See Stormy Run

I’m a racing Greyhound. When I was young, all I ever wanted to do was run. Run as hard and as long and as fast as I could. Run faster than all the other puppies in my litter. Run faster than any other dog in the world.

At least that’s what I thought. Now I know better. I know there are more important things in life than running. But it took me a long time to learn that lesson. To let you understand what I’m talking about, I’ll have to start at the beginning.

My name is Midnight Storm, and that’s the name printed on all the racing forms in all the races that I ran. But you can call me Stormy. Everybody does. I got my name because my father was Black Thunder and my mother was Lightning Lady. My father was a famous racer, but I never knew him. My mother raced, too, before her owners retired her for breeding. I don’t know where she is now, but I loved her very much.

Looking back, my early life as a racer may sound exciting, but really it was dull. Even the running on the track is nothing but a blur in my mind now. All the tracks. They were all the same. When you’re racing, for those few fleeting moments, your heart is beating, your feet are pounding, and every nerve in your body is stretched out hard and tight to think of nothing but speed, speed, speed. You don’t focus on anything except what’s ahead of you, and you want to get there first no matter who or what gets in your way.

That’s my earliest real memory: running. Running with my littermates, my three brothers and four sisters. We would tear around our kennel yard chasing each other. Even then I tried to run faster than the others, and most of the time I did.

I also remember the day they took us into the office and each of us got our ears tattooed. Inside the left ear I got a special registered number for racing, and inside the right one numbers for my date of birth and place in the litter. Believe me, I was scared.

I can’t remember much about our kennel keepers. We never saw them, except at feeding and exercise times. They seemed to change all the time, and I can’t recall what they looked like, much less what their names were.

When I was a few months old, they turned us into a much bigger pen where we could really stretch our legs and run. And run and run. As always, I tried to be fastest. Then they put us into an even bigger run, and we ran with other young dogs our age, and I tried even harder.

Then we met our trainer, a big man with black boots and a big voice. He started by dragging lures like cans and bottles on a rope to get us to chase them. I didn’t need those things. Then and later I never needed anything to follow. I never wanted to do anything but run and get to the finish line before anybody else.

The trainer wasn’t mean, but he never seemed to notice us at all as individual puppies. He never petted us or even talked to us. Until one day, he took me by the collar and looked me over. “You’re big and black and ornery,” he said. “But you want to run, so we’ll see what you can do.”