Paws before dying

aerobic bicycling hadn’t yet reached the suburbs.
    Leah and Kimi and Rowdy and I were not, of course, in the same class. Leah and Kimi’s Novice instructor was Bess Stein, who sometimes admitted to seventy-five, was rumored to be well over eighty, looked about twenty years younger than she was, and moved with the agility of a preteen. She was tall and angular, with salt-and-pepper hair swept into a loose bun plunk on the top of her head, and she had the one absolute requirement of an obedience instructor: a clear voice that carried well, even outdoors. Tony Doucette, who was teaching my advanced class, was a tidy little man with a pencil-thin moustache and hair-oiled waves who looked like what you’d expect if one of Al Capone’s accountants had been deep-frozen in the thirties and then periodically defrosted to teach people to train dogs. I was always surprised that he didn’t wear spats.
    Our advanced class met near the tennis courts, which, I might add, had a crumbling, choppy red clay surface and lacked nets, probably because of a tax-cutting measure called Proposition 2 1/2. Bess’s class gathered on the opposite side of the long, wide playing field granted to us by Newton Parks and Recreation. Beyond it stretched what looked to me, a country girl, like honest-to-God woods.
    Novice obedience can get boring, but it has one giant advantage over advanced work: All you need is a dog and lead. While three or four of us were still hauling the high jump, the bar jump, and the broad-jump hurdles out of the van someone had driven into the park, Bess’s group of about fifteen handler-dog teams was already heeling around. Leah wasn’t hard to pick out, and I noticed two young guys heeling their dogs, a border collie and a German shepherd, very close to her. Steve Delaney would work his shepherd bitch, India, close to Kimi when India was almost perfect and he wanted to proof the exercise. All dogs deserve perfect scores in their own backyards, but to perform well at a trial, a dog has to ignore distractions: a kid with an ice-cream cone, the sudden blare of a loudspeaker, a burst of applause, or—the ultimate proof—an Alaskan malamute. But other handlers usually scrambled to avoid us. Even so, there they were, a burly blond kid with the sides of his head shaved clean, heeling a young male shepherd way too slowly just ahead of Kimi, and a younger kid, about Leah’s age, with curly dark blond hair, whose black and white border collie was within inches of Kimi’s tail.
    When we finished setting up the jumps, sweaty work on that steamy night, Tony started running a handler and her black Lab through the Open routine, and Rowdy and I sat on the grass near Rose Engleman and her miniature poodle and a bunch of other people and dogs I knew from shows. The dog of Rose’s I’d known best was Vera, a fantastic O.T.Ch. standard poodle— at least twice the size of Caprice, her new one—and always shaved, trimmed, and pom-pommed. Caprice was also black, but she was a miniature poodle with a close-to-natural Puppy clip and an impish expression to match it. That Puppy clip told me that Caprice was being shown exclusively in obedience. For the breed ring—conformation, looks, gait, not behavior—she’d have needed an elaborate, sculpted English Saddle or Continental clip. Smart, perceptive obedience poodles must realize that that shaved-hindquarters Continental clip leaves them half naked in public, and I always feel embarrassed on their behalf, but don’t tell the poodle people that I said so.
    I said hello to Rose, who was sitting in a folding chair with Caprice perched on her lap, and I made Rowdy quit sticking his snout in the poodle’s face.
    Rose had never been fat, but she’d lost weight since the days when she and Vera entered every trial within an eight-hour drive of Boston. I remembered seeing her once at a show when she’d had her feet propped up to reduce the swelling in her ankles. Kindergarten teachers have to stay on their feet all day, and I’d wondered how she managed to do that all week, then hit the road every weekend. She must have been in her midfifties then, maybe five years ago. The children probably loved her quiet, hypnotic voice as much as her dogs did. She’d probably never had to chase or yell.
    “You aren’t teaching anymore, are you? Did you tell me you retired?” I said.
    “Two years ago, but not from dogs, of course.” She stroked Caprice’s head. “I’ve used this place for