me. She inspected the puppy and gave it a tentative lick.

I relayed this to my mom who was pleased about the progress I was making. “See? She knows just what to do. Take the puppy and put it in the box and Schatzie will take care of the rest. I have to run. I’ll call you around midnight when I’m on lunch.”

And with that she was gone and I was alone. Well, as alone as I could be with a pregnant dog and a newborn puppy. I lured Schatzie down the hall and back into the bedroom with the now furiously squeaking puppy. It was quite a procession: me walking backwards with the puppy cupped in my palms and Schatzie following with her tongue flicking out to lick at her baby.

Schatzie willingly crawled in the whelping box once the puppy was in it, too. And she was an attentive mother, licking and nuzzling it and pushing it back to her swollen belly and protruding nipples. She nipped and pulled at the cord (which my mom had said not to cut, but to see if she’d take care of it) and shredded the thing as she actually ate it. She kept at it until her next set of contractions started. Then she was out of the box, leaving the one puppy crying piteously as she pawed at the door again to get out.

This seemed horribly familiar and as I got up and went to her at the door I just knew this wasn’t going to be a pleasant experience. I lifted her tail and sure enough, there was a second black bulge. Only this time, it wasn’t stuck and I barely had time to catch it before it would have fallen to the floor.

Her labor problem resolved, my “natural” mother jumped back into the box and began soothing her anxious puppy. I didn’t have a towel this time and I got to experience the full sensation of the rubbery bubble. It moved and shifted and it burst with only the slightest pressure of my nails. Again my hands were bathed with the warm amniotic fluid and the now empty sac curled around them, clinging like some weird sort of alien slime. I cut the cord, almost gagging as it spurted blood. I quickly gave Mama the baby and dashed to the bathroom to scrub furiously at my hands. As with the first, she was an attentive mother and hardly seemed to care that I had handled the baby first.

Exhausted I collapsed on the waterbed and bounced to make a wave to rock me. Surely, I thought, she’s got the hang of this and I can go on to my described duties of counting noses and giving praise. Only, it wasn’t to be so.

When my mom called at midnight I had counted five noses and it had been two hours since she’d had a puppy. According to the book (and why I even bothered to consult it I don’t know) if she hadn’t had a puppy in an hour she was done. I really, really should have made sure that Schatzie read that book before having her puppies because when my mom came home at ten minutes after six, there were ten wiggling bodies rooting against her belly in search of a nipple.

Every hour, practically on the hour, after midnight Schatzie had a puppy. I thought it had been hard when I was awake and anticipating the next puppy but Schatzie in labor was Evil, with a capital “E”. Every time that silly dog had labor pains she jumped out of the box and dropped a sac-enclosed puppy somewhere in the room then zipped back to her growing brood. It was hard to tell which alerted me first to the fact that I’d have to get out of bed and puppy-hunt: the crying or the rustling of the newspaper.

I got no sleep. She got no sleep. The puppies slept, but who wouldn’t after their ordeals? Jim, safe in his own home, no doubt got plenty of sleep. My mom didn’t deserve any sleep for abandoning me for work, but no doubt she’d get sleep as soon as she came home.

I heard the front door open when mom came home. I heard her carol out as she opened the bedroom door, “Do we have puppies?” She was clearly excited and sounded entirely too happy considering the miserable night I’d just had.

I rolled over in bed and glared at her. “I hate you,” I told her in a cold, sour voice. “I’m never speaking to you again.”

My mom was shocked. “Why?” she asked as she knelt by the whelping box. Schatzie had no problem with mom inspecting the babies or even picking them up, the traitor. I felt that the least she could have done was growl to show mom how upset she was to have been left in my totally inexperienced hands. “I thought there were only five!” she exclaimed as she did her own nose counting. “Wow, ten puppies! Ten babies, Schatzie! You have ten babies!”

I pulled my exhausted body from the bed and fell into a sitting position next to mom. “How could you just leave me alone?” I accused her. “Schatzie wouldn’t have a single puppy in this stupid box and if I hadn’t kept an ear out we’d have dead puppies all over the floor! She kept sneaking out of the box, dropping a puppy for me to play hide and seek with then zipping back to the ones she already had.”

I picked up the book on raising and breeding dogs and thrust it at her, flipping to the page where it said if no puppy presented within an hour she was done. “Look at this! This book was totally useless and it didn’t describe what to do if you had a dog who was doing a drop-and-run delivery! You shouldn’t have left me!”

To give her credit my mom did look sheepish and she did apologize, sort of. “Well, Jim said…”

“’Jim said, Jim said’” I mimicked with a sneer. “What about what I said?”

“Well, all’s well that ends well,” my mom said philosophically. “And we have ten puppies! Aren’t they cute?” She nuzzled on blind, fuzzy little ball making it squeak and perking Schatzie’s ears up. She held the puppy out and inspected it from the bottom. “Do you know how many boys, how many girls?”

“Eight boys, two girls,” I said with a sigh. “I’m going to bed. Wake me up when they’re ready to be sold.”

I didn’t actually get to go to sleep that morning. First we took Schatzie and the puppies to UC Davis Vet School for evaluation. As soon as we got home Jim showed up and mom was off in ecstatics about the puppies. And idiot that he was he’d brought his three dogs, which Schatzie was understandably upset about. In fact, the only bright spot in the whole ordeal was that she bit him when he reached in to pick up a puppy.

Maybe I was a bit hasty in saying that it wasn’t a beautiful experience. The memory of the shock on Jim’s face when he got bit is definitely beautiful.