Black Ribbon

shop. I just didn’t know.” She massaged the little dog’s big, hairy ears. “He isn’t show quality. We had him neutered.” She took a breath. “But Lucky is a very good dog. He’s great with kids, he loves everyone, and he’s so smart. I didn’t want a show dog, anyway. I just wanted a pet.”
    I could almost read the words about to spring from the pendulous lips of Eva’s pushed-in bulldog face: You sure got one , she was about to say. Person-to-person and in my Dog’s Life column and articles, I am an ardent bad-mouther of pet shops, the puppy mills that supply them, and the entire wholesale commercial dog industry. But Joy had already gotten the message.
    I spoke up. “Lucky has a very sweet face.”
    Joy’s whole body radiated pleasure. “Thank you. But your dog is really beautiful.”
    “Thanks.” I felt awkward, as if I’d made a polite remark about some ghastly art-object of Joy’s, a Day-Glo matador on black velvet, a lamp in the shape of Michelangelo’s David, and in return, she’d praised my Rembrandt.
    “Good-looking dog,” conceded Eva, eyes on Rowdy. “Maybe a little small for the breed,” she told Joy, “but he’s still a good-looking dog.”
    I am the first person to admit to the faults in my dogs. Kimi lacks Rowdy’s perfect ear set. One of my goldens, Danny, had a gay tail; he carried it a little too far above the horizontal. Gay has nothing to do with sexual preference, by the way; in fact, whenever Danny was anywhere near a bitch in season, I always wished it did.
    “Which breed did you have in mind?” I asked Eva.
    She looked baffled.
    “Never mind,” I said. Be a tree. But on another occasion, I realized, maybe I actually would rather get bitten.
     

 
    “EVA SPITTELER is a prize b-i-t-c-h.”
    Cam White lowered her voice to spell out the word. Even without the special treatment, the bitch -as-in-s.o.b. meaning would have been unambiguous, and as for prize, well, if Eva had been the only dog entered in a kiddie pet parade, she still wouldn’t have made it into the ribbons.
    To get away from Eva and Bingo, I’d pretended to have forgotten something in my cabin. After I returned there and waited a few minutes, I reemerged and immediately spotted two Lodge sisters, Cam White and Ginny Garabedian. I’d seen Cam in the ring, and we’d hung around together at shows, but I also knew her from photos in Front and Finish, which perhaps I should explain is the official publication of the Exhausted Order of Obedience Fanatics, a monthly tabloid for dog trainers that’s crammed with pictures of OTCH dogs (Obedience Trial Champions); ads for equipment, videos, trials, and, yes, indeed, dog camps; and chatty, informative columns about everything from the evils of animal-rights extremism to the methods of the top handlers to what are euphemistically referred to as the “challenges” of working with northern breeds. (Front and Finish, P.O. Box 333, Galesburg, IL 61402-0333. See? We aren’t a secret society at all.)
    As I was explaining, Cam White had an OTCH sheltie named Nicky who appeared in Front and Finish in his own right, sometimes with a grinning Cam at his side, and who also inspected the reader from the photo at the top of Cam’s column, which was about the fine points of the obedience regulations. In the typical column, Cam presented a scoring dilemma that she then resolved. At a recent outdoor trial, a reader would write, mine was the first dog in Open A. On the Retrieve on Flat, he was casting back and forth in long grass looking for his dumbbell when he came across what the spectators later described as the remains of a peanut butter sandwich. After wolfing it down, he gave a loud burp and then promptly located and retrieved the dumbbell. The judge took a substantial deduction. Shouldn’t we have been allowed to repeat the exercise? And Cam would discuss the judge’s obligation to inspect the ring, distinguish between the excess length of the grass and the presence of the sandwich, explain that the judge could have permitted the dog to repeat the exercise, opine that the deduction was for slowness in retrieving rather than for eating or burping, lament the failure of clubs to follow the regulations stating that grass is supposed to be “cut short,” and argue that the regulations should be revised to specify precisely how short, preferably in millimeters. Then she’d launch into the fascinating theoretical question of whether burping alone merited a