Pearl | Song Dog Journal

What started out as an uneventful eventful day turned into a fiasco when the new mother of a litter of five brand new puppies vanished. Just vanished.

I was going down to check my chickens and she acted like she wanted to go out. Okay, I thought, she’s been inside all day and her puppies had full bellies. So I let her out. I took care of my chickens and went to locate Pearl, who popped up from down past the shop. I did my due diligence and made sure there wasn’t a surprise puppy down there, and Pearl headed up towards the house. I was close behind her, but just needed to grab something on my way. I took my eyes off her for all of three minutes. And she was gone.

I looked everywhere. And I mean everywhere. I looked for about forty-five minutes before calling my husband, who was up north getting grain. And I kept looking. I took the ATV out and looked, as I said, everywhere. Calling, shouting, scolding, and finally melting into an angry, crying, but still functional mess.

I figured she’d had another puppy in her and went off somewhere to have it. I remembered the elk carcass a mountain lion dragged away, up on top of the ridge and north a ways, and the mountain lion scat I saw closer to home. We’ve had some good sized coyotes getting rather bold. And then the sun started going down.

If it could be gotten into or under, I looked there. And looked again. And Brad got home and we looked again. And then she appeared out of nowhere from by the house, pretty dirty and looking guilty again. We had looked under everything. Except the front deck. We didn’t even know a dog could fit under there. But she did. And sure enough, we could hear a puppy squealing, not near one side or the other, but under the very center of the deck.

So basically we had to partially take the deck apart, which was harder than it should have been, to rescue the miserable, cold little girlie, and thus the entire ridiculous and beautiful family was reunited. Everyone is warm and dry and bellies are full, tight as little drums. Four little girls and two little boys.

All’s well that ends well, I guess. But Pearl is kind of in trouble.

So it was at the very end of September, I had just emailed a friend and asked if she knew of anyone with a intact male cow dog, since we were looking to breed Pearl. Well, roughly a day later we were helping a neighbor work some cows and I made some offhanded remark that Joe, his dog, seemed to be kind of distracted by Pearl. He was kind of making eyes at her. You know what I mean. Joe even got knocked over by one cow and stepped on by another and ended up in a cast with a broken paw. Apparently Pearl was super distracting.

Later that day, we (ahem) caught them together, if you know what I mean. Very together.

About, oh, a month later I started noticing just a slight fullness in Pearl’s midsection. Then it became very obvious. Pearl was pregnant. We did the math and we figured she’d have her pups…well, right now. The first week of December.

This morning, Brad left early to haul some open cows to the St. Onge sale barn and Pearl didn’t even budge from her little bed. A couple of hours later, the first pup showed up. I was in the living room and heard something in the mud room and thought a cat had sneaked in. There was Pearl standing in the corner and a little wet pup was wailing on the dog bed.

Pearl seemed confused about the presence of the little alien and paced around looking guilty. I coaxed her over to the dog bed, made her lay down and helped the pup find a teat. Maternal instinct was quick to kick in. It is so amazing to watch!