Paws before dying

handlers, a momentary satori in canine Zen. Then it broke.
    “You want to see something?” I said to Leah. “Watch over there, the Utility ring. You see the silver standard poodle?”
    “He was there the other night.”
    “That’s the one. And opposite is Heather, his handler, right? With the silver hair?”
    “So?”
    “So look in back of Heather, outside the ring. You see that really skinny woman with long brown hair? In the green flowered shirt?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Notice that her arms are crossed. Her hands are closed, sort of in fists, as if she’s got something in them. And she’s watching the dog, right? That’s called double handling. That’s Heather’s daughter, Abbey, and they’ve practiced this routine so they’ve got it cold. It’s illegal to take food into the ring, but the dog’s been taught there’s something in Abbey’s hand, liver or something, and Abbey stations herself where the dog can see her. If the dog starts to break, she probably moves her hand a little, or does something, something really subtle.”
    “That’s cheating!”
    “It’s a mother and daughter act,” I said.
    The silver poodle didn’t break, of course. I watched until the end. Then I heard a deep male voice hollering.
    At the edge of the field closest to the parking lot, Rose’s exstudent, Willie, was leaning on the long registration table. He seemed to be filling out an entry form. He looked as if he might be trying to bury his face in it. His blond German shepherd lay on the ground at his feet. About five yards beyond the end of the table, another blond young man was shouting at another shepherd, a cowering, snarling dog that kept lunging toward him.
    “Kaiser, you bastard, down!” he yelled, and he yanked hard on the dog’s collar.
    “Is he supposed to be doing that?” Leah sat up. “Oh, God. You know who that is? And that’s Righteous and what’s his name, Willie. That’s his brother. The one—”
    “Next door to Rose and Jack. Yeah. And no. He isn’t supposed to be doing that. Someone will speak to him. What are they doing here, anyway?”
    “Bess gave us the fliers, remember? But you said—”
    “I did, and it’s not allowed.”
    Even from a distance I could see that the brother’s shepherd had a long, soft, silky coat—undesirable in the breed—that needed a shampoo. If the dog had been scrubbed, I guessed, his pale fur would have looked washed out, not rich like the first dog’s. When his handler took a step ahead, the dog suddenly jerked his head toward the man. It looked to me as if he tried to bite him. The man retaliated. He raised an arm and smashed the dog hard on the flank, and the dog yelped. In his unceasing hope that a fabulous dog fight would break out and that he could launch himself in the center of it, Rowdy leapt up, and Kimi, the radical feminist, joined him. If I’d stayed on the blanket, Rowdy could easily have hauled me across the field and into the shepherd’s jaws, but I stood up, got a good grip on his lead, braced myself, and told him to sit. He did. Without being asked, Leah took charge of Kimi. In fact, she seemed so capable of managing the dogs that I started to hand her Rowdy’s lead— I intended to step in, but not with Rowdy—when I saw that one of the judges, a man I didn’t know, was finally going to intervene.
    “There’s a judge,” I told Leah. “And somebody else. That is totally forbidden. You aren’t allowed to do anything more than a little warm-up. You can’t even really train, and hitting a dog is totally against the rules. At a show, they’d make him leave the grounds. I don’t know what they’ll do here.”
    The judges and the officials running the match were slow to respond, because, I suppose, they were as surprised as I was. Once in a while, someone who hasn’t bothered to read the rule book starts training at a show or talks a little loudly to a dog, and dogs occasionally get aggressive, but most shows, trials, and matches are harmonious. The human participants who worship dogs, and the few who train harshly do so only in private, partly because they know the rules and partly because they want to avoid creating a bad public impression of the sport.
    “That’s my judge,” Leah said proudly. “What’s he saying?”
    “He’s probably telling him to leave.”
    By then, the shepherd, beaten into submission, was lying quietly by his owner. The judge was obviously lecturing. One of people from the Lincoln Kennels, a