Sitting by the window, I watched my dog play with her puppies. She crouched down on her forelegs, her chin nearly on her knees. Her four eight-week-old puppies wriggled their bottoms and dashed straight for her. Just before they stumbled over her front paws, she jumped up and dashed around them in a circle, yipping as she went, and came to a crouching stop right behind them, her tail waving behind her. Puppies tumbled over each other trying to turn around to see where she went.

Smiling, I watched her play with this, her first and last, litter and I wondered what she thought—when she brought a dead squirrel to them just after their eyes first opened; when she avoided their attempts to suckle, nosing the dead squirrel closer and when she played.

I had a lot of dogs then. This one came to me an abandoned, half-grown puppy. She wandered in from the woods, covered in burrs. Ticks, gorged on her blood, poked out fat and grey from her coat. She was a long-hair, black, tan and white mixed-breed. Where I lived, on the Spokane Reservation, people came out from the city and dropped off unwanted dogs. I think that some of those people think it is an act of kindness—that the dogs stand a better chance of survival hunting for a living rather than going to the SPCA or some similar organization. They don’t. Dogs have to learn to hunt, what to hunt, what species are easier to rundown, what species will not be eaten, where certain food animals live. All these things have to be learnt, despite the fact that the act of hunting is instinctual.

When she came to me she was already pregnant. Her first heat, I suspected, had been the motivation for her forced change of address. Because so many dogs came through my life, and because I have a sense of horror of dying by starvation, I have the dogs spayed or neutered. It has proven to be costly and time-consuming but what, realistically, are the alternatives for unwanted dogs? And yet, watching her play, knowing that I would shortly take her puppies from her, knowing that she would never have another, knowing that she had at least enough thought and feeling to love her children, to teach them through play, I felt guilt along with my reasoning.

My dog flipped over on her side panted from a last circling run around her puppies and allowed all four of her brood to scramble over her head, legs and belly. Part of me wanted to play like that, wanted to be rolled on by four eight-week-old fuzz balls with legs. And I wondered if only guilt, remorse, grief, injustice—a sense of moral incorrectness—are what separate humans from other animals. Is it our sense of helplessness and fear at some of the things we must do to protect ourselves and those we love from a future we can sometimes all too clearly see that makes us human? But no, in my experience that doesn’t work either, because once I took the puppies and came home again without them, my dog keened for them, searched for them, grew listless and in this behavior I knew we shared at least some of these feelings.

On the day I took the puppies, my dog left the other adult dogs and came to see what I was doing. She nosed her puppies as I picked them up and put them in the pet carrier. My dog moved from one puppy to another, reacted to their squeals and grunts. Her body was tense, the flag of her tail moved only with the sway of her head—from puppy to puppy—from puppy to puppy. I put the carrier in the front passenger seat; closed the car door, got in and drove off. I saw my dog run down behind me as far as the main road. I sped up and drove the fifty miles to town.

When I returned my dog came up to the car. She stuck her front paws in the car, her long nose poked into the empty pet carrier. I pulled it out, set it on the ground. I patted my dog, told her it had to be and went inside.

A few days later, I saw my dog head into the woods. I never saw her again. When I realized she was probably gone for good, I went and built a sweat. It was hot. I sang hard and cried but still today I cannot shake my sense of shame.