Evil Breeding

backs, and they sang in unison the universal malamute song of joy: Woo-woo! Woo-woo-woo!
    “I am richer with you,” I solemnly told the dogs, “than I would be with other people’s money. I wouldn’t trade with anyone.”
    If I’d been Geraldine R. Dodge, I wouldn’t have had to trade. I could have had my perfect dogs. And money, too.
     

Chapter Three
     
    LIKE GERALDINE R. and Marcellus Hartley Dodge, Steve Delaney and I maintain separate residences. The Dodges had adjoining estates. Hers covered about two thousand acres. His? I don’t know. Those were just their country homes. They also shared a Fifth Avenue town house. Shared is probably the wrong word. Mrs. Dodge always had ten or twelve dogs with her. Consequently, I suspect that occupancy of the Dodge town house was more a matter of taking turns than of actual sharing. A dozen dogs wouldn’t drive Steve away. There are often more than that at his clinic, and his own dogs, India, the shepherd, and Lady, the pointer, live with him above the clinic, which is in Cambridge and, come to think of it, probably closer to my place than Mr. Dodge’s house was to Mrs. Dodge’s. Our Cambridge estates, alas, cover less than a quarter acre each and do not abut. Because the noise from Steve’s patients and boarders disturbs my sleep, he often stays with me. Rowdy and Kimi howl at sirens once in a while, but are otherwise remarkably quiet. My cat, Tracker, sleeps on the mouse pad by the computer in my study, so even if she purrs loudly, no one but the PC hears her, and so far it hasn’t complained.
    Alaskan malamutes being the pack-oriented creatures that they are, Rowdy and Kimi like to sleep in the bedroom. Rowdy’s favorite spot is under the air conditioner, which he regards as a totemic object to be worshiped year round because even when its motor is turned off, it still leaks cold air. Both dogs are supposedly allowed on the bed only by invitation, but Kimi gets away with assuming that the invitation is open, and I don’t object because she is an excellent bed dog, meaning that she cuddles without shoving you onto the floor. When Steve is there, we banish the dogs; caring nothing about privacy themselves, they fail to respect other people’s. Enough said.
    Anyway, the siren-induced howling of the exiled dogs was how Steve and I ended up at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The whole episode was the fault of the latest craze in canine education, a technique called “clicker training.” A clicker is a little plastic device with a metal strip that emits a sharp click when pressed. The first step in clicker training is to pair the click with food: Click, treat, click, treat, click, treat, and presto! The sound comes to mean that food is on its way; it rapidly becomes a secondary positive reinforcer. Since malamutes are totally obsessed with food and go utterly bonkers at dinnertime, I speeded up the initial phase of clicker training by clicking just before the dogs’ dinner bowls hit the floor. The next step was to pick a behavior to reinforce with clicks and treats. What I chose was howling. I selected this target for the excellent reason that when it came to Northern-breed vocalizations, Rowdy had always distinguished himself as a Pavarotti among malamutes, a canine Caruso, if you will, and while Kimi was more given to what malamute people call “talking” than to actual singing, she was perfectly capable of joining Rowdy in gloriously melodious evocations of the Land of the Midnight Sun. The only problem was that the dogs seldom showed off this prodigious talent. Also, they wouldn’t sing on command. Suppose you’re the young Glenn Gould’s mother, okay? Except that he hardly ever sits at the piano, and when your friends drop by, he won’t so much as rattle off a little tune, never mind launch into a Goldberg Variation. Such was my frustrating position until along came clicker training. The only impediment was that since the dogs hardly ever howled, they gave me blessed few opportunities to reinforce the target behavior with clicks and treats.
    So at two o’clock in the morning on a Saturday in May a few days after my first visit to Mr. Motherway, as Steve and I lay asleep in my bed, a terrible fire or possibly a major false alarm—I never found out which—sent what must have been dozens of fire trucks, cruisers, and emergency medical vehicles speeding down Concord Avenue past my house with their sirens wailing and blaring so loudly and