Ruffly Speaking

Leah had been last year. If only I’d known, I’d have replaced the bed with a bohemian pallet on the floor. French novels would have barricaded the windows. Candles tucked in Chianti bottles would have provided the only light.
    Fortunately, though, Leah has a sunny disposition. Also, she hadn’t yet realized that black is the color created by God to display the undercoat and guard hairs of Her chosen breed, the Alaskan malamute. Beryl’s packages had contained a couple of defurring gadgets. While I prayed that they worked, Leah merrily unpacked a tremendous number of black garments and tried to reassure me that the redone room was very pretty.
    “It’s a little, uh, unsophisticated for you,” I said, looking around. “But it’s also my guest room, when you’re not here.” I tried to imagine my father curling up on a pallet, blowing out a Chianti-bottle candle, and resting his head on a stack of existentialist novels. After five insomniac minutes, he’d end up in a red-blooded American L.L. Bean sleeping bag outside in the yard, and in the morning, he’d have a serious talk with me about moving back to Owls Head, Maine.
    “Really, I like it a lot,” Leah said for the tenth time.
    Within a few days, however, Leah’s room was so shrouded in black clothing, so thick with dog hair, and so stacked with unreadable books that my misguided redecoration didn’t show. Let me point out that I did not nag her to clean up her room. I train dogs; I knew better. As any sane dog person realizes— Sane dog person. Oxymoron. As any wise dog person realizes, nagging gets you nowhere. If you don’t like it when your neutered male mounts your bitch? Don’t watch. So that’s what I did with Leah: I kept the guest room door shut.
    Besides, Leah and I had better things to do than clean and nag. We talked. We trained the dogs. Last summer, I’d been the expert. Over the winter, I’d merely been living with dogs, working my dogs, attending obedience classes, going to shows and trials, and writing for Dog’s Life. Leah, however, had undergone a religious conversion experience, seen the light, and opened her heart to Bernie Brown, proponent of the “no-force method” of dog training, the only trainer ever to earn more than 5,000 OTCH points—1,472 points last year alone—revered instructor, lively dog writer, and altogether a guy worth taking into your dog-loving heart.
    On Saturday night, when Steve and I went out to dinner, I got a break from the unrelenting “Bernie Brown says...” but when we got back, Leah and her last summer’s boyfriend, Jeff Cohen, were on the sidewalk on Appleton Street, and the first words I heard when I opened the car door were, “Jeff, Bernie Brown says…”
    Jeff is absolutely everything you could ask for in your cousin’s boyfriend—lovely kid, great sense of humor, blond curls like a Renaissance angel’s, Celtics fan—and, as if all that weren’t enough, he’d just put a C.D.X.— obedience title, Companion Dog Excellent—on his Border collie, Lance, brilliant breed, splendid dog. (Border collie. Not Lassie. Smaller. Black and white, tough and wiry, world’s best herding breed, top agility breed, Frisbee genius, obedience natural.)
    “The underlying philosophy,” Leah was saying, “is that you don’t give the dog a chance to screw up. You structure everything so that the only thing the dog can do is what you want.”
    As Leah droned on, Kimi was pulling on her leash and using her front paws to excavate a giant hole at the base of a Norway maple. Meanwhile, Lance, the object of Leah’s pontification, sat in flawless heel position at Jeff’s left side, black and white body perfectly straight, head turned to take in Jeff’s face. If a flock of sheep had turned onto Appleton Street, Kimi would have torn the leash from Leah’s hands and murdered them all. Lance, C.D.X., born with sheep on the brain, wouldn’t have let his eerie
    Border collie stare wander from his master’s eyes until Jeff had released him. And Leah was the one playing instructor.
    Jeff was going away for the summer, but what if Leah bored him senseless and drove him permanently off? Well, I just hated the thought. We’d lucked out once: a perfect Border collie. But twice? Two perfect Border collies? Forget it. If fortune favored us, though? An Airedale. Possibly a Norwegian elkhound. A Keeshond, wonderful breed, long life span, more energetic at age ten than most breeds are at three.
    And if heaven