Black Ribbon (14 page)

“What’s going on?” Heather asked.

I explained. “That’s not, uh, intentional, is it? Leaving rawhide in the tunnel? Because—”

“Hey, we’re not crazy.” Heather shook her head. “You start some kind of Easter egg hunt with rawhide all over the place, and sooner or later, all you’re going to end up with is a fight. Who put that thing there, anyway?” Before anyone had a chance to answer, Heather added, “You know, this is going to be a problem for a while. Every time Rowdy goes through the tunnel, he’s going to be looking for more rawhide, and it’s going to slow him down. You’re going to have to work on that.”

“Fine,” I said meekly. As I started to ask Heather about the commands to use in telling the dog which obstacle to head for, Eva and Bingo once again diverted her. The diversion was not, I should point out, Bingo’s fault. A change in water has that effect on a lot of dogs. Some owners carry a one-liter
soda bottle of water with them when they travel, and every time they give some water to their dogs, they refill the bottle, so the dog gradually gets used to the strange water. Or maybe Bingo had a case of nerves. At any rate, he was squatting once again, this time in the woods at the edge of the clearing, and once again, Eva was looking any place and every place else—at Rowdy, at the A-frame, at Nigel, who was making his dainty, precise way down the descent ramp of the low dogwalk toward a happy-looking Phyllis.

“Do you have a plastic bag with you?” Heather asked. “Or do you need one?”

Her mind still elsewhere, Eva watched Nicky, Cam’s sheltie, neatly sail through a tire jump.

“You!” Heather was finally losing patience. “Camp rule: Clean up after your own dog!”

“Are you talking to me?” demanded Eva, throwing a stubby-fingered hand across her breast. “He’s going in the woods. What’s it matter?”

“This has been gone over in detail,” Heather replied quietly. “It was in the material you got through the mail, it was in the registration packet you got yesterday, and we discussed it at the meeting yesterday afternoon.”

The Leona Helmsley of pooper-scooping, Eva was lofty. “I wasn’t there.”

“And we just talked about it now, before we got started,” Heather persisted. “We leave this place a mess, and camp’s not going to be able to come back here. All over camp, there are bags and scoopers and buckets, and if you don’t use them, among other things, it’s not fair to Maxine. In case you don’t know, it’s not easy to find a good place that welcomes all these dogs, and part of my job’s making sure that when you guys leave here Saturday morning, there’s nothing that anyone’s going to mind stepping in. Now, do you have a plastic bag, or do you need one? They’re right over there by that trash can.”

By coincidence, Phyllis Abbott, her hair and makeup fastidious,
her white shirt crisp, her white slacks spotless, was heading toward the trash can at exactly the time Heather pointed to it. As if to model responsible dog ownership, she took a clean plastic bag and led Nigel slowly along the edge of the clearing. “Show time!” she told him. “Show time!”

Attracted perhaps by Heather’s vehement lecture, the entire group was gathering around.

“Holly?” Joy asked tentatively.

“Yes?”

“Is this some kind of …?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “There was just a little, uh …”

“What is ‘show time’? I don’t …”

I’ll spare you. Yes, it’s possible to teach your dog to eliminate more or less on command, but you can use any word or phrase you want. Pair it with the act, say it every time the dog goes, praise him, and before long, you’ve got a dog that will relieve himself before he gets into the show ring instead of right in the middle of the judging. There are other ways to prevent soiling in the ring, but if you aren’t a real dog person, you’ve probably lost your lunch already, and if you’ve managed to keep it, the other ways would bring it up. I limited myself to assuring Joy that Phyllis was acting perfectly normal. Maybe Eva cleaned up after Bingo as I was watching Phyllis or talking to Joy. Or perhaps Heather relented. I don’t know; I didn’t see.

After that, we again broke into groups and introduced the dogs to the other obstacles. Because of his background in obedience, Rowdy had no trouble with the jumps, including the tire jump, or with the down-stay on the pause table, either. The weave poles weren’t a big hit. They’re a slalom course; the trained dog weaves smoothly left, right, left, right, bending his body to speed through. To Rowdy, the poles must have seemed like a dumb bunch of sticks. We prepared for the balance-beam dogwalk by using a narrow board so close to the ground that I couldn’t convince Rowdy to keep his feet on it.
With Heather’s help, I sent him through the tunnel two more times. The first time, he lingered; the second time, he raced through. We ended where we’d begun, at the A-frame, which was clearly going to be one of Rowdy’s favorite obstacles. In fact, by the end of the class, I knew that Rowdy was ready to have the A-frame raised higher. I didn’t say so, of course. No one wants to sound like Eva Spitteler, who managed to get into a final dispute with the agility people by loudly announcing her intention of returning to the area, raising the heights of the obstacles, and letting Bingo run the course without what she referred to as Heather and Sara’s “interference.”

“
No
one,” Sara informed her icily, “absolutely no one uses this equipment unsupervised. Got it? No one.”

“Oh, yeah?” Eva demanded. “You’re here twenty-four hours a day?”

“Everyone!” Sara called. “This is important.”

When we’d gathered around her, she tactfully explained that someone had raised the question of whether the agility course was available for practice between classes. The answer, Sara said firmly, was no. We all knew about liability, didn’t we? Well, liability wasn’t the reason. The reason was the safety of the dogs. “And could everyone get here a little early tomorrow morning?” she added. “We could use a little help moving the obstacles. So get here good and early.”

As the group broke up, I heard Eva grumble very loudly, “Good and earlier than you will! How’d one
A.M.
do? That early enough for you?”

As Cam, Ginny, and I moved out of Eva’s range, Cam exclaimed, “Talk about
grating!
That woman makes me feel like a piece of Parmesan cheese, for God’s sake!”

In unspoken agreement to get away from Eva as quickly as possible, we gathered up our gear and got our dogs moving, but as we were leaving the clearing to head down the little road and across the field to the obedience tent, Eva and Bingo caught up with us. Even our low-level beginning agility was
decent exercise, and the temperature was rising. Besides, Eva didn’t look exactly fit. She was panting hard. Hauling Bingo around in front of us, Eva came to a halt, turned to face us, spread her feet apart, and planted herself in the road. Lifting a half-pointing finger and glaring directly at me, she said, “You’re a dog writer!”

All I could think of were the old films of the Army-McCarthy hearings. Eva looked and sounded so amazingly like Senator Joseph McCarthy that I was almost tempted to raise my right hand and swear that I was not now and never had been a member of the Dog Writers’ Association of America. But D.W.A.A. is a wonderful organization, and I’m not the kind of disloyal member who’d tailor her conscience to fit the fashion of the times.

“Yes,” I admitted. “I am.”

ONCE EVA SPITTELER had decided that I was a lot more important in the fancy than I really was or ever will be, she abruptly cut the nasty remarks about Rowdy and made an ingratiating pest of herself. She loved
Dog’s Life
, she loved my column, she loved my articles, she loved not only everything about everything I’d ever written but everything about how I’d written it. To Cam, a more accomplished obedience handler and a far greater legal expert on the sport than I’ll ever be, Eva said just about nothing. Ginny’s response to Eva was a little hard to interpret. That Ginny hated the sight of Eva was clear. Ginny’s friendly, ruddy face hardened and faded into what looked like a death mask. Even the braid around her head seemed to turn to clay. I wasn’t sure whether this transformation was merely Ginny’s habitual response to Eva or whether it represented a specific reaction to Eva’s disgusting attack of writer worship. In any case, Cam and Ginny rapidly made their escape down the road.

Eva’s unhappy victim, I remained as pinned as if she’d held a knife to my belly. My cheeks froze in the kind of quirky half-smile
that you see on a dog who’s just about to vomit. Not content with falling all over me, Eva had to fawn over Rowdy, who will strut, preen, cajole, offer his paw, bat his eyes, sing
ah-roos
and
woo-woo-woos
, and, if necessary, fall to the ground and wave his silly big legs in the air to elicit the merest glance of genuine admiration, but who would have nothing of Eva Spitteler and her phony flattery. Bingo, too, was aloof and subdued, altogether a different creature from yesterday’s lunger and the past hour’s A-frame bounder. Tempting though it is to suggest that the big Lab was sympathetically mimicking his owner’s change in attitude, I must report that the real cause of Bingo’s sudden transformation was undoubtedly the heavy-duty pinch collar that now encircled his neck. I wondered whether Maxine McGuire or someone else had ordered Eva to keep Bingo under control.

Eva must have followed my eyes. “I never use that thing,” she said.

Except right now
, I wanted to add. Instead, I said, “I’m not crazy about them, but I use one if I have to.” As you probably know, a pinch collar, otherwise known as prong collar, consists of interlocked metal links. When the handler tightens the collar, the points of the links, the prongs, pinch the dog’s neck. It’s a high-powered and somewhat controversial piece of training equipment, totally banned by some obedience clubs, highly recommended by others. I explained: “Sometimes I help with Malamute Rescue, and if I get a really big, totally untrained dog, sometimes I have to use a pinch collar, or I can’t even take the dog for a walk.”

“Well,” Eva confided, “the truth is that’s more or less my situation with Bingo, not that he’s untrained or anything—he’s really very, very good—but when I got him … Really, what he is, is a rescue dog. I had no idea at the time, but the breeder I went to does
not
socialize her puppies, and she breeds dozens of litters, and, believe me, she charges big bucks, too. This woman has a big, big reputation, and I paid a
fortune for pick of the litter, and how was I supposed to know?”

I shrugged. The unnamed breeder was, of course, Ginny Garabedian.

Eva resumed: “And right from the beginning, I had to work my ass off trying to make up for what that poor puppy had been through, nobody touching him, nobody even speaking a kind word to him, if you ask me. And I still keep thinking, I should’ve known, because when I got there, I wanted to see her kennels, and she would not let me back there. And now I know why, because her house wasn’t exactly clean, but, back there,
it’s filthy.
And from what I hear, nobody but
nobody
gets back there.”

Then how did anyone but Ginny know what condition the kennels were in? I didn’t ask. “Maybe the breeder’s just trying to protect the puppies,” I told Eva. “People can track in anything. They don’t even have to handle the puppies; they can bring things in on their shoes.” Well-meaning visitors can wipe out whole litters by infecting puppies with parvo, distemper, or any number of other diseases.

“Yeah, but that’s not why,” Eva insisted. “What I know now is, she’s got thirty or forty dogs back there, and she never cleans up. What the place is, is just a
puppy mill.”

According to my strict definition, a puppy mill is a wholesale commercial kennel that mass-produces puppies for resale in pet shops. Every once in a while, the fancy discovers in its midst a well-respected breeder whose dirty, crowded, disease-ridden kennel is no better than a puppy mill. Like Masons who find that a member has revealed the secrets of the order, dog fancy henceforth deems such a person, as the Masons phrase it, “devoid of all moral worth.” Any brotherhood, any sisterhood, any order, including the fancy, has a few members unfit to be received into the lodge. But
Ginny?
I’d never actually seen her kennels. I had the impression that she bred very selectively, the best to the best. If I’d had to guess, I’d have
wagered that she bred only a litter or two a year. But how could I really have defended her?
Ginny is one of us
, I could have said.
And you, Eva, very definitely are not.

“Bingo sure doesn’t look like a puppy-mill dog,” I said.

Big mistake. In trying to be kind to Eva, I’d patted an abandoned animal I had no intention of taking home. Eva launched into an intolerably boring and seemingly interminable Bingo-centered monologue that ended only because Rowdy, unassisted by a pinch collar, drowned her out. Malamutes spend hours, sometimes days, without uttering a sound. Old breed joke: They aren’t called
malamute
for nothing. But when they feel like it, they can scream like hungry babies, wail like fire engines, and bellow like moose, all at the same time. I picked up my carrier of scent articles and Rowdy’s little canvas travel bag of assorted dog supplies, pointed to Rowdy, mouthed nonsense syllables, and raced off down the road.