Gaits of Heaven

and not just let him out. And we’ll schedule another meeting. Monday is Memorial Day. How would Tuesday be?”
    Ted gave a strange nod, but Eumie, as if translating from a foreign language I was too dense to understand, said, “Tuesdays are my special days just for myself.”
    “If you love Dolfo,” I pointed out, “then he is part of yourself. I’ll be here at nine on Tuesday morning.”
    Somewhat to my surprise, Ted and Eumie both thanked me. Armed with his clicker and treats, Ted took Dolfo outside to the backyard. It was Eumie alone who showed me to the door. When we got there, she spoke in a voice far softer and gentler than her usual squeal. “You’re anxious about something,” she said, “something that has nothing to do with us. I have the feeling that you’re panicking about something.” To my amazement, I found myself telling her what it was. “Showing my dogs,” I said. “I’ve always had ring nerves. But it’s all much worse. I haven’t been showing in obedience at all.”
    “I can help you with that,” Eumie said. “And I will.” Oddly enough, I believed her.
     

CHAPTER 6
     
    On Saturday, while Steve and Leah were at the clinic, I show-groomed Rowdy and Sammy, who were entered the next day, both with professional handlers. I’d almost always used a handler for Rowdy, who’d finished his championship easily and had thereafter been shown occasionally as a “special,” a champion competing for Best of Breed and, with luck, for a placement in the group to which the breed belongs. A show, as maybe I should mention, is a conformation event, as opposed to performance events like obedience and agility trials: in conformation, the judge evaluates the extent to which the dogs conform to the ideal image spelled out in the breed standard. The Best of Breed winners then compete within their respective groups, and the first-place winners in the groups compete for Best in Show. These days, when I entered Rowdy, I was interested in a group placement, that is, in having him take first, second, third, or fourth place in the Working Group, the one to which the Alaskan malamute belongs. Well, at Sunday’s show, Rowdy never made it to the group because the judge overlooked him in favor of Sammy, who went Winners Dog and Best of Winners, and then BOB over specials, including, of course, his own father. Naturally, Steve and I were thrilled about Sammy, and neither of us was surprised when he went nowhere in the group, mainly, we thought, because he was still a puppy and looked immature next to the competition.
    On Monday morning, Memorial Day, Steve devoted an hour to taking down his bird feeders and remounting them on poles equipped with new squirrel baffles. When he finished, he came into the kitchen and looked out the window above the sink as if he already hoped to see cardinals and chickadees devouring sunflower seed and goldfinches scarfing up expensive thistle. The feeders, I might mention, were not in the fenced yard but on the opposite side of the house, where any birds they might attract would be safe from Rowdy, Sammy, and Kimi. It was Kimi who’d delivered the coup de grace to my previous bird-feeding efforts by interpreting the term bird feeder as a personal invitation to feed on birds. Feed on them she had. I’d given up and given the feeder away. The dogs, however, never entered the area on the opposite side of the house, and Steve was optimistically convinced that his magic touch with animals— he truly has one—would enable him to devise a system for foiling the squirrels.
    “Maybe we should get a squirrel feeder,” I suggested. “People do that. They put out dried ears of corn. The idea is that the squirrels prefer the corn and leave the birdseed alone.”
    “Unlikely,” he said.
    “It isn’t as if we have ordinary squirrels. The black ones are special.”
    Cambridge abounds in what Steve calls melanistic individuals or black morphs , which is to say, black squirrels. When I first lived here, I was convinced that some Harvard lunatic who’d spent a year in a place like Ceylon or Java had brought home a breeding pair of exotic squirrels that had filled Cambridge with pigmented progeny. As it turns out, our Cambridge black squirrels are probably descended from a colony in plain old ordinary Westfield, Massachusetts, a colony descended from black squirrels imported from plain old unexotic Michigan. Fantasy is often better than reality. “An attractive color variant,”