Mika.

Mika liked to sit on Grandpa's lap when he was visiting. I think it was his ability to hold perfectly still that appealed to her. She would try to sit on other people's laps as well, but those people would either be too fidgety for her to ever get settled, or (and this was worse for everyone involved) they would hold still long enough for Mika to get comfortable, and then they would move, causing her to start awake suddenly in a fit of growling and biting. She would heave herself up, grumbling, and go look for a vacant pillow or Grandpa.

Unfortunately, Grandpa was never around at bedtime. Mika liked to sleep with me and Pat, on one of our beds, probably because we three all smelled about the same. But she would beat us to bed, and had a keen sense of positioning on the mattress. Whichever brother was lucky enough to have been chosen as Mika's sleeping companion for the night would arrive at his bedside to find her sound asleep in the direct center of his blanket. This made it impossible to pull back the covers without rousing her and creating an ugly situation.

We eventually got wise enough to never make our beds, so that Mika couldn't pin our covers down (yes, Mom, that is why we didn't make our beds). But her instinctive drive to sleep right in the middle of the bed remained unaffected by our clever planning. So then it was simply a matter of easing ourselves into bed around Mika without disturbing her. There were two basic methods for completing this delicate operation. One was to pick a side of the dog, and then resign yourself to an uncomfortable night of trying to sleep on half of a twin mattress.

The other method, for the bolder young man, was to carefully slide yourself down with one leg on either side of the dog, straddling her, until you were settled. It should be obvious why this maneuver required a bold operator, but I will expound for the sake of thoroughness. To be far enough under the covers to lay down on the bed, you had to slide down until Mika's slumbering form was nestled right against your crotch. This meant that your movements had to be delicate to the point of steely-eyed precision. If you could move nimbly enough, you could set yourself up for a night of relative comfort, since you could at least occupy the full width of your mattress. You could not, however, move at all without disturbing Mika. If you attempted the approach too quickly or haphazardly, you sealed your fate. Mika would spring up maliciously, legs flailing, and claw and bite confusedly in the dark under the blanket, until one of the bed's two occupants was ejected onto the floor. Then whoever had been thrown from the bed faced the choice of either trying to climb back in next to someone with whom there were now a lot of angry feelings, or slinking off into the dark house to sleep somewhere else.

Moving her while she was sleeping was one of a few things for which Mika had little tolerance. Another of those things was toddlers. She had a child alarm zone that extended in a five-foot radius from her, and when it was breached, she would start to whine. Not the high, pitiful whine that you hear from most dogs - this was lower-pitched, a moaning, groaning, very nervous sound deep in her throat. It gave the impression that she knew she would be forced to bite if the child got too close to her, and that she had no control over the reaction. And she was apparently very worried about the inevitability of all of this. Smart kids would therefore take the strange, ominous noise eminating from the tiny dog as a portent of attack, and rightly back away. But most kids got their fingers nipped.