Paws before dying

Scandinavian hair accented her sun-damaged skin.
    She’d carefully wrapped the Akita hanging in tissue and was now spreading out a long, wide muffler woven in six or eight different shades of brown. “What about something like this? Only not this color, of course. Unless you want it dyed. You don’t want it dyed, do you? You want it natural.”
    “I think he’d like that better,” I said. I pulled a tightly sealed plastic bag from my purse and handed it to her. “This is just what’s coming out now. My dogs both have white undercoats.
    Kimi has some tan, but not much. But once they start losing the guard coat, it’ll be gray—some dark, some light—and black, and more white...”
    “Of course.” She opened the bag and, like a baby rubbing a blanket ribbon, ran the fur between her fingers.
    “Look, I don’t know anything about weaving,” I said. “Is it all right? Can you do something with it?”
    “Of course.”
    I was happy that my fur—well, Rowdy’s and Kimi’s—had passed inspection. We discussed the dimensions and design of the scarf and settled on a price that seemed reasonable enough, especially if you consider that the raw material was going to arrive really raw, fresh off the dogs.
    Finally, since a profile of a weaver who’ll card and spin what your pet sheds is exactly the kind of piece that Dog’s Life will always buy, I asked Marcia how she’d feel about an article. She was Battered, even though Dog’s Life isn’t exactly The New Yorker. The big difference is that New Yorker profiles focus on people, whereas the Dog’s Life reader wants mainly to read about dogs. As you can imagine, then, I hoped that Rascal, her border collie, was photogenic and personable. I hadn’t even met him. I asked where he was.
    “He was with Zeke,” she said, going to the window and pulling open one of the curtains. “My son. Maybe they’re back. Yeah, there’s Rascal.”
    “Your yard’s fenced?” Newton has a tough, enforced leash law. I assumed that the dog wasn’t wandering loose. Marcia didn’t say anything, and I went on. “I love Cambridge, but most of the yards are so small. I always feel guilty about my dogs when I see one with lots of room.”
    “Yeah. Actually, we used to live in Cambridge. Before.” In Newton, that means B.C.: Before Children. “We moved here for the schools. Just like everyone else.” She looked apologetic. “We’ve been here, um—Zeke was four, so it’s five years. You get used to it.”
    “I’ll bet,” I said as Marcia walked me to the door. “And a big fenced yard for your dog. That must be more than a little compensation. I mean, if you’ve got enough room so you can even think about having sheep, too. Nice.”
    Just as Marcia opened the front door, her telephone rang. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to get that.”
    “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll call you about the article.”
    The first thing I did when I stepped outside was to look around for the fence so I could peer over it or open the gate to see what the dog looked like and say hello to him. As I was crossing the lawn, though, a rather small, mostly black male border collie with a lowered head dashed around a corner of the house, stopped abruptly, and stared at me. Maybe you’ve never been held in the gaze of a border collie. Have you ever been hypnotized, entranced, overtaken, and fixed in place? Same thing. I wasn’t sure how to read this guy. He wasn’t barking at me, but I was pretty sure he didn’t want me to approach him, either. Well, I guess that says it: The effect of a border collie is to make you ask yourself what he wants you to do. They’re small dogs, at least in the eyes of someone with malamutes, and they’re fine-boned and fantastically agile, not burly or tough-looking, but they have an air of intense, authoritative intelligence. Goldens are the top obedience dogs in terms of raw numbers of titles, but there are lots of goldens and few border collies. If you take the numbers of dogs into account, the border collie is the unequaled, unbeatable great obedience breed.
    I wondered whether I was supposed to say something, but this border collie, unlike the others I’d known, didn’t issue the usual clear directions. Did he want me out of his yard? And what was he doing loose? Well, damn it, I thought. I should’ve known. He’s so perfectly trained that they don’t keep him tied up or fenced in. On the other hand, hadn’t she said that he was neurotic?