Black Ribbon

scarring it with impatient paws.
    The lake was as flat as it had been the night before, but brilliant, a glass that reflected the clear sky, the morning light, and the pines along the shore. In the shallow water near the dock, fish jumped. Like droplets from a miniature cloudburst, tiny circles appeared on the surface. Straight out from the dock, a big fish jumped, a predator, maybe, in search of minnows. A door slammed shut. I leaped like one of the fish and jerked my head toward the Abbotts’ side of the deck. Their door was closed, their blinds drawn.
    A man whistled softly and called, “Elsa! Elsa!”
    Rowdy caught sight of the Chesapeake before I did and, finding me slow to fly after her, hit the end of his leather lead and bounded down the stairs dragging me after him.
    “Easy!” I told him. “Easy!” Serious obedience people don’t believe in wasting all the work we’ve spent training our dogs on the inconsequential situations presented by real life. We reserve commands like “Heel,” “Down,” and “Come” for the context in which the dog’s behavior actually matters: competition. But train your dog, anyway! When I’m bouncing down a flight of steps behind Rowdy, at least it’s by choice. “Easy!”
    Flashing his eyes in Elsa’s direction in the futile hope that the sight of a macho male malamute anointing a tree would check her urge to hit the water, Rowdy paused at a pine and lifted his leg so high that he almost lost his balance.
    “Dream on,” I told him.
    As Rowdy was lowering his leg, a bleary-eyed Eric appeared and greeted me. He wore tan swimming trunks and a souvenir sweatshirt from last year’s Chesapeake Bay Retriever National Specialty, and carried Elsa’s blue-and-white rubber toy. Pausing momentarily, Elsa turned her head, caught Eric’s eye, and threw him a hopeful glance of defiance, as if all she needed to complete her joy was his disapproval. He laughed and said, “Elsa always likes to think she’s getting away with something, even when she isn’t.” Beaming at Elsa, he held up the toy and clambered down the slope toward the dock. Rowdy and I followed. Another fish jumped, and without waiting for Eric to toss her toy, Elsa tore down the length of the dock, hit the lake, and vanished beneath the surface in apparent pursuit.
    “Has she ever actually caught a fish?” I asked. I was eager to believe Elsa capable of almost everything. It’s a view shared by all admirers of the Chesapeake, every sensible person who has ever known one.
    Eric shook his head. “No, but she’ll go under after rocks. If she’s in a cooperative mood, she’ll go after one for me, retrieve the one I throw.”
    As I was trying to imagine Elsa in a cooperative mood, her head bobbed up and disappeared. Rowdy stirred and made a high-pitched noise of impatience or, perhaps, of apprehension.
    “How deep does she go?” I asked.
    With a modest shrug, Eric said, “Well, not like a Portuguese Water Dog. I don’t know, most of the time, not more than five or six feet. But a while ago, she... uh, I was visiting some people who had a pool, and I tried keeping her out, but she went down to the bottom of pool, at the deep end, and that must’ve been ten or twelve feet. They had her retrieving things from there. She knew she had a crowd, and she was showing off. Most of the time, it’s not that deep. You can usually see the tip of her tail sticking out.”
    When I’d last seen Elsa’s head, she’d been close to the area where Phyllis had attacked me, in what I guessed was seven or eight feet of water, certainly at a depth well over my head. “Not—” I started to say.
    “What the...?”
    Elsa had surfaced with a shiny object in her mouth and was swimming toward the dock. What the morning sun had caught, what Elsa may even have seen as a sluggish perch or a languid trout, was a metal object that it took me a second to identify. At first, I wasn’t sure, but as Elsa approached the dock, I moved out ahead of Rowdy, went striding down the wooden boards, came to a halt at the end, and got a good look. Clamped in Elsa’s mouth was a piece of an agility obstacle, one of the smallest, heaviest parts of any obstacle: one of the iron legs of the pause table. Having glimpsed an interesting object underwater, Elsa had done what Chesapeakes do: She’d retrieved it. And what Elsa had retrieved was Phyllis Abbott’s backup plan for me, the one she’d dropped when I’d fallen for the drowning-swimmer