Eight Young Labradors, One Terrible Morning
Riverspook opens on a litter that does not have names yet. Eight puppies in a kennel run in the hour before dawn, and the only way anyone can tell them apart is a dab of paint on each head. This is a post about the eight of them—who they are before anything happens to them—and why I gave them colors instead of names.
Why paint
Karen, who runs Riverspook, says the names will come when the puppies go to their forever families. Until then she marks them with small dabs of colored paint on the head, reapplied every week. It is a practical solution to a practical problem, and it does something a name cannot: it tells you nothing. A name is a promise somebody else makes you. A color is only where you are in the pile.
I wanted the reader to meet the litter the way a dog meets his siblings—by smell and by temperament—before a human handed out names. Dogs know each other long before they know what they are called.
The narrator is Red. A black Labrador with a red mark on his head, and he will tell you the mark feels as much a part of him as his fur. He is the one who wakes up first. If you have read my novel, you know which one he grows up to be, and that is the one thing this post is not going to say.
The eight
Blue is Red’s sister. Black, smaller than the rest, faster than she looks, and the decisive one—when the others hesitate, she has already made up her mind. She rolled in the morning dew yesterday and still smells of it.
Brown is one of the litter’s two yellow dogs. Methodical, curious, and thorough about everything, including the mud puddle he found behind the water station. Brown works a problem the way he works a puddle: all the way through, whether or not it is a good idea.
Green is black, sleek, and all engine. He rolls in pine needles on purpose. His energy is boundless when things are good and nervous when they are not, and it needs somewhere to go.
White is pale enough to glow in the dark, and some part of her knows exactly what that means. She is the cautious one, the clean one, the one who avoids getting dirty—and the one who says the thing nobody in the litter wants to hear. When the others find water, White is the first to point out that water draws other animals. She is usually right. That does not make her popular.
Then there is the Trio. Orange, Purple, and Violet—two black, one yellow, the three biggest, always huddled in the same corner. Orange grew larger than the others early and has worn the superiority ever since. Purple and Violet take their cues from him. Every litter has a faction, and I have watched real ones form: the big ones find each other and agree, in advance, that the small ones are overreacting.
Five black. Two yellow. One so pale she glows. From the outside they are a pile of puppies. From the inside they are eight completely different problems.
The morning
The novella begins with a smell. Red wakes in the dark because something has changed in the air, and the first thing he notices is not what is there but what is missing. Every morning of his short life has started with birds. This one is silent.
Under the familiar layers—milk-sweet siblings, the lavender of Karen’s soap, the creek with its fish and wet stones—there is something older. Old blood, and patience. I wrote about that scent-layering in an earlier post, because it is how a dog reads a room, and Red reads this one correctly. Something in the tree line is watching the kennel. He does not know what it is. Neither will you, for a while.
What I can tell you is how eight temperaments meet the same fear. Blue goes from asleep to alert in a single breath. Brown puts his nose up and tries to solve it. Green bristles. White presses herself against the far wall, because pale is visible and she knows it. And the Trio, the largest and most confident dogs in the litter, dismiss the whole thing from their corner. Their leader’s verdict is that the small ones are being puppies.
That is the reason I wrote a litter instead of one dog. A single puppy in danger is a scene. Eight puppies in danger is a small society under pressure, and temperament shows in the first ten minutes—who leads, who follows, who tells the truth, who would rather not know. Riverspook is based on a real place. The eight are invented. The way they sort themselves when the birds go quiet is not.
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