Maxie is the Heap Family's pet wolf or 'Abyssinian wolfhound' as Silas Heap says.
Heritage
Silas tells Marcia that Maxie descended from the 'Maghul Maghi wolfhounds'. [1]
Trivia
A little known fact is that it takes exactly the same time for an artritic wolfhound to walk from the palace gate to the Wizard Tower as it takes a cohort of jinn to run the Ice Tunnel from the Observatory to the Wizard Tower.
