Read The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout for Free Online

with each other that they may as well be from different species,” she writes. “The wolfhound bit, mouthed and charged at the Chihuahua; yet the little dog responded not with fright but in kind.”
    Next to full-grown Cyon and Bunny, Scout must have felt like a Chihuahua, but gradually she began to learn how to hold her own. When we walked down our street and let her off the leash in a nearby field, she would cower, tail between her legs, when Bacci, a huge Bernese mountain dog who belonged to a neighbor, approached her to play. Then, when he came up to her, Scout would run for the hills. But after a few minutes, she would return to Bacci and give him a few tentative sniffs. Soon they were playing like the Chihuahua and the wolfhound, just as Horowitz described it.
    But it was Marian who remained the touchstone of Scout’s early socialization, and they quickly formed a mutual adoration society. Marian has piercing blue eyes and a wonderful laugh, and when Scout was
around we heard that laugh often, because Marian seemed to be amused by just about everything Scout did.
    We had known Marian and her husband, Howard, casually for many years. Henry and their son, Chip, were roommates in college, and we would often run into Marian and Howard at the beach and around town. But we got to know them much better when I started teaching a course at Yale, where Howard is an emeritus professor of medicine. After a couple of chance meetings on the commuter train, Howard invited us to become associate fellows of one of Yale’s colleges, and later he inducted Henry into the Lawn Bowling Association. Marian and Howard have extensive professional networks and a hectic social schedule, but they never let you know it. As a friend of ours remarked upon meeting them over lunch, they possess “not a single drop of pretension between them.”
    Everyone in the Spiro clan is an avid sailor, and the mix of dogs and the sea comes naturally. One granddaughter wrote for a grade-school class exercise, “I love my Grandma because she has a big dog and a big boat.” Howard, who has a deep voice and a penchant for aphorisms, often notes that “there’s nothing better for a cut than saltwater and dog saliva.”
    Unlike many people with goldens, Marian came to the breed later in life. She grew up during the
Depression in Fall River, Massachusetts, and her family owned a succession of cocker spaniels. “They ran loose, as all dogs did back then,” she recalled. Even before she and Howard had children, they got a mutt. When she brought it back from the dog pound, the puppy was so small that it could fit in her pocket. Over the years, she had a series of pound puppies until one of them mated with a golden, at which point they became smitten with the breed.
    The Spiros have owned three goldens, and all three were named after stars or constellations. First came Orion, then Sirius, and now there’s Procyon, or Cyon for short. Sirius became famous for accompanying Marian to the science class she taught at a private middle school in New Haven. The dog would rest quietly in his crate during class but then come out so that the kids could pat him while coming and going.
    Despite the celestial monikers of her dogs, Marian’s dog-raising philosophy is down-to-earth. “Dare I say it’s just maternal instinct?” she said to me, reassuringly. Key to her approach is the element of patience, for both dogs and their owners. Very early on in Scout’s life, Marian would hold a piece of high-value treat, like a small piece of cheese, mere inches from her snout and say, “Wait … wait … wait, baby.” Only when Scout was calm and sitting still would Marian deliver the goody. Marian repeated this ritual several times a day.
Other puppies would practically bite off a finger while trying to get the snack, but Scout learned to hold back and resist temptation, which served us well in our later training work.
     
     
    At some point we learned that Marian, Clyde, and