Bloodlines

like that. One day Harry was there, the next day he was gone. An English setter isn’t like a malamute, you know. This Ranger was—”
    “Ranger was fine. I ran into Harry’s widow five or six years ago, and she had Ranger with her, and he was fine. Anyway, this is someone totally different. Walter Simms.”
    “Never heard of him,” Buck said. “What breed does he have?”
    “Malamutes. Maybe some other breeds, too. Probably. I don’t know. He isn’t necessarily around here. He could be anywhere. See if you can find out, would you? It’s Walter Simms, with two m’s.” I paused to give Buck time to make a note of Simms’s name. Buck wouldn’t need to jot down Icekist Sissy’s, of course. He wouldn’t even need a reminder. Buck never forgets a dog’s name. “Buck,” I added, “this is important. Simms is the breeder shown on the papers of a malamute called Princess Melissa Sievers. I need to know about him.”
    “Puppy mills,” Buck said. “ That’s what this is about. Puppy mills. AKC ought to blast those goddamned places off the face of the earth.”
    The American Kennel Club has no individual members. Its members are clubs, each of which has a delegate. My father is not an AKC delegate. Maybe he should be.
     

18
     

     
    Maybe you’ll remember that at the Shawsheen Valley show, when Betty Burley and I broke the news to Lois Metzler that her line had shown up on the pedigree of a pet shop dog, Lois turned pale and acted horrified. On Monday, though, the day after the show, Lois didn’t call me for the information I’d promised her on Missy’s pedigree, and by midday on Tuesday, I still hadn’t heard from her. I’d been on the phone for most of the morning, of course. Maybe she’d tried to reach me. I was pretty sure that if Lois had actually had a heart attack or if she’d fallen into a state of nervous prostration, someone would have let me know. Could Lois be ashamed to call, afraid that I’d blame her for not screening her buyers? Or possibly she was sick after all, and I hadn’t heard.
    But when I reached Lois, she sounded healthy enough, which is to say, fit enough to have taken the initiative instead of waiting to hear from me. “Oh, yeah, I’ve been meaning to call you,” she said rather vaguely and mildly, as if she’d been neglecting a promise to pass along the name of a wonderful new brand of coat conditioner. “But I can’t talk now,” she added. “I’ve got some people coming to look at a puppy. They’re supposed to be here now. But they won’t stay too long.
    Why don’t you come out here in an hour or so?” She made it sound like a summons, not a question or an invitation.
    I agreed, but hung up feeling resentful. Who was Lois to order me to drop everything and drive out to her place? We could have exchanged information over the phone. Furthermore, although it was Lois whose bitch, Icekist Sissy, had evidently ended up in a puppy mill, I was apparently more eager than Lois was to find Sissy and maybe even to reclaim her.
    But I was eager, and I did drop everything. Lois’s place, which I’d visited before, was north of Westbrook, but about the same distance from Cambridge, that is, a drive of forty-five minutes or so. The temperature had suddenly risen to the high thirties, and with the roads wet but free of ice, I made good time. Just as I arrived, a Volvo station wagon was pulling out of Lois’s driveway; the people who’d been coming to look at a puppy had apparently arrived and were now leaving.
    If you don’t have malamutes, you’ll probably assume that when I parked, got out of the Bronco, shut the door, and followed the concrete path to the front door of Lois Metzler’s many-times-expanded and thus sprawling yellow split-level, I was greeted by an eardrum-puncturing chorus of barking, but I wasn’t. As a watchdog, the Alaskan malamute is less useful than the average canary, which might sing or at least chirp or peep. When my doorbell rings, my dogs don’t just ignore the signal, of course. Far from it. They instantly dash forth to welcome whatever friend, burglar, or rapist is calling on us. Unless the visitor’s arrival happens to coincide with Rowdy and Kimi’s dinner time, though, the only sound they emit is the almost inaudible swish of two wagging tails.
    In a kennel situation like Lois’s, a big pack of malamutes will usually manage some token growling, but her dog runs, I remembered, were located at the extreme end of her back