Black Ribbon

you’ve got to try again, and you do: You catch such a multitude that your net breaks. In other Words, hanging around in nature’s vicinity is a waste of time until love and faith come along. And when they do, you get hack more than you can handle: draughts of fishes, Alaskan malamutes.
    And that’s how I spent the next hour: handling Rowdy. Or trying. In obedience, almost all of us handle our dogs ourselves; it’s an amateur-dominated sport and none the worse for it, because, except among the top handlers, it’s as competitive or noncompetitive as you choose to make it. Conformation, however, is the hardball of the dog show game. That’s why I hire a professional handler to show Rowdy in breed. If the dog-eat-dog breed competition depended strictly on the merits of the animals, I’d be spared the expense; but as it is, Rowdy deserves a better breed handler than I’ll ever be.
    That Rowdy and I ended up in Eric Grimaldi’s breed handling class is thus testimony to my respect for the authority of AKC judges: Eric gave me an order, and I obeyed. Eric didn’t phrase it as an order. What he said was that Maxine McGuire was the best of the best, and that if Maxine wanted him to do a breed handling class, he was happy to oblige. Like all other activities scheduled for the morning, breed handling had, of course, been canceled. For reasons unconnected to Eva’s death, however, the afternoon schedule contained numerous gaps. The carting workshop was off; according to rumor, Maxine had had some sort of financial dispute with the instructor. The people running the Temperament Testing had phoned to report that their van had broken down on the Maine Turnpike. The last-minute cancellations seemed to me to confirm Eva Spitteler’s analysis of Maxine’s deficiencies as camp director.
    “We can’t let Maxine down,” Eric told me. “What we all need to do is pitch in and try to salvage what we can. You’re not doing anyone any good hanging around here with a long face, are you?” I admitted that I wasn’t. “Come on!” he said “I was counting on you to be a good sport, Holly. And you’ll like it. It’ll be fun.”
    The class took place in the same big field we’d used for lure coursing and obedience, but at the end near the main lodge, as distant as possible from the police van and the cruisers clustered near the little road that led to the agility area. Because of Eric’s determination to recruit participants and thus to create a semblance of normal camp activity, he ended up with about twenty people, five or ten more than he probably wanted. Although conformation is, by definition, open only to purebreds, a few campers showed up with what I think I’m now supposed to call random-bred dogs, mixes, crosses, and anybody’s guesses owned by people who wanted to find out what breed handling was, I suppose, or by people who just wanted something to do. Jacob, the long-coated Akita, couldn’t be shown in breed, but Michael brought him, anyway, for the socialization, I suppose. Maybe Joy and Craig brought Lucky for the same reason. I certainly hoped that they didn’t ask Eric’s opinion of the little dog’s merits. To support Eric, I think, Phyllis Abbott showed up with Nigel, who really was a show dog, as were quite a few of the others gathered near the two baby-gated rings that Everett Dow was setting up. Today, the dogs ignored the handyman. At the last minute, Cam and Ginny turned up, Cam with Nicky, and Ginny, to my amazement, with a highly subdued Bingo.
    Let me remind you that Eric Grimaldi was a handsome man with an appropriately judicial air of authority. He started the class by assembling us in one of the rings and explaining what we’d try to accomplish. We’d begin, he said, with a review of a few basics: the correct collar position, the appropriate position of the dog, the stand. Then we’d break into groups. Eric would work first with the real beginners; meanwhile, the rest of us could observe or, if we liked, practice in the other ring.
    Rowdy sat at my left side with his eyes fixed on my face. When he’s with his breed handler, Faith, he knows not to sit, and he gaits for her without twisting his head to watch her face. I had to remind myself that in taking Rowdy to a single breed handling class, I wasn’t going to confuse him; plenty of dual-ring dogs had the same handler in breed and in obedience. In fact, I paid more attention to Rowdy than I did to Eric, who was delivering a little