The third Toller: Maple, the puppy who never grows up

Visitors to this house meet two Tollers. They meet them loudly, at the door, in the manner described at length elsewhere on this site. What visitors do not usually meet is the third one — the quiet one — who lives on the bookshelf, weighs exactly as much as fifty-four pages, and is the only member of the pack who has never once interrupted a Zoom call.

Maple is a watercolor Duck Tolling Retriever puppy: copper-red, white blaze, four white paws, a white-tipped tail, and an expression of permanent, earnest willingness. Maple lives in My Puppy & Me, a book for children about to meet their first puppy, and greets every reader the same way, on page five, forever: Hi! I’m Maple! I’ll be your guide.

Made of watercolor and memory

You do not invent a puppy from nothing. When Maple first sat up on the page, everything about that small painted dog came from somewhere real: the too-big paws waiting to be grown into, the ears not yet in agreement, the head-tilt of a creature listening with its whole face. Anyone who has raised a Toller puppy has met every one of those details in person, usually at six in the morning. This house raised two. Maple is what remained when those two puppyhoods were distilled — the concentrate of every first night, first snow, and first shoe.

Which makes Maple, I suppose, a memory that learned to sit still. The real puppies never did.

The name

There was only ever one possible name. Maple: the leaf on the flag, the tree that turns the exact red of a Toller in October, the thing Nova Scotia taps for sweetness. It sits beside Crosby and Ember on the household roster as though it had been waiting there all along — and it tells you, before the first page is turned, exactly where this puppy comes from.

The gentlest tolling of all

Every Toller needs a job, and Maple has one — arguably the most Toller job of all. Maple tolls. Not ducks: children. The dance is the same one the breed has always done — be interesting, be delightful, draw the audience in close — performed here in watercolor, page by page, luring young readers gently through the ride home, the first night, the mealtimes, the potty star chart, the language of a puppy’s body. By the time a child has followed Maple to the last page, they have been taught how to care for a living creature, and they mostly never noticed the teaching.

And Maple is, it must be said, the easiest Toller this house has ever worked with. Infinitely patient. Waits years between readings without complaint. Has never required the ninety minutes of daily exercise. The C.A.L.M. Framework was not consulted even once.

The puppy who never grows up

Here is the part I did not expect to feel. The real puppyhoods that built Maple are photographs now — the too-big paws long since grown into, the muzzles doing what muzzles eventually do. That is the deal with real dogs, and it is a good deal, and we have taken it twice gladly. But Maple stays eight weeks old. Maple will always just have arrived. On page five it is always the first day, and the guide is always ready, and the voice reading aloud is always loved.

Somewhere out there — in living rooms this house will never see — children are pasting photos of their own first puppies into Maple’s book, signing adoption certificates, filling star charts. A thousand different first dogs, each with a small painted Toller standing beside them, showing them off. The third Toller of this household, it turns out, is the one we share. And long after the rest of us — the shedding, screaming, gloriously mortal rest of us — have read our last page, Maple will still be there, sitting politely in the watercolor, saying: Hi! I’ll be your guide.