Bloodlines

aimlessly, her tail immobile, her eyes vacant. The golden retriever is a superb obedience breed, of course. Acting as her own trainer and handler, this golden seemed to have taught herself the trick of feeling nothing at all. In her circumstances, she couldn’t have chosen more wisely.
    My hands dripping with sweat, I pulled out the camera and photographed the living things I saw: the golden retriever bitch and the maggots that lived on the feces she’d pitifully tried to confine to one end of
    the shed. Then I got a couple of tiny dog biscuits frommy pack, placed them on my open palm, and slowly extended it toward her. At the sight of a moving hand, though, she cringed. I’d been wrong. She hadn’t lost all feeling after all. I dropped the treats onto the dirt floor and left.
     

28
     

     
    The damp air outside the shed should have seemed almost fresh after the toxic-smelling fumes the poor golden breathed, but it didn’t, and my mouth tasted as though I’d caught a gum disease that was spreading to my tongue and throat. I wanted to find Missy and get out. But was she here? I leaned against the shed and gave my eyes a chance to recover from the camera flash and readapt to the darkness. I was facing the back of the property. Ahead of me were two more little outbuildings. A black mass of trees rose in the distance. In the cleared area to my left, between the trees and the nearby ruins of the massive chicken coop, I could make out a scatter of low, dark lumps. Oil drums? Then one of them moved. A chain rattled. I glanced around the corner of the shed to check out the house. No lights were on. Stepping much more slowly and carefully than I’d have liked, I started toward that moving lump chained in the field. The darkness made the Simmses’ whole spread look vast, but, by daylight, it had seemed small, and my feet covered the ground quickly. In what seemed like seconds, the lump came into focus as a big, wolflike dog.
    As I stepped forward, the clouds opened, and I saw the white of the dog’s bared teeth, the flattened ears, the stiff legs, the low angle of his head and tail, the whole posture of fearful aggression. Carelessly and stupidly, I stared directly at him, and with an almost inaudible growl, he took two quick paces, the warm-up for a powerful lunge. By the time he hit the end of his chain, I’d backed up out of reach. I shouldn’t have stared at him, but I couldn’t help it. Even in the darkness, an Alaskan malamute is unmistakable. Besides, Rowdy and Kimi had dulled my reflexes. If you stare at either of them, what you’ll get is a highly polished see-how-cute-I-am routine designed to convince you that you’re the greatest thing to come along since Eukanuba. Their ridiculous and universal friendliness to human beings is as typical of the Alaskan malamute as the bulky muzzle, the brown eyes, or the plumy tail waving over the back; and, to my mind, bad temperament is a far worse fault in the breed than the snipiest muzzle, the palest eyes, or the shortest, baldest little whip of a snap tail. Where does it come from? Careless breeding. Human cruelty.
    I gave this guy the benefit of a doubt. “My God,” I whispered to him as I backed away, “what have they done to you?”
    Underfed him? Even in the darkness, his body was skeletal. And his thick chain was moored to bare ground. In a fierce blizzard, he could have nestled snugly in the snow, but he had no natural shelter from the rain and, worse yet, the summer sun, not so much as an empty barrel, not the poorest excuse for a doghouse. Inflict this misery on Rowdy, and how long would his lovely temperament endure? How long would Kimi’s?
    But they were safe at home. Where the hell was Missy? I turned away from the malamute. Showing him my back may have been a mistake, or maybe I suddenly gave off a scent of terror. In any case, since my arrival, there’d been a few low barks and growls, but nothing even approaching the deafening canine warning I’d feared, the sudden outbreak of cacophony: Intruder! Intruder! But now? And from a malamute ? The breed that can bark, but almost never does? The world’s worst guard dog? His sudden roar must have doubled my heart rate. Within seconds, the pack was off my back, and my right hand was gripping a rawhide bone, knotted at both ends, shaped more or less like a wooden dumbbell. I’m no good with balls of paper, but even under pressure, I can hurl a dumbbell-shaped object through the air and place it in