Creature Discomforts

But I want Molly with me, and Buck ”—Gabrielle beamed at me—“tells me that I’m perfectly right. What we do is called ‘ringside delivery.’ There’s also something called ‘ringside pickup.’ Isn’t that a wonderfully licentious expression? But Molly and I don’t do that. We make advance arrangements to meet Horace at the shows, except that half the time I have trouble finding him. Anyway, before Norman got into one of his snits and fired Horace, Isaac was hardly ever here. He was always with Horace Livermore.”
    I was about to ask a gossipy question about why Norman Axelrod had fired his handler, Livermore, when Opal commented that it was just as well, in retrospect, that Isaac hadn’t had the chance to get too attached to Norman. If something happened to her or to Wally, Pacer would be grief stricken. And what would Molly do if Gabbi died? She’d be heartbroken!
    “But Isaac knows!” Gabrielle insisted. “Or he’ll figure it out. Sooner or later, he’ll know something is dreadfully wrong. He’s so bright! I keep thinking there ought to be a way to help him understand what happened. If I could just explain it to him—”
    “Since the rest of us don’t know what happened,” Wally Swan said in grouchy tone, “I don’t know how you expect to explain it to a dog. I, for one, don’t have a clue about what Axelrod was doing near the Ladder Trail. As I understand it, he fell on the upper part of it, above the ladders. And Malcolm, I have to say... Well, it’s already been said. Norman Axelrod was a crank. Let me tell you, when he heard about Opal and I volunteering to help on the Homans Path, he didn’t have a good word to say about that project or anything else you were connected with, Malcolm. And that’s the truth.”
    Tiffany, the Pine Tree Foundation secretary, again filled me in. “The Homans Path goes up Dorr from the Nature Center,” she said quietly. “It’s one of those old trails with stone steps, but the Park Service abandoned it ages ago, for no good reason. They cut down trees at the bottom and top to block it off. So, Malcolm got people together to restore it, and he got permission, and the foundation gave a grant. Malcolm does a lot of the work himself, and he got Opal and Wally to be part of his trail crew, and also a new guy named Zeke, who isn’t here tonight. That’s what Malcolm’s like. He doesn’t just want to sit in an office and talk about the environment. He gets right out there and does the work.”
    “Opal and Wally?” I whispered back. “Swan and Swan?”
    “That’s Malcolm Fairley! Who else would’ve asked developers? I mean, talk about hands-on learning about the environment! He’s actually got them involved, really involved, not just on paper. You aren’t going to get developers to change their attitudes by yelling at them or lecturing them. It’s a waste of breath. But Malcolm’s got them out there clearing brush and moving logs and opening up the trail, so eventually they’ll figure things out for themselves. No one else would even have thought about asking them, never mind gotten them to do it. And the Homans Path is really beautiful. The steps aren’t even in terrible shape. Once you see it, it’s just so obvious that it’s worth saving. If you ask me, once it’s done, the park ought to rename it after Malcolm Fairley.”
    When I tuned back in to the general conversation, Malcolm Fairley was saying that yes, Norman Axelrod was the last person you’d expect to find hiking anywhere. “You’d hardly call it hiking,” Fairley said ruefully. “I knew he wasn’t fit for a real hike, but I had no idea he was in such bad shape. He was only about my age, and he had to stop every five or ten steps to catch his breath. When we started out, it was raining, not hard, but the stone was wet, and he had a rough time with the footing. We hadn’t gone more than a quarter of a mile when I started asking him if he didn’t want to call it quits. And this was on Kurt Diederich. Anyone who can walk up an ordinary staircase ought to be able to do Diederich. Or that’s what I thought.” Fairley was in radiantly robust condition. His notion of a slow, gentle walk might be most other people’s idea of an exhausting climb. And two males? Contrary to popular stereotypes, self-confident females, especially malamute females, do lift their legs, but it’s males who are driven by an unreasoning compulsion to mark everything, especially anything that