Black Ribbon

Robert Frost— dogs to walk before we sleep, dogs to walk before we sleep. Speaking of which, you know this book by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas? The Hidden Life of Dogs. That one. It’s what I thought of as I walked Rowdy that night... or, pardon me, as I systematically applied my observational skills to his behavior in my trillionth effort to fathom how any sensate human being could ever have discerned anything even remotely discreet, reserved, or modest, never mind clandestine, disguised, covert, masked, obscured, kept under wraps, or otherwise HIDDEN, for heaven’s sake, about the desire of a male dog to leave his mark as ostentatiously as possible on absolutely every object in the vicinity of which he could possibly cock a leg. In truth, it’s a sad book, the pitiful story of a woman so terrified of a normal, protective human relationship with dogs that she fled the responsibility and mutuality that love entails.
    But there’s one phrase in the book that I adore: “pitiless domestication.” You know what that means? The breeding of show dogs. Almost everyone else in the fancy loathed the book, you know. I’m unusual. Anyway, with my product of pitiless domestication oppressively reduced to an unnatural and abnormal condition, which is to say, with Rowdy safely hitched to his flex lead and thus, worse yet, linked to his devoted oppressor, I started out along the bank of the lake away from the main lodge. When we reached the thick woods, the path ended, and we reversed direction, strolled past the dock, the pebble beach, the upended canoes, the lodge itself, and the cabins on its far side. Circling around in back, we skirted the edge of the big field, passing the area where Eric had held the breed handling class. Here and there in the field and among the trees that formed its boundaries, dark shapes loomed and stirred: other people, other dogs. Resdess, I considered crossing the field to the blacktop drive and following it through the high pines and thick undergrowth out to the main highway. What kept me away from the dirt road to the agility area was not, I conclude in retrospect, some superstitious fear that Eva’s avenging revenant lurked among the colorful obstacles, passed through them perhaps, invisibly seesawed back and forth on the teeter-totter, whooshed through the weave poles, cleared the jumps, or lingered on the pause table gathering strength to spring off, brutally dismember the innocent pieces of equipment, and—brandishing planks, poles, metal bases, thick wooden supports, and heavy chains in its phantasmagoric hands—vent the rage of the newly dead on any hapless intruder who had the ill luck to stroll by. Not at all. I didn’t fear the living, either: I was no threat to anyone. Besides, despite Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s fancy academic credentials—gee whiz, a Ph.D. in anthropomorphism—the real expert on dogs was Carol Lea Benjamin: Rowdy’s heritage of pitiless domestication had, if anything, brightened the big red S on his show-dog chest, and I was his very own Lois Lane. So what stayed my steps? Not the dead, not the living, but what I now identify as true panic: the primitive, universal terror of the great god Pan. At the time, though, all I felt was a muted, civilized disinclination to approach the thick woods.
    “Rowdy, this way!” I called softly. “Let’s go!” I had to reel in his lead. Pan was Greek, a god of trees and shepherds. Rowdy’s original people spoke Mahlemut. On the treeless tundra, they kept no sheep. Survival itself was their only luxury. They could not indulge in pointless foreign gods.
    “Rowdy, this way!”
    Driven, as I now realize, away from the shadowy woods and toward the expanse of the lake, I jogged past the lodge, slowed my pace, and wandered by my cabin and down the slope to the water. A loon laughed. The bird’s call is freakish, human and nonhuman, utterly animal yet disturbingly easy to mimic. It doesn’t take much skill to ape loons well enough to call them in. I wanted to try, but I was no more eager to be overheard by the campers still awake than I was to awaken those who’d gone to bed. My loon imitation, although remarkably effective in achieving its goal, is not meant for human ears. I yodel even worse than I sing, and my singing exhibits the same leaden property that affects my efforts to float: negative buoyancy.
    “And if I got the loon to come in,” I told Rowdy, “you’d just scare it away.”
    In response to my voice,