Black Ribbon

rule!” Maxine McGuire exclaimed cheerfully. “Were you going to snitch on me?”
    I laughed nervously. “Of course not. I was just soaking my feet and enjoying the night.”
    Maxine pattered down the dock, picked up a towel I hadn’t noticed, and started to give herself a rubdown. “I never get a chance to swim anymore, but after dinner, ten people started pawing and nipping at me like teething puppies, and I said to myself, ‘What die heck! It’s my camp.’ And I feel a lot better now.”
    “They were upset about the sympathy cards?”
    “Oh, yeah, that and those darned silly brochures. Some joker left a lot of stuff about pet cemeteries and things, all mixed up with the dog magazines I put out. It’s just someone’s dumb idea of a practical joke. You watch. Next thing, he’ll go around short-sheeting the beds. It’s camp; you’ve got to expect it.”
    “Phyllis Abbott didn’t take it quite that way,” I pointed out.
    Max wrapped the towel around herself. “Well, if I may say so, neither did you. Get up early tomorrow morning, Holly, and let your friend there try lure coursing. It’s in the field by the parking lot. Six-fifteen. He’ll love it.”
    Back in my cabin, as I was brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed, I decided to take Maxine’s advice. Stupid practical jokes didn’t deserve any attention at all. I’d get up early and let Rowdy chase a plastic bag. I was just opening the front window when Don Abbott’s voice reached me. It sounded a little thick. The Abbotts, too, must have opened the front window, and Don must have been near it. I couldn’t make out his words. He rumbled something, paused, and issued what sounded like a question. I assumed that, as usual, he was using the portable phone. He spoke and paused a couple of times. Then the call apparently ended. A few seconds later, I caught Phyllis’s voice. Don replied. His tone was angry and unmistakably demeaning. Until then, I’d heard only speech contours, intonations, patterns. This time, I understood one word. In dog fancy, of course, overhearing the word bitch is in itself meaningless. Don Abbott could have been talking about or maybe even to Edwina, the Pom. What gave the word its nasty charge was the way Don spoke it. I was certain he wasn’t speaking to or about a female dog. To my ear, he didn’t sound like a dog person at all. He just sounded like an ugly drunk swearing at his sober wife.
     

 
    IN THE EARLY LIGHT of that Monday morning, the elusive white prey that zipped around the green field ahead of wolf-gray Rowdy might have been an Arctic hare, a ptarmigan, or some other little snow-white creature that fled, tarried, veered, zoomed out of reach, slowed to a tantalizing creep, turned a corner, and sped off again. Flashing across the field, hindquarters driving, forelegs reaching, body stretched, dark coat glistening, Rowdy became the soul of dog made manifest: a mythic creature of the Inuit pantheon, Primal Dog, Every Dog, Essence of Dog Itself. The prey at last between his teeth, Rowdy shook his head once, very hard, thus efficiently snapping the neck of the plastic bag.
    An hour later, after I’d fed and crated Rowdy, taken a wake-up shower, and observed Elsa the Chesapeake as she intently rearranged the rocks at the edge of the lake, I was sitting in the dining room at a windowside table that gave a great view °f the lure coursing. When I glanced out, two basenjis were sprinting around the field giving all the other dogs—and one malamute owner—a little demonstration of precisely how the sport was supposed to be practiced. I didn’t mind. Far from it. I feel an odd sort of breed loyalty toward basenjis, which in most essential points of character are small, short-haired, barkless, curly-tailed African malamutes, creatures that had once had to fend for themselves.
    My breakfast tray contained a glass of orange juice, a big plate of scrambled eggs, a little plate of giant blueberry muffins, and a cup of not-bad coffee, the entire meal prepared by someone other than me in a kitchen to be cleaned by someone other than me and served on dishes to be washed by someone other than me. I was alone at the table. Neither Eva Spitteler nor Don Abbott was even in the dining room. The people at the other tables were strangers to me. I knew them anyway; they all had dogs. Back out in the real world, some people had dogs, some didn’t, and all too many of those with dogs didn’t actually understand dogs and