Black Ribbon

the remaining article. Easy? So you try it! What makes the scent discrimination interesting is that the dog doesn’t just zip out and instantly grab the right article. Rather, the dog examines the articles, compares them, checks himself, mulls over his thoughts, and reaches a decision. If you don’t believe that dogs think, you’ve never seen a dog work in Utility.
    Or that’s how it’s supposed to be, and that’s how it was until Edwina reached the articles. After one cursory sniff, instead of going about her work, the little dog turned abruptly to face Phyllis and threw her a puzzled and almost startled look, as if to demand what new and weird training trick her handler was trying now. Eager not to interfere with Edwina’s work, Irma gave Phyllis a questioning glance. Phyllis shrugged her shoulders and kept watching Edwina, who was now circling the diminutive dumbbells and examining them in a normal, if somewhat suspicious, fashion. After twenty or thirty seconds, Edwina zeroed in on the correct article, a leather dumbbell, but she’d no sooner picked it up than she immediately dropped it. In fact, she didn’t just let it fall; she spat it out.
    “Something is very wrong,” said Phyllis, striding rapidly to the baffled and anxious-looking little dog, who was now scouring her muzzle with her tongue and coughing lightly, as if trying to rid her mouth of a bad taste. After speaking softly to Edwina, Phyllis kneeled on the ground, peered at the articles, and sniffed. Then Phyllis did the sensible, repulsive thing: She picked up one of the leather dumbbells and gave it a light lick. Her whole face puckered. Shaking with rage, she rose to her feet and addressed not only Irma but everyone else under the bright striped tent. “Someone,” she announced, “has tampered with my articles. They have been deliberately treated with some bitter substance. This is a vile thing to do to me, and it is a vile thing to do to my dog. And don’t you dare try and tell me that this is any accident!”
     

 
    IT HAD ALWAYS SEEMED to me that in the world of, ahem, literary endeavor, my fellow dog writers and I enjoyed the unique privilege of not having to work very hard at what we did. I’d felt particularly sorry for our human-writing brethren, cursed to sweat over so intractably complex a subject as human nature while we got to scribble and jot in effortless celebration of creatures who were simply wonderful. Every time I’d ever tried to plunge out of the genre and into the so-called mainstream of dogless fiction, my tedious human characters would sit around boring themselves and their creator until, against my will and sometimes theirs as well, a dog would suddenly vault in, dig its teeth into my story, and after a tug of war that I inevitably lost, drag me out of the mainstream, where I was drowning anyway, and back to the canine shores where I could breathe again. Years ago, desperate for cash to special a dog, I’d gotten halfway through writing a promisingly trashy and exclusively human romance novel, but then a golden retriever had leaped in and stolen the plot, and I’d given up the project as hopelessly unpublishable. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is, after all, more demand for canine romances than I dared to hope.
    I threw out the manuscript, but I still have the title, and that’s a start.
    Heartworms.
    All this is to say that at quarter of twelve on that same Monday morning, I sat at the little desk in my cabin, stared at a blank sheet of yellow legal pad, and realized that I had something in common with Phyllis and Edwina: Someone had contaminated my article and left a foul taste in my mouth. I reminded myself that all writing is selective. I rationalized: To write is inevitably to transform. I tried to silence my conscience with scraps of an Ogden Nash verse, something about sins of commission and sins of omission, but either Nash or my own sense of humor let me down. I tried to think that what I wrote didn’t really matter, because Bonnie would edit it anyway, and she’d certainly get rid of the pranks, the bad feeling, the gossip, even the loathsome Eva Spitteler.
    Immediately after Edwina’s unhappy encounter with what everyone suspected was Bitter Apple or a similar antichew product, while Phyllis, Jennifer, Irma, and a few others were discussing techniques for de-scenting scent articles, Eva had barged into the obedience tent, issued loud complaints about the doggy swimming lessons,