Black Ribbon

deduction and, if it did, how many points it should cost.
    The obsessive streak evident in Cam’s dog writing harmonized with her almost compulsive neatness. Her clothes retained visible creases—deliberate ones, that is—and her short, dark hair waved in evenly spaced rows of controlled curls. Her lipstick never smudged. Her mascara never ran. She arrived at shows with her gear meticulously packed in clever canvas cases she’d designed and sewn herself. Nicky was always under perfect control. Although the Shetland sheepdog is to the rough-coated collie what the Shetland pony is to the full-size horse, sheltie people resent having their dogs demeaned as miniature collies. Thus I hesitate to report that the sable-and- I white Nicky really looked a lot like a rerun of Lassie on a very I small screen.
    Cam was in her early or midthirties, about my age. Ginny I Garabedian, her companion and cabinmate at Waggin’ Tail, I looked about sixty, as she’d done for the ten years I’d known I her and would probably continue to do for another two or I three decades. An AKC tracking judge and breeder of Labrador retrievers, Ginny was a compact, sturdy person who I braided her gray hair into an extremely long plait that she I wrapped around and around her head and fastened tightly in I place. Bareheaded, she looked as if she wore an elaborately I woven basket upturned on her head. Like a lot of tracking I people, however, she frequently wore a real hat, and when I first met her, the double chapeau effect always made me wonder whether Ginny had some haberdashery-specific neurological disorder that caused her to perceive two hats as one.
    After a while, though, I learned to ignore the oddity of Ginny’s head. For one thing, I ran into her a lot and got used I to it. She showed in breed, casually and routinely put Novice I obedience titles on her dogs, taught tracking clinics, attended j seminars on canine nutrition and diseases, wrote a few articles I for the dog magazines, belonged to D.W.A.A.—the Dog I Writers’ Association of America—and otherwise gaited my I own rings of the haut monde du chien. For another thing, I I learned something about Ginny that diverted me from her I trivial quirk of appearance, namely, that she had outlived five I husbands. I was astounded. Topped by the plait alone, Ginny I had a vigorous, outdoorsy, and distinctly unisex attractiveness. I If she’d been a bird, I thought, she’d have belonged to some I appealing species shown in the field guides with a single illustration and the notation “sexes alike.” After I heard about the five dead husbands, I wondered about them whenever I saw Ginny. So complete was her dedication to dogs that I found it difficult to imagine her being interested in one man, never mind five, unless they’d all looked like Labrador retrievers. Or maybe, with canine opportunism, she’d married the men to support her dogs. If the full truth be known, I also wondered what had killed the five husbands and how much life insurance each had carried. As it turned out, everyone else in dogs harbored the same suspicions about Ginny that I did. Never having been married, however, I kept mine to myself until the day a dog acquaintance of Ginny’s and mine confronted me on the subject. “Look,” she said, “here are the rest of us, fighting and scheming and begging whenever it’s time to get a new show puppy, and then there’s Ginny, and, I mean, you have to ask yourself: What did she do to deserve that kind of luck?”
    “Prize b-i-t-c-h,” Cam repeated. “And in my area, everywhere you go, there’s Eva.” Cam’s area, if I remembered correctly, was New York or New Jersey. By everywhere, she did not mean supermarkets, movie theaters, and dinner parties; she meant only the places that counted. “You can’t go to a show without seeing her! And she is so obnoxious. She’ll stand outside the breed rings and say awful things about everyone’s dogs—”
    “At the top of her lungs, too,” added Ginny, who was not, by the way, wearing a hat. We were standing in the shade of a big old white birch midway between my cabin and the main lodge.
    “Yes,” Cam agreed, “and she doesn’t know what she’s talk-lng about, either, and Ginny, I am really sorry to say this, but that dog does not belong on the grounds of an AKC show.” Cam and her husband, I remembered, had connections at AKC. Among other things, he was a delegate. For AKC types like Cam—and like me,