Bride & Groom

topic. She’d also done the inevitable breed profiles (“Meet the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever!”), the articles about protecting dogs from summer heat, and the comparisons of popular brands of dog food. I’d seen her pieces before, but having written on the same topics, I’d never read her presentations of what was bound to be the same material.
    I leafed through the copies in the dossier until I came upon a copy of an article that had appeared in a newsletter about dog health published by an obscure veterinary school about four years earlier. There are zillions of dog publications; no one reads all of them. I’d never heard of this one. Anyway, I began actually to read the article because the subject surprised me. Elspeth’s dogs were well-mannered pets, but she’d never shown them in obedience. Furthermore, I’d never heard her express any interest in obedience trials, formal obedience training, or, indeed, dog training in any form. Yet this article was about the dos and don’ts of using food in dog training. The topic was not one on which I held any sort of monopoly; it was a popular subject. Still, it was my subject and not Elspeth’s. So was the article, which had originally appeared in Dog’s Life magazine. With my byline. Elspeth had changed the first sentence. Every reference to malamutes had become a reference to Irish terriers. But I know my own writing, and this work was mine. Elspeth had stolen it from me.
     

CHAPTER 26
     
    On the evening of Tuesday, September 17, Steve went out to dinner with two fishing buddies of his, fellow veterinarians who were on the staff of Angell Memorial Animal Hospital and who kept trying to persuade him to sell his practice and join them there. After feeding dinner to the dogs and then to myself, I decided to quit putting off the task of reading Elspeth’s manuscript, which had been sitting in my office for four days. By now, Mac had probably mailed his blurb to Elspeth’s editor. Of course, he had the advantage of not intending to read the book at all before generating a couple of quotable sentences of persuasive praise. Highly recommended! Essential for everyone who wants to raise kind children! His blurb would be followed by its truly essential components, namely, Mac’s full name and the titles of his books.
    As an antidote to my cynicism, I went to the third floor and got Sammy the puppy, and turned him loose in my kitchen. To the general public and to many pet owners, puppy means a very young pup, a ball of fluff, but in the parlance of the Dog Fancy, puppies are puppies until they’re eighteen months old, long after they’ve grown to adult size. Sammy, who’d turn one year old this coming winter, wasn’t yet as big as Rowdy, but was nonetheless a big dog, albeit a big dog with a ball-of-fluff brain. To encourage Sammy to play with actual dog toys rather than with objects that he’d happily redefine as such, I confined him to the kitchen by shutting all its doors and got out a couple of big black Kong toys, a fleece dinosaur, and, his favorite plaything, an eerily naturalistic stuffed squirrel that looked realistically dead. Ignoring the toys, Sammy plunged his head into Rowdy and Kimi’s big water bowl, filled his mouth with water, and galloped across the floor while opening his jaws and shaking off the water that clung to his face. Having drenched the tile, he grabbed the squirrel, tossed it, and pounced. Cured of cynicism, I opened the manila envelope that Elspeth had left, extracted the two manuscripts it contained, and took a seat at the kitchen table.
    What Elspeth had called her “book” was a children’s book with a companion volume for parents and teachers. Until I examined the manuscripts, I knew nothing about the material except its theme: kindness. I began with the children’s book. Centered in the middle of the first page was the title: The Story of Zazar. With a sense of disbelief, I turned to the first page of text, where I discovered that the eponymous Zazar was, indeed, a juvenile elephant. The following pages explained that little Zazar lived in a city of animals, where he was friends with a monkey and with a little old lady. The city wasn’t called Celesteville, and the monkey wasn’t named Zephir.
    “Even so!” I said aloud. “Outrageous! How could anyone be so stupid?”
    What on earth kind of blurb did Elspeth expect me to write? A must-read for fans of intellectual property theft! I could go on to say that I