Ruffly Speaking

6
     

 
     
    To Wendy Willhauck
    in memory of
    her beloved companion, the miracle dog,
     
    Ch. FROSTFIELD SWEET HONCHO
     
    (1976-1989)
     

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
     
    The wonderful people and spectacular dogs of NEADS, the New England Assistance Dog Service, Princeton, Massachusetts, helped me in researching the background of this book. Thanks, too, to Joel Woolfson, D.V.M., for clear answers to my veterinary questions and superb care of my dogs.
    Many thanks to my fellow members of the New England and the Charles River dog training clubs, especially to those masters of praise and correction, Geoff Stem and Roseanne Mandel. I am also grateful to Bernard, mascot of Alaskan Malamute Rescue of South Texas, who bounded right into this book, and to Susan Cloer, who cheerfully leaped in with her dog. Thanks, too, to my perfect editor, Kate Miciak. Huzzah!
    Frostfield Arctic Natasha, C.D., T.T., C.G.C., V.C.C., my first Alaskan malamute, prima inter pares, soul mate and godsend, died on March 31, 1993. Her grieving young nephew, Frostfield Firestar’s Kobuk, who hitched himself to my sorrow, pulled as only a malamute can. I am grateful for his strength and graced by his life. He loved her, too.
     

 
     
    The world of goodness is filled with fleas.
     
    —dictum of Chogyam Trungpa, called — Rinpoche, meaning “precious one”
     

 

1
     
     If I come right out and ask whether you’ve been grabbed by evil-eyed aliens, whisked aboard their spacecraft, and subjected to grueling medical tests, you’re going to say no, aren’t you? Even if you remember every terrifying detail of the whole nasty business, you’re probably too embarrassed to say so because you’re afraid that people will think you’re crazy. Besides, UFO experts agree that practically all abductees are left with only fragmentary memories of the horrid little gray-skinned medics who prodded and poked them and stabbed them with needles. No wonder people forget. Earthling doctors are bad enough; a gynecologist from outer space doesn’t bear remembering.
    It can’t be easy to do research on UFO abductions, can it? The subjects who remember won’t tell, and the ones who might spill all the fascinating details about the design of extraterrestrial hypodermics and speculums and stuff can’t because they’ve forgotten. So instead of asking about the experience per se, the experts pose trick questions about epiphenomena—buzzing and whirring sounds that orchestrate the dance of weird lights, the sense that you’ve lost time and don’t know where it’s gone. Ah, but that happens to everyone, doesn’t it? Certainly. But is it common to wake up paralyzed and sense a living presence lurking around in the room, looming over you, breathing close by your bed, watching you? Does everyone have the feeling of flying through the air without knowing how or why? Do we all feel as if we’ve left our bodies? And on returning, do we discover puzzling marks and scars on our torsos and limbs? Key indicator experiences, they’re called, signs that maybe even unbeknownst to you, you’ve been the victim of an alien abduction.
    Alternatively, of course, you spend your life with big dogs. The loudly respirating being in the bedroom? That sense of being watched ? And just try walking two Alaskan malamutes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an icy winter day. Yes, flying through the air without knowing how or why, an out-of-body experience like none other, invariably culminating in abrupt reincorporation and the subsequent appearance of genuinely mystifying lumps and bumps, scoop-shaped, line-shaped, and otherwise, where none were before.
    Amnesia, too. The last time it happened to me, I didn’t remember a damned thing. One second, Rowdy and Kimi were leading the way down Appleton Street, and there was I, Sergeant Holly Winter of the Canadian Mounted Police, fearlessly daydreaming her way across the frozen Yukon wilderness; and the very next second, I found myself sprawled on a Cambridge sidewalk, watching a heavenly light show, but clinging nonetheless to the leather leashes of the Wonder Dogs, who were still after the same cat that had just precipitated my own precipitation, if you will. Thus, according to every key indicator, I am a bona fide abductee, and, in a way, the experts are right. What they miss, though, is a crucial difference:
    UFO abductees loathe and fear their alien captors, but, scars or no scars, I am wholeheartedly crazy about dogs.
    So was Morris Lamb.