Title : There Are No Doughnuts in This Shack, There Are No Puppies in This Pack
Fandom : due South
Characters : Diefenbaker, Benton Fraser, Ray Kowalski
Pairing : Benton Fraser / Ray Kowalski
Rating : Teen and Up
Word Count : 400 (quadruple drabble)

AN # 1 : Written for the "Old Friends" Challenge on fan_flashworks, cross-pollinated with the current slashthedrabble prompt "pack" and with the Tenth Anniversary Canadian Shack Challenge.

AN # 2 : The opening three lines are the first three lines of the poem "When You Are Old" by William Butler Yeats. No copyright infringement intended.

Summary : In his old age, Diefenbaker dreams about doughnuts and ponders about puppies.

"When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read...."



I wake as the air cools, the fire burning lower in the cabin's fireplace, my paws still twitching from hunting doughnuts in my dreams. There are no doughnuts in this shack. There were so many doughnuts in the long ago when we lived elsewhere, but now only when we sled to the more-twofoots-place where packmate Ray gets things; Ray gets coffee and I don't care about that...and Ray gets chocolate candies and I whine for some until packmate Fraser says "Diefenbaker, you know that chocolate is bad for wolves...and Ray gets doughnuts he will share with me when Fraser isn't looking, so then I wag and keep quiet. But now there are no doughnuts and the fire is burning low, so I pad over to the closed bedroom door and whuff to say "add more logs". They always close the door when they are mounting each other...ever since that first time when Fraser and I moved back from the elsewhere to the here, bringing Ray to live with us...when they mated for the first time and I jumped on the bed and humped against them, and Ray yelled "Gah! Fraser! Do not tell me the wolf is bi, too !" Problems with my hearing...I thought Ray said "wolf bite, too" and so I gave him a love-bite. That was in the long ago, but there is always the closed door since then. I whuff more loudly and Fraser opens the door, looking first at me and then past me to the fireplace. "Alright, old friend," he says; in the long ago he would meet a request like this with a comment like "Dief, for God's sakes, you're an Arctic wolf...do you realize you're getting soft...." but nowadays he just obliges me. From the bed, Ray murmurs "Frase, pitter patter...whatever the furball wants, and then get your ass back in here so we can...." Fraser and I are at the fireplace now; he adds more logs, ruffles my fur, and returns to Ray in the bedroom, closing the door again. I settle down in front of the warmth, grinning with wolfish pridefulness as I often do at my superior potency : all these years they've been mating, and never any puppies....