Black Ribbon

scared of bloat than I already am.”
    I said, “It’s like that stuff that was left in the lodge last night, all those brochures for gravestones and things. It’s depressing, and nobody wants to think about it, but that’s pretty much it. And the sympathy cards. The point is, I guess, to get us worried. But Jennifer’s right. We’re the people who do take precautions. So we’re the people who ought to be least scared.”
    “You’re missing the point,” Phyllis said. “The point is that we’re the perfect targets for this kind of campaign. The reason we take precautions is that we know these threats exist and we know our dogs are vulnerable and we’ll do anything to protect them. Is Mr. Pet Owner on the Street worried about kennel cough? Of course not. Mr. Pet Owner doesn’t even know it exists, or if he does, and if he’s had his dog immunized, he thinks that means his dog’s one-hundred-percent protected. Believe me, this is not a campaign to frighten the pet people. It’s a campaign directed against us. ”
    “It’s just Eva,” someone said. “Glutton for attention. Jealous of everyone else.”
    “Well, I for one intend to ignore it,” Jennifer said.
    The other woman nodded. I did, too. I disagreed with almost everything Phyllis had said. Although pet people probably weren’t as informed as we were, I thought that they loved their dogs as much as we did and tried as hard as we did to protect them; and I saw no evidence of a scare campaign targeted at show and obedience people. Whether Eva or someone else was responsible for the brochures, cards, and clippings, I agreed with the policy of doing nothing. “Who-ever’s doing this,” I said, “wants to make trouble. The best thing to do is not let that happen. Just like training dogs. You make the result interesting, the behavior’s going to increase; you make the result boring, the behavior’s going to stop.”
    “It’s only serious if we take it seriously,” someone said. “We have fun, it’s going to stop.”
    And we did have fun, or at least I did. Watching top handlers work their dogs is always interesting. I returned to Rowdy, released him, and settled down on the grass to watch Cam, Jennifer, and a couple of other people who had a lot to teach me. Cam and Ginny continued to grumble about not getting what they’d paid for, but I felt satisfied to loll in the shade and stroke Rowdy’s head while I studied the beautiful handling of the real pros and the almost incredible precision of their wonderful dogs. Top handlers and their dogs move with the control and grace of dancers. Cam and Nicky, in particular, were the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire of dog obedience. I wished that Cam were the instructor and that we were taking a course on footwork. On the left turn, you almost never actually see a dog remain in perfect heel position, body parallel to the handler’s, every single second. As I watched Nicky, I briefly wished for a sheltie and even thought about asking Cam whether she intended to breed him. On reflection, I realized that if I moved like Cam, I’d give Rowdy at least half a chance to move like Nicky. And if Rowdy had observed the dogs as intently as I observed the handlers, he’d have felt humbled, too. Malamutes jump on power, and Rowdy jumped very well indeed, but when Jennifer’s Doberman, Delilah, took her jumps, I caught my breath, cursed to myself, shook my head, and grinned.
    While Jennifer and Delilah were working, Phyllis Abbott was warming up Edwina, her Pomeranian bitch. As a team, Phyllis and Edwina, despite the disparity in size, were well matched. Both were bright-eyed, quick, and animated. When their turn came, Phyllis clapped her hands softly. “Let’s have fun! Let’s play!” she told Edwina.
    By the time I was deciding on the color of my Pomeranian, Irma, acting as her own steward, was laying out Phyllis’s scent articles at the far side of the ring. The idea of the exercise is simple: There are ten articles—most people use dumbbells—-five leather and five metal. Someone, usually a steward, arrays eight of them, four leather and four metal, about twenty feet from the dog and handler, who face away from the articles. The handler scents one of the remaining two articles, which is placed with the unscented ones. On the judge’s command, the team turns to face the articles, and the handler commands the dog to find and retrieve the one the handler scented. Then the exercise is repeated with