The Prodigal Daughter" as a puppy.

She arrived on the requisite 49th day, as per the gospel according to Richard Wolters. And she did not come quietly. I could hear her barking madly half a mile away as the baggage cart rattled metallically across the bleak asphalt tundra of the Whitehorse airport.

In the cargo office when I opened her traveling crate, she marched boldly outside, her tail held high and wagging confidently as she snuffled around, nose to the ground, in the rank weeds and litter that always seem to arise spontaneously around industrial sites. While she stretched her legs and had her first pee in the Yukon, I read the note taped to the cage by Mrs. O'Grady, her breeder: "Here's Heidi. Just remember, she's only seven weeks old and she's a good girl."

My previous dog had been a fine male black Lab and I wanted the new pup to be totally different so she wouldn't remind me of Tarka. I had been researching and writing to kennels for months, searching for a female chocolate Lab, and now, eight months later, I was the hopeful owner of Heidi. And while she was, indeed, "only seven weeks old," I would quickly discover she was not "a good girl."

She fought and fussed and barked in her kennel on the truck seat all the way home, and in the canoe crossing the river. When I finally set Heidi down on the floor of my cabin she planted her feet, looked me in the eye and barked even louder, as if to say, "Who are you? What is this place? Why did you bring me here? And what are your intentions?"

Well, my first intentions were to feed her. And when she smelled the food she gave me a hint of the most prominent of her good traits, her athleticism. At seven weeks she could jump higher than the kitchen counter, and she did it over and over, seeming to levitate each time she touched the floor, as if she had springs in her feet.

And she barked even louder, if that were possible. Each time she reached the peak of her trajectory she exploded in my ear.

That was the first demonstration of just one of her bad characteristics--always expressing her hysteria with the loudest bark of any dog I've ever heard. Brodie, my wife, maintains to this day that her formerly extraordinary hearing was ruined in the first six months of living with Heidi.

Pheasant hunting in the sagebrush country in eastern Alberta.

She barked at everything--other dogs, cars, bicyclists, and even road signs on the highway. She barked when it was time to go for a walk; she barked when I stopped walking. She even barked at me; if I walked into the woodshed and came out a few seconds later it was as if I had gone in and the boogie man had emerged.

Over the first few weeks she presented such a peculiar combination of good traits and bad, strengths and weaknesses, that she almost drove me crazy, and to the verge of selling her down the river.

On the good side, she came running every time I called. In my experience "come" is the hardest command to perfect, but she would always respond, even when there was a distraction. Conversely, she absolutely would not stay.

I tried endless repetition. I tried yelling at her. I tried bribery with food. I even, I hate to confess, thrashed her, since she clearly knew exactly what I wanted yet would not do it.

But nothing would allow me to walk more than 10 feet away from her before she got up and followed.