First there was our malamute, Tatanka, all 100 lbs of him, who somehow held the contradictory notions that he was both a lapdog and a furry human. I had just gotten home from knee surgery, a substantial affair where they sliced my thigh muscle apart to get to a growth on my knee. Tatanka wanted to cheer me, so he hopped onto the couch, or more accurately onto my legs. That part isn't the favorite memory. It was the look of pain and humiliation when I yelled at him to get off my leg. He looked so hurt that I had to apologize to him. That is the favorite memory of him.

The other is from our husky, Diablo. He was very neglected by his first owner and never got over the fear that he was going to not get to eat again. Which meant he would eat pretty much anything. Not just the usual stuff like out of the litter box or the trash, but he once escaped and came home with an entire deer leg and he once caught a grouse in the backyard. My favorite memory of him was the time he found a dead dove in the middle of winter. He started to eat the carcass, gets yelled at to stop at which point he paused to look at us with half a dozen feathers sticking out of his mouth before very deliberately swallowing the rest because we weren't close enough to stop him.