Disclaimer: Much as it distresses some members of my family, we don't own any dogs at all, much less Krypto the Super-Hound.

Contrary to popular myth, dogs – those, at least, that make their homes in the great city of Metropolis – can indeed look up, and, as our story begins, a group of cocker-spaniel bitches in the Hatcher Street Kennel were gazing raptly up at a distant white streak soaring between the City of Tomorrow's majestic array of gleaming towers of industry.

"Look!" one of them barked eagerly. "Up in the sky!"

"Is it a ball?" a second woofed.

"Is it a Frisbee?" a third yipped.

"No!" they all bayed in unison. "It's KRYPTO THE SUPER-HOUND!"

And so it was. An inter-dimensional rift had recently opened up in that part of the country, and Metropolis had been fiercely harried by a roving pack of saber-toothed tigers, escaped from a universe where that genus had never gone extinct. Superman, being busy on a mission with the Justice League, had naturally called upon his trusty pet to round up the savage beasts; equally naturally, the sabertooths, for all their ferocity, had been no match for a super-dog, and Krypto was even now carrying the last one's carcass across the city in triumph.

"Krypto! Krypto!" the cockers cried, and Krypto, to whom the admiration of Metropolis's animals was as kibble and water to other dogs, paused in his flight to grin and wag down at them. "Krypto, we love you!"

"You're the bravest dog in the world, Krypto!"

"Krypto, sire our puppies!" (This last from a cocker named Bess, who was staying at the kennel while her owner, Miss Catherine Grant, was covering a Miami fashion show for the Daily Planet.)

"Yes! Yes!" the others chorused. "Say the word, and we'll whelp you the finest super-litters that ever were!"

Krypto chuckled, and tossed the sabertooth carcass up into the air so as to have his mouth free to reply. "I'm sorry, ladies," he said. "You're all lovely creatures, and you'll make some good hounds very happy. But there's another bitch in this town who already holds the leash to my heart."

Bess sighed wistfully. "Oh, what a lucky bitch that is!"

Krypto's jaw creased in a modest smile. Inwardly, though, he thought, Glad you think so, honey. Now if only she agreed with you…

Then he caught the sabertooth carcass as it came spiraling back down, and, after giving the cockers one last wink, soared off with super-canine rapidity toward Kidder Beach.

On a rise overlooking Kidder Beach's sugar-white sands, there stands a spacious, apricot-colored seafront villa, the residence, nine months of the year (he spends his summers in New Hampshire), of noted critic and social commentator Peter Todd Ablewight. As Krypto approached this dwelling, he spotted an elegant female Afghan hound dozing at the bottom of its porch steps, and his mighty heart fluttered at the thought that this time, just maybe, she would at last accept his troth.

He alighted on the sand, the whoosh of his approach rousing his lady from her slumbers, and dropped the sabertooth carcass in front of her. "Well, Roxy," he said, "I suppose you've heard the news; if not, you can smell the evidence for yourself. And now, will you be my mate?"

Roxy sighed, and shook her head. "Oh, Krypto, Krypto…"

"What?" Krypto demanded. "You said you wanted a mate who could prove his bravery. I just single-handedly rid Metropolis of a pack of ferocious prehistoric monsters. How much more proof can you need?"

"Krypto, you don't understand," said Roxy. "I don't need evidence of your heroism; I never doubted that you had plenty of that. What I need you to prove to me is your bravery."

Krypto blinked. "Is there a difference?"

"Of course," said Roxy. "All the difference in the world. Heroism is about what you do; bravery is about what you risk in doing it."

Her would-be beau only continued to stare at her blankly, and she yelped in frustration. "Oh, don't you see, Krypto?" she said. "Listen!"

She cast her mind back to a favorite passage in one of her master's books, and recited from memory: "He came in, roaring with rage. He flung himself between me and the killer hogs… He yelled with pain as the savage tushes ripped into him. He took the awful punishment meant for me, but held his ground. He gave me that one-in-a-hundred chance to get free. From Old Yeller, copyright 1956 by Fred Gipson."

(She wasn't quite sure what the last part meant, but her master always put something of the sort at the end of every quotation he used. And, like any good dog, she regarded her master as the epitome of all mortal wisdom, so naturally she did the same.)

Krypto nodded approvingly. "Good for him," he said. "Just what any true-hearted dog would want to do for his boy. But what does it have to do with you and me?"

"Well, can't you see the difference?" said Roxy. "Imagine what a sacrifice it was for Old Yeller to fling himself on those hogs – how many natural instincts to avoid pain and mortal peril he had to overcome for the sake of his duty to Trevor. That's what bravery is: the deliberate facing of dangers and bearing of hardships. Now if you had been facing the savage tushes of a herd of killer hogs…"

"Tushes are tusks, aren't they?" said Krypto.

"Yes."

"Just checking. I thought they might be something else."

"If you had been facing them," said Roxy doggedly, "there wouldn't have been any danger or hardship, because no mere hogs could possibly harm you or cause you any serious trouble. Their tushes –" she emphasized this word ever so faintly "– would have broken in pieces if they'd struck anywhere near a major bone, and even your fleshy bits couldn't have been pierced by them. And as for hardship… well, how hard could it ever be for you to take care of a few unruly swine?

"I'm not saying you wouldn't do a worthy job of it, or that your motive would be anything less than the pure love of the human you sought to protect. As I said before, it's not your heroism I question. But, when your powers render you functionally invincible and invulnerable… it's not your fault, I know, but how can I ever know whether you're really brave? How can you ever know, yourself?"

Krypto was silent for a long moment, thinking about that; when at last he spoke, his voice was almost plaintive. "I didn't ask to be what I am, Roxy," he said. "I'm just doing the best I can with it. Isn't that enough?"

Roxy sighed. "I wish it were, Krypto," she said. "I like what I can see of your heart, and the last thing I want to do is break it. And you are good-looking for a bulldog type," she added with an earthy chuckle. "But… well, there it is. If you can't help being the Dog of Steel, neither can I help being the daughter of a thousand Pathan leopard-hounds. To give my pups a sire who can't show them how to conquer fear, because he can't ever feel it himself… I can't, Krypto. I just can't. I'm sorry."

She came down from the step, and gave Krypto a long, heartfelt lick behind the ears; then she turned away, and walked back up the steps and through the swing door into the villa without looking back. Krypto stared after her for a moment, swallowing the mournful howls that were welling up in his throat; then, with a harsh snarl, he snatched up the sabertooth carcass, flung it five miles out to sea, and flew away from the beach as fast as yellow sunlight would carry him.

Now it so happened, at that moment, that a lone tern was out flying five miles from Kidder Beach, hunting for small fish and crustaceans, and brooding darkly on the villainous clan of Maine Coons, the darlings of one of Peter Todd Ablewight's wealthier neighbors, that with their egg-sucking ways were making nesting season a nightmare for her and her kindred. It was a subject that had preoccupied her of late, and it took a great deal to distract her from it – but the 500-pound carcase of a prehistoric monster hurtling through the air and landing with a titanic splash only a few yards away from her was enough to do the trick.

She flew down and alighted gingerly on the dead sabertooth's matted fur, and poked her bill inquisitively into the bloody hole where Krypto's heat vision had pierced its heart. She knew, as all the animals of Metropolis knew, about the Super-Hound's recent exploit; unlike the cockers of Hatcher Street, however, she was too much of a wild creature to have any great devotion to the savior of the city. Her only devotion was to her and her offspring's survival – and, as she sat and thought upon the floating carcass, an ingenious gleam came suddenly into her eye.

She leapt back into the air, and flew over to a small fishing-boat that was anchored some distance away. The tackle-box sat open on the deck; while the fisherman wasn't looking, she snatched a lead sinker and flew back with it to the carcass. With dainty precision, she placed the sinker in the center of the wound, and poked it inward with her bill until it would go no farther; then, after washing her bill clean of smears of dried blood, she turned toward the shore and took to the air once more. There were a few of her fellow beasts she wanted to call on: a few young and credulous mergansers, a half-blind old sea snake, an inveterate gossip of a plover – and, of course, a certain Kryptonian super-hound.

Krypto, at that moment, was sitting on the fire escape of Lois Lane's apartment, brooding about his recent failure in love. (Krypto generally stayed with Miss Lane while he was in Metropolis; she was a known friend of his master, and her apartment had acquired enough Kentish scent over the years to be a soothing abode for the loyal super-dog. He did wonder sometimes why he couldn't just stay in Clark Kent's own Metropolis residence, but he trusted that his master had some good reason for not wanting that.)

"Old Yeller," he growled, gnawing fiercely on the chunk of Carrara marble that currently served him for a chew toy. "So real flesh-and-blood dogs aren't enough for her, are they? She's got to have an idealized figment of some writer's imagination. Bah! If that's the kind of bitch she is, let someone else have her; I'm just lucky to have…"

But he couldn't finish. Deep down, for all his anger, he knew that he wasn't lucky to have gotten out in time – that Roxy's admiration for true canine virtue was a key part of what he loved about her, and that any other bitch he could ever love would be just the same. Which was as much as to say that he might as well just give up on love altogether, and devote himself full-time to flinging rabid grizzly bears into the sun, or whatever super-dogs did after they'd resigned themselves to a life of unbroken loneliness.

As he was ruminating on this grim prospect, there came a whiffle of wings above his head, and the tern alighted on the railing in front of him. "Good afternoon," she said. "You're Krypto the Super-Hound, aren't you?"

"That's right," said Krypto – indistinctly, for he still had the marble in his mouth. "What's up?"

"Oh, I just wanted to congratulate you on your animal cunning this morning," said the tern. "Luring the sabertooths out beyond city limits so that you could take the credit when human hunters shot them? I only hope my own chicks will grow up so sly."

Krypto blinked, and slowly spat out the rock and sat up to face the tern eye to eye. "What are you talking about?" he said. "I lured the sabertooths away so that innocent people and animals wouldn't get hurt when I seared their hearts open. There were never any hunters involved."

"Oh, of course that's what you'd say," said the tern. "But you know how little we dumb beasts know of forensics. You can't expect us to be able to tell the difference between heat vision and powder burns; if a certain krait I know goes to examine that last carcass, and finds that there's something small and round and leaden buried in the fatal wound, what are we supposed to conclude?"

"But there isn't," said Krypto.

"Well, there wasn't, perhaps," said the tern. "And there might not be again, if I fly back out to the carcass in the next few minutes and call off all the little ducks I set to guard it. Then you can remove the sinker without anyone noticing, and, when old Diamond-head swims out to make his inspection, it'll be plain that the rumors currently circulating along the shore are quite without foundation. But I doubt you'll be able to pull that off on your own – and even the two of us together won't have a chance much longer. So I think, Krypto, that you and I had better come to an agreement quickly."

Being blackmailed by a sea-bird was a new experience for the Super-Hound, and it took him a second or two to fully process it. When he had, he said, icily, "What do you want?"

"That's the spirit," said the tern approvingly. "Well, it's this way. You know the human female with all the oversized cats in her villa? She's a positive menace to all of us who nest on the beach; so long as she's around, we can't have a moment's peace of mind – and we've given up hope that she'll ever move away on her own. But if some beast of immense strength were to slip into her kitchenette while no-one was around and crush her skull between his jaws – well, then her animals would be sold off and dispersed, and all would be well on the Metropolis shore again. And what beast could be more immensely strong than the mighty Super-Hound of Krypton? So…"

"What?" Krypto yelped. "You want me to kill an innocent human just for having too many cats?"

"Yes, exactly," said the tern brightly. "As soon as possible, please."

"You must be crazy," said Krypto. "Don't you know whose dog I am? Superman trains his pets to stand for truth and justice, not to go around murdering unsuspecting cat ladies."

"Of course, I know that," said the tern irritably. "That's why I'm not asking you without offering something in return. But if it's a choice between eliminating one useless human life or having all the animals of Metropolis think you a fraud, how can that be a difficult decision? Come on, hurry up; as I said, you don't have much time."

Krypto's blood ran cold as the idea sank in. The tern, indeed, was more right than she knew; the idea of crudely crushing the woman's skull and not being found out was silly, but there were at least half a dozen other ways his powers made him able to kill a human without anyone even knowing how she had died, let alone at whose paws. It would be so terribly easy – and then, on the other side, to lose all the love and respect he had earned from Metropolis's animals over the years, just because of a single scruple… after all, he didn't much care for cats himself (with a few exceptions, such as his friend Streaky in Midvale), and humans who weren't his master's friends meant little to him deep down – and it wasn't as though the shore-nesting birds of Metropolis didn't deserve protection for their nests…

With a tremendous effort, he shook his head. "No, ma'am," he said. "I'm sorry, but I can't."

The tern cocked her head in honest puzzlement. "Why not?"

"I don't think you'd understand," said Krypto, thinking bitterly of another animal who might have. "I just can't, that's all."

The tern stared at him for a long moment, and then clacked her bill. "I see," she said. "I take it back, then. If my chicks grow up no slyer as you, I'll never live down the shame."

With that, she spread her wings and flew away, leaving Krypto to roll over unhappily and await the fruition of her vengeance.

"Did you hear?" said one of the Hatcher Street cockers to another next morning. "All those saber-toothed tigers that Krypto was boasting about having killed – it was really just ordinary humans that took them out, all along!"

"Humans?" the other repeated.

"That's right! Some snake or other went out to see that carcass Krypto was carting about like a trophy – he'd tossed it in the ocean for some reason, probably to get rid of the evidence – and he found a bullet in it!"

"Krypto did?"

"No, stupid, the snake did!"

"But why would there be a bullet? Krypto doesn't need ammunition to kill a dangerous…"

"Krypto didn't kill it, don't you see? He just said he did, because it happened outside the city where none of us could see it. Probably the mayor called in the National Guard or something, and they took out all the sabertooths while Krypto just pranced around looking beautiful."

"But… if he didn't do it, why would he say he did?"

"Oh, honestly, Skittles! Don't you know that male dogs are all a bunch of lying curs who'll say anything to turn bitches' heads? The wonder is that we were silly enough to think Krypto was different just because he came from another planet – as though that could make any difference!"

"And I offered to have his puppies!" Bess wailed. "Oh, I feel so unclean!"

A cocker belonging to one of Cat Grant's sub-editors came up and licked her commiseratingly. "There, there, Bessie," she said. "How could you have known? A handsome, plausible scoundrel like that – why, it's enough to sweep any bitch off her paws."

Bess sniffed. "Well, I hope he gets what's coming to him, anyway," she said. "They don't make Kryptonite muzzles, do they?"

"I don't think so."

"Phooey. Well, maybe Lex Luthor will invent them soon; a girl can hope, at least."

This scene was far from atypical. Nearly all the brutes of Metropolis, upon receiving evidence sufficient unto their brutish intellects that their chief civic hero was in fact a clay-pawed poseur, launched themselves immediately into a week-long orgy of reactive fulmination against him. From the gables of the highest penthouses to the lowest parts of the sewers, in a myriad of bestial voices, the Dog of Steel was aspersed, belittled, censured, derided, and so on all through the alphabet – and, with his super-ears, he couldn't help but hear every bit of it. It was only a mercy, he felt, that the headline writer for the Daily Planet didn't have the gift of animal communication, or KRYPTO THE GLORY-HOUND! would have been plastered over every news-stand in America.

Thankfully, on the third day after the tern's contrivance, Miss Lane's radio announced that the Justice League's mission had been completed, and that Superman would be returning to Metropolis sometime that day. Krypto, who was all too ready to be taken back to the Fortress of Solitude, was even more pleased by this news than Miss Lane herself; throughout the rest of the morning, he kept bounding out onto the fire escape and pricking his ears skyward, hoping to catch some early whisper of his master's impending arrival.

Then, on his tenth or eleventh such trip out, he heard a familiar voice barking his name from the sidewalk below, and looked down to see an elegant female Afghan hound looking expectantly up at him. As this was very nearly the last thing he had expected ever to see again, it took him a moment to compose himself and fly down to her. "Roxy?" he said. "What are you doing here?"

"Playing truant, by my master's reckoning," Roxy replied. "I'm sure I'll catch purgatory when he comes out of the Coffee Shrub and finds I've slipped my leash – but what's a girl to do? I knew today was my last chance to reach you, and I wasn't about to let you leave town without telling me the truth behind all these absurd scurrilities that I've been hearing about you all weekend."

Krypto screwed up his muzzle bitterly. "So it's absurd for me to be a coward, then?" he said. "Funny, I remember you saying something quite different the last time we met."

Roxy rolled her eyes. "Honestly, Krypto," she said, "how many times do I have to tell you that I've never doubted your heroism? Whatever internal victories may or may not be possible to you, you're still the last dog in the world to take credit for a feat you didn't perform; if everyone and his dam goes around saying that's what you did, then something's rotten in the state of Metropolis, and I'd be a poor sort of friend to you if I didn't insist on finding out what."

Despite himself, Krypto felt a warm glow in his belly at these words. "Well, thanks for the vote of confidence."

"You're welcome," said Roxy. "Now spill."

So Krypto told her all about the tern's blackmail plot, his refusal to cooperate, and the subsequent gleeful blackening of his name. Roxy listened attentively as the story unfolded, and sat in thoughtful silence for a moment after it had ended. "With your powers, I'm surprised you couldn't frustrate the bird's scheme somehow," she said.

"Maybe I could have," Krypto acknowledged. "But I couldn't think of a feasible plan in time. I couldn't very well attack any of her dupes, and if I'd been seen tampering with the carcass…"

"Yes, of course," said Roxy. "So that's how it was, then? In order to keep from harming an innocent woman, you had to resign yourself to being rejected by the city you'd done so much to serve."

"That's about it," said Krypto.

"In that case, I think you deserve a full meed of praise," said Roxy. "It isn't every dog who could aptly bear so great a hardship."

"Well, thanks for that," said Krypto. "But, you know, deserving praise is one thing, and…"

Then he trailed off, as he saw the knowing twinkle in Roxy's eye, and the precise phrase she had used registered in his mind. "Bearing hardship?" he said. "No, it wasn't… well, it was, of course, but I didn't… I mean, I wasn't even thinking of bravery when…"

"Of course you weren't," said Roxy, beaming. "Truly brave dogs never are. Oh, Krypto, forgive me; forgive me, my own, my dear, my darling one. I should have known – but I had to know, you see? And now I know… oh, Krypto, Krypto…"

The next few moments were always a bit hazy in Krypto's memory: a wild, golden blur of long, silky fur, rich, wet tongue, and the unmistakable fragrance of an austerely passionate thoroughbred whose mind and heart were at last in full accord. All he knew was that he would have been the happiest dog on Earth if each of those moments had lasted a hundred years.

In fact, though, the entire interlude lasted less than a minute – not from either participant's wish, but because Krypto, in the very midst of it, suddenly heard a familiar supersonic whoosh far up in the air, and disentangled himself from Roxy with a sigh. "He would pick right now to show up," he muttered.

"Yes, I suppose he would," said Roxy with a laugh. "But it's all right, darling. You'll be back before long, and I'm not going anywhere – and then we can pick up right where we left off. And in the meantime, I'll whisper your name every night before I go to bed, and you'll hear me up in your Fortress and sweeten your dreams with thoughts of me." She gave him one last fond lick, and then stepped back and nudged him with her paw. "Go on, now. Be the loyal dog I love."

Krypto grinned, and returned her lick with as much fervor as he dared; then he sprang into the air and launched himself toward his master, leaving his mate gazing after him, as proud as a queen.

"Hey, boy!" said Superman a few seconds later, rubbing Krypto behind the ears hard enough to grind any other dog's skin to powder. "Ready to go home to the Fortress now? Had enough excitement in Metropolis for one weekend?"

Krypto made no reply, except to snuggle his nose a little bit deeper into his master's chest. Inside, though, he couldn't resist a chuckle. Oh, my poor, dear master, he thought. You haven't the faintest idea.