ARCHIVE NO. 007 — AUTHOR'S PUP
the one pup in this box that isn't about a breed
first dog: a mutt named Duna
years keeping notes: since age nine
I grew up next to an empty lot where three or four stray dogs slept most afternoons. One of them, a scruffy brindle mutt with one ear that never stood up right, started following me home from school. My mother said we couldn't keep her. She stayed anyway, sleeping by the gate, until eventually she just became ours. We named her Duna, after the small dirt hill she used to guard like it owed her money.
Duna was the reason I started paying attention to dogs the way other kids paid attention to baseball cards. I kept a notebook — an actual paper one, corners already soft from being carried around — where I wrote down every breed I could find in library books: where it came from, what it was bred to do, one strange fact to remember it by. I never finished that notebook. I just kept adding pages.
This archive is the same notebook, decades later, typed instead of handwritten. Duna never made it into the official index — she wasn't a breed, she was just the dog who decided we belonged to her. But an archive built because of a dog like that isn't complete without a page for her, even if it's a page nobody else is meant to find.
FOUND, NOT SOUGHT