Black Ribbon

a plate from the spread on the buffet table, I quickly assembled a sandwich, wrapped it in a napkin, left the lodge, wandered down to the dock in front of my cabin, and made my way past Heather and Sara. They were lying flat on the dock as if they’d intended to sunbathe, but had forgotten to undress first. Heather, lean and fit, now looked thin and pinched. The effect of the bright sun and the lake’s glare on Sara’s face reminded me of one of those wildly unflattering photographs of what people look like before cosmetic surgery. At the end of the dock, I removed my shoes and socks, sat down, soaked my feet in the lake, and ate food I couldn’t taste. Also, I eavesdropped. I’d previously heard Heather and Sara hold a few minor debates about matters related to agility, for instance, whether a dog was or wasn’t ready to try something new. Otherwise, they’d spoken with one voice, Sara’s soft and warm, Heather’s a little sharp, perhaps, but one voice nonetheless. Now, however, they were engaged in disjointed argument.
    Heather’s voice had lost its occasional edge to become steadily acerbic. “Look, Sara, face reality!” she demanded. “It was a booby trap, okay? Nobody goes out in the middle of the night to work a dog; you don’t, I don’t, and Eva Spitteler didn’t, either. What she was out there doing was trying to rig the A-frame so it’d collapse under the first dog—or the first big dog, anyway. She hated me, she was jealous of both of us, and she wanted to make us look bad.”
    “But nothing would have happened,” Sara insisted. “The fact is that the first thing we would’ve done would’ve been to check the obstacles. One of us would’ve found out! Okay, so maybe there’s a remote possibility that it might have collapsed on, or more likely under, one of us, if we hadn’t actually looked at the hinges. But there wasn’t a chance that a dog would’ve been hurt. Not a chance!” she finished breathlessly.
    “You’re missing the point. We know a dog wouldn’t’ve gotten hurt. But Eva didn’t know that! And what if we’d—”
    “We wouldn’t have. We always check.”
    “Sara, yesterday, after the Canine Good Citizen test, we started moving things, and it’s just remotely possible, you know, that this morning we would’ve said, ‘Well, the A-frame’s okay, because we just checked it yesterday afternoon.’ ”
    “You know what, Heather? I don’t know! All I really know is that those pins didn’t just jump out of the hinges! They didn’t slip out, fall out, drop out; they were in tight. How they ended up on the ground is one thing. But how one of them ended up under her... But if she was stupid enough to go under the A-frame and undo the chains, maybe she was stupid enough to—”
    Heather snapped, “Remove the pins from the hinges and then go under it? And then stand with all that weight over your head and undo the chains and try and move it? Nobody’s that stupid. But maybe...” Her voice trailed off.
    The two women fell silent. One of them sighed. In muted tones, they began to discuss their plans for next summer. Sara pointed out, correctly, I thought, that in agility, a reputation for unsafe equipment was a disaster. No matter how much people respected or liked the instructors, no one would take a chance with obstacles that might injure a dog.
    After that, I caught only the occasional stressed word: safety, reputation, liability. And again and again, competition.
    In the hope of finding the calm and solace that nature is reputed to offer, I studied the lake, but found nothing soothing. Two approaching Jet Skis buzzed like chain saws. From a tree at the edge of the lake, a belted kingfisher swooped out and dove at the water, its flight jerky, its rattling call dry and cruel. Making my way past Sara and Heather, I left the dock and went to my cabin, wherein lay nature’s true source of peace and comfort. What’s wrong with mountains, lakes, trees, kingfishers, and all those other supposedly restorative elements of the wilderness—or for that matter, of the cosmos —is that no matter how intensely you stare at them, admire them, venerate them—no matter how much you love them, they’ll never love you back. But a dog? A really good dog? It’s like the Miracle of the Draught of Fishes. You’re Simon, the fisherman, and you spend all day casting your net into the water without catching so much as a minnow. And then along comes Jesus and tells you that