Bloodlines (33 page)

Bending from the waist, Enid Sievers leaned down to the little dog and coyly shook an admonishing finger.
“Friend
, Pedro!
Friend!
Pedro,
hush!
Pedro, Mommy has company!”

Pedro leaped in the air, danced in circles, and kept up the high-pitched barking. Eventually, though, Enid scooped him up in her arms and cooed at him until he quit.

“Pedro is adorable,” I said. “Some terrier there, huh?”

Enid Sievers’s expression was one I recognized immediately. I don’t usually see it, though; I just feel it spread across my own face whenever someone admires my huskies, my shepherd mixes, or, believe it or not, my beautiful Akitas. “Pedro,” she informed me, caressing the dog’s little head, “is a Chihuahua.” I sealed my lips. She read my face and asked in a tone of arch condescension, “You’ve never seen a Chihuahua like Pedro before, have you?”

“No,” I admitted. “Actually, he seems a little, uh, bigger than usual.”

“Well, that’s what
I
said when I first saw him,” Enid Sievers said. “So I said to the salesgirl, ‘Isn’t he big for a Chihuahua?’ But she explained that Pedro is supposed to be big like this because he’s a
standard
Chihuahua,
not just an ordinary one. That’s why he was a little bit extra, of course. They’re
very
rare.”

Rare? The standard Chihuahua is a member of the rarest group of dogs on earth, the AKC’s famous Nonexistent Group, which also contains the mini Saint Bernard, the hairless puli, and the legendary unicorn hound. Pedro came from Puppy Luv. But he must be a Chihuahua, I guess. After all, he has AKC papers to prove it. Enid Sievers showed them to me. She also parted with Missy’s, and, while she was at it, signed a form turning Missy over to Malamute Rescue.

But you don’t care about Enid Sievers, Bill and Janice Coakley, Enzio Guarini, or Cheryl and Walter Simms, do you? You care about what happened to the dogs. Walter Simms’s arrest and the raid on the Simmses’ puppy mill resulted in the removal of all dogs from Cheryl Simms’s custody, but she managed to get back Champ, who obviously hadn’t been abused, and six of the small dogs, none of them spayed or neutered. The court felt sorry for Cheryl because of her diminished capacity and her sad history. I’m sorry for her, too, but I don’t believe that the dogs should have been returned to her. The court paid too much attention to Cheryl’s mental limitations and too little attention to her real disability: She has a diminished capacity for kindness.

And the other dogs? The Eleanor J. Colley Society and local purebred rescue organizations took most of them, but Lorraine, Rhonda, Pete, and the rest of Steve’s staff fell in love with the golden retriever bitch. They named her Val—Valentine, of course. High-quality protein was a wonder drug. Val’s litter was very small, only three puppies, but they all survived. Because of superb veterinary care, Val is doing very well, and the puppies, now cured of the intestinal parasites to which they were exposed before birth, are little golden teddy bears come to life. After a really terrible fight, Rhonda gave in and said that Pete could take Val if she could have pick of the litter. Lorraine is taking one of the remaining two
pups, and the third, a darling little male, has been promised to a carefully selected client, a guy named Ron Coughlin, who’s my plumber as well as the treasurer of the Cambridge Dog Training Club.

Missy’s sire, Yukon Duke, the male malamute who growled at me, went to Malamute Rescue, of course. When I visited him in his isolation kennel at Betty Burley’s and got my first good look at him, I felt heartsick. It’s hard to find good homes for beautiful, friendly, young dogs. What in God’s name would we do with this rangy, badly proportioned, cranky ten-year-old? And the damn thing was that despite the horrible life he’d led, Duke was perfectly healthy. Also, although he didn’t have the ideal malamute temperament, he wasn’t vicious, just reserved, crotchety, and, of all things, protective. Even so, absolutely no one would want to adopt him. These decisions are terribly hard to make, but Duke was taking up space at Betty’s that we might need for a friendly, young, readily adoptable rescue dog. His situation seemed hopeless.

Fortunately, though, reality is not my father’s strong point. Buck is convinced that one of these days, the right adoptive owner will come along, and, until then, the now-neutered Duke will live in Owls Head.

The raiding party discovered Icekist Sissy inside the tumbledown broiler farm. She’d given birth to a litter about three months earlier. Her coat was a thin, ragged mess, and she was suffering from malnutrition. Also, she was frightened of almost everything. But, to my surprise, Lois Metzler made good on her promise to take responsibility for Sissy. Lois paid her vet bills, including the cost of spaying, and she’s even paying Betty to board Sissy until we can place her. It may take a while. Sissy needs a very special home. She’s not a typical malamute, of course. You can already see that once she puts on a little more weight and gets her coat back, she’ll be gorgeous, but she’s hand shy and rear shy. Loud noises startle her. She’s terrified of strangers. Even the most
gentle word of correction makes her cringe. Amazingly enough, though, she loves other animals, especially cats.

Missy, too, is still looking for a good home. It’s only fair to warn you that she’ll shed copiously about twice a year. Also, she’s tremendously strong, she isn’t great with cats, and she turns out to be a food thief, too. But she’s healthy, outgoing, spayed, fully housebroken, very pretty, and, at least for an Alaskan malamute, she’s almost docile. Interested?

And the malamute puppy at Puppy Luv? When John Sweet reopened the pet shop two weeks after his wife’s murder, I tried to talk him into letting me leave some breed and obedience-training information with the puppy’s papers, but he refused. One day in Harvard Square, though, I happened to spot the puppy, and I talked to the couple who bought her. The wife is an assistant professor of economics at Harvard, and the husband has a Ph.D. in biology. Educated people, right? And decent people, too. But when they came to my house to meet Rowdy and Kimi and to pick up some information about malamutes, I tried to suggest that they might consider buying their puppy chow someplace other than Puppy Luv. I explained that pet shops that sell dogs support the puppy mill industry. A Harvard professor and a Ph.D., right? Economics and biology. They asked me what a puppy mill was. Believe me, I told them. They listened, too.

And you? We can close the puppy mills, you know, we really can. The AKC won’t do it, and the USDA won’t do it. We will. Remember, we’re everyone, and we’re everywhere, and, before long, none of us will buy so much as a single morsel of premium kibble from a pet shop that sells dogs. Peace will come. Let it begin with us.

S
USAN
C
ONANT
, the recipient of 1991 and 1992 Maxwell Awards for Fiction Writing, lives in Massachusetts with her husband, two cats, and an Alaskan malamute. Her work has been published in
Pure-Bred Dogs/American Kennel Gazette
and
DOGworld.
She is a member of the Alaskan Malamute Club of America and is the state coordinator of the Alaskan Malamute Protection league.

If you enjoyed
Susan Conant’s
BLOODLINES,
you’ll want to read her latest
dog lover’s mystery,

STUD RITES

available now in paperback from
Bantam Books
Look for it at your bookstore!