At present, we have three dachshunds. I’ve almost always had dogs, initially largish dogs, including a Siberian Husky, a vain and near-brainless Samoyed, several other canines of mixed parentage, and then Toffee, aka Toffee Royale, a pure-bred female chocolate Labrador retriever, who weighed almost eighty pounds without an ounce of fat on her and who could and would retrieve tennis balls longer than any of my teenaged offspring could throw them (and all of them were athletes). Toffee even broke up a local softball game in New Hampshire by “retrieving” the softball and refusing to surrender it.

But until I met and married my wife the professor and opera singer, I’d never made the acquaintance of any dachshund – except in passing. I just thought they were short-legged, often obnoxious, bark-boxes. After Toffee’s passing (at seventeen, no less), my wife longed for another dachshund, because her last dachshund had died before we met. We found a rescue long-haired red dachshund puppy we immediately named Siegfried. He was cute, playful, affectionate – and an escape artist. To this day, I often could never discover how he got out on more than a few occasions.

One of us would have to go out and call him… and then, suddenly, he was right beside whoever took on recovery duty with this expression that proclaimed, “What’s the fuss? I’ve been here all along.”

Because dogs really do better with other dogs, especially according to my wife (and I will not- quite-grudgingly admit that they are pack animals), we soon added a black and tan smooth-coat miniature dachshund named Hildegarde, who was incredibly sweet to people, and a ferocious defender of her territory, all ten pounds of her. She and Siegfried chased off German shepherds and all manner of intruders -– although they never actually bit any person or dog. (And yes, it’s that Hildegard I inserted into The One-Eyed Man.) Hildegard was, however, a bit of a “breedist,” that is, she would only be social with other dachshunds. Other breeds were to be distained.

Our next dachshund was, and is, Buddy Mozart, who was supposed to be an English cream, but turned out to be a wheaten short-coat dachshund (i.e., half wirehair dachshund and half longhair dachshund). He was the inspiration for Rudy, the protagonist of “The Unexpected Dachshund.” He arrived at our house shortly after Dolly, another rescue from a puppy mill. Dolly is incredibly sweet and gentle, and when Buddy Mozart was a puppy, she never barked. So, his requests to us, to this day, are whines, as opposed to barks (which is also crucial to the story).

The latest addition to the dachshund pack is Wolfgang, now only ten months old, affectionate, and an incredibly beautiful English Cream longhair, with razor sharp teeth designed to “de-squeak” any squeaking dog toy known to man or woman, which leaves Buddy Mozart often forlorn because he likes to play with the squeaking dog toys (especially miniature rubber pigs), rather than destroying them, while Wolfgang’s sole mission in his young life seems to be to de-squeak Buddy Mozart’s pig toys. While I try to put the pigs out of reach when Buddy Mozart is finished, I often fail, especially when I’m writing, and that’s I why order the pig toys in large quantities.

NOTE: This post is for a faithful reader who requested anything, even about dachshunds, that didn’t deal with horrible occurrences in the U.S. political arena.