Black Ribbon

bribery. No dinners, no flowers, no candy, no liquor, no offer of bed and board, no ride from the airport or to the next show, either, nothing that could compromise the judge’s appearance of impartiality. As I refrained from mentioning, the average judge doesn’t really care about such inducements, anyway; the real temptation to the typical judge is the prospect of more judging assignments, preferably at prestigious shows in attractive locations.
    Then I turned to judicial authority and, specifically, to the matter of what questions it was and was not all right to ask a judge. According to the AKC guidelines, conformation judges “should answer questions, but normally not about their placements and certainly not about a competitor.... Judges should never discuss the relative merits of another entry with a competing owner or handler.” Obedience judges are “allowed to engage in a discussion on an individual dog’s performance with its handler.” Forbidden to all judges is any conversation whatsoever with a disgruntled exhibitor. It is fine to request a judge’s opinion, but to question the opinion is to make it impossible for the judge to continue the conversation.
    I noticed the time, realized that I was ravenous, dropped my pen, rushed Rowdy out for a quick walk, crated him, and headed for the lodge. For once, there were few dogs and few people in sight. At the edge of the woods between my group of cabins and the bunkhouse, the sweet-tempered, long-haired Akita, Jacob, sniffed at a tree stump, lifted his leg, sniffed again, and, evidently satisfied, ambled along in apparent pursuit of new odors to’ cover. From the human end of Jacob’s flex lead, perhaps ten feet from the dog, Michael waved to me. I waved back. Pulling an additional five or six feet of the cordlike lead from the plastic case in Michael’s hand, Jacob followed an invisible trail along the rough ground. Patiently waiting, Michael stood still. If I remember correctly, he didn’t even move the hand that held the lead—he certainly didn’t try to reel Jacob in—and Jacob didn’t leap, lunge, or do anything else to strain the cord. To all appearances, it broke entirely on its own. I was amazed. I’d used those flex leads since they’d first appeared on the market, and so had almost every other dog person I knew, including other malamute people with untrained dogs that pulled even harder than mine did. We trusted those leads. You could crack and ruin one by dropping the plastic case on a hard surface; the unwary person who grabbed the cord got a terrible rope burn; and every now and then, the cord would get temporarily fouled up inside the case. But I’d never even heard of the cord, the lead itself, just breaking.
    My loose-dog instincts awakened, I got some liver from my pocket and walked smoothly toward Jacob, but as soon as Michael called, the big dog went right to him. When I reached them, Michael had Jacob by the collar. I didn’t really expect Michael to know why the lead had snapped. I asked anyway.
    “No idea.” He offered me the plastic case.
    I examined it. It looked exactly like the two I owned, except that the one I’d brought to camp bore a stripe of adhesive tape with “Winter” printed in black laundry marker. And mine wasn’t broken. Was it?
    “Have you dropped it?” I asked. “Has anything happened to it?”
    Michael shook his head.
    I said the obvious. “Jacob’s a powerful dog. Does he pull hard on it? Put any strain on it?” I don’t know why I asked. Kimi routinely strained my identical leads—same brand, same twenty-six-foot length—running around in circles, and she’d never seemed to do them any harm.
    “No. All I can think of is that something went wrong inside the case. There’s a spring in there.”
    When the lead had broken, Michael must have been too startled to press the trigger on the handle. The loose length of cord had retracted all the way inside the case. The other end was still attached to Jacob, a short length of ordinary flat nylon lead securely snapped to his collar, then the thin, strong cord, the part meant to retract inside the case. I followed it to its end, held it, stared at it, and wished that I knew something —anything at all—about how to tell whether a rope has simply broken or whether it’s been deliberately cut. To my ignorant eye, the cord showed no signs of wear. It certainly wasn’t frayed. Except at the end, where it had broken quite cleanly, it looked