Animal Appetite

ashen, and the temperature had dropped thirty degrees. The heavy rain that slicked the highway seeped into the interior of the van to reawaken the odor of every dog Steve had ever transported in it. By the time we reached Concord, New Hampshire, we’d had to stop twice to clean up after Lady, Steve’s pointer, who sometimes gets carsick.
    As the miles and minutes passed, my relationship with Steve smelled more and more like a sick, wet dog. Neither of us said anything about my father, his mother, Thanksgiving, or his impending post-Thanksgiving trip home to Minneapolis.
    “If you’d fed her gingersnaps the way I told you,” ' said, “she wouldn’t have thrown up.”
    He didn’t reply.
    “You should’ve given her Bonine. We should’ve stopped in Nashua or Manchester and found a drugstore.”
    “If I want a consult, I’ll hire a consultant.” He peered at the highway and leaned forward to wipe the fogged-up windshield. “With a degree in veterinary medicine.”
    “As a matter of fact, I wrote an article about car sickness, and obviously, I know more about it than you do. My dogs aren’t throwing up.” Neither was India, Steve’s other dog. Furthermore, I hadn’t fed Rowdy and Kimi gingersnaps, dosed them with Bonine, or done anything else to prevent a malady from which neither had ever suffered. Steve nobly refrained from saying so.
    “Which exit is it?” he asked.
    “Next one. Seventeen. When we get off, we follow the sign for Penacook, but we go only a half mile or so. The island’s actually in a town called Boscawen. The parking area’s supposed to be on the left.”
    And it was. When we turned in, the rain was pouring down, and I wanted Steve to stop so that I could take a picture of the green historic marker from inside the van, but he kept going. “You can get one on the way back,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”
    “I didn’t make you come! You volunteered. I could have driven here by myself. In case you’ve forgotten, we decided it would be a chance for us to spend some time together.”
    Steve parked next to a path that led down a hill toward the river. Rowdy, who hates to get wet, balked at leaving his crate. Once we were all out of the van, Kimi directed an unprovoked growl at India, who looked to Steve for guidance.
    “You ought to get that under control,” he said to me.
    There’s no need for it.”
    “If I want a consult, I’ll hire a consultant,” I snapped.
    “Preferably an expert in animal behavior, by which I don’t mean a vet.” Veterinarians don’t necessarily know anything about dog behavior, but Steve is as good a dog trainer as I am. In some ways he’s better because he’s more patient than I am. India had her U.D.—Utility Dog title—-and was working on her U.D.X. The X is for excellent, and excellent is just what she is. The title Perfect Bitch obviously belonged to someone other than India. In the eyes of Steve and all four dogs, I read the message that we should have stayed home.
    Fortunately, as we started down the path, the rain stopped, the sky brightened, and our foul moods began to evaporate. When I’d called the New Hampshire Historical Society for directions, I’d envisioned the scene of Hannah’s massacre as a small and perhaps inaccessible island in the middle of the Merrimack, which I imagined as wide, rocky, and turbulent, bubbling with the confluent waters of the Contoocook River. To my surprise, I’d been told that there was a footbridge. I pictured a narrow, rustic suspension bridge with footing that might prove treacherous to the dogs. By now, the entire episode of Hannah’s captivity had acquired such significance in my mind that it never occurred to me that anyone would have marred the site by running railroad tracks straight through the island. In all my reading, I might mention, I’d come across only one other person, a man, Leslie Fiedler, who found Hannah as consequential as I did. According to Fiedler, Hannah’s story represented the characteristically American and feminist recasting of the European myth of the damsel in distress. What weakened a lot of the points he made, however, was his failure to get the facts right. According to Fiedler, the Haverhill Hannah was a stone monument of a woman in a sunbonnet who held a tomahawk in a “delicate” hand. Bronze, no hat, a hatchet, not a tomahawk, and a hand toughened by rough work. A hand, in fact, like mine. Furthermore, central to Fiedler’s argument was