Ruffly Speaking

he’d quickly become the focus of Leah and
    Matthew’s attention. Planted at Rowdy’s heavily furred rear end, Ivan carefully grasped the dog’s tail in his left hand, raised it, pointed an undercoat rake straight ahead, caught my eye, and demanded to know, first, whether the anal sacs were vestigial organs and, second, whether Rowdy would mind having them emptied.
    I shot a protective hand toward Rowdy. “Yes! He certainly would mind. And they don’t need emptying. They’re not full.”
    “Do they ever explode?” Ivan asked eagerly.
    “Not that I’ve noticed.” I sounded casual, as if such an event might entirely fail to blow my superb sangfroid.
    “I read that in a book,” Ivan explained. “It said that sometimes if dogs are, like, in stressful situations, they’ll explode. All of a sudden, they’ll just empty their anal sacs.”
    “I guess that sounded pretty interesting,” I murmured.
    “It did.” His reedy little-boy voice was serious, but those eyes gave him away. “I wondered if it made a noise.”
    “What it makes is a mess,” I said firmly. “And it doesn’t smell very good, either. But if you’re worried about having it happen while you’re working on his tail, don’t, because it isn’t going to. His anal sacs aren’t full, and that’s not how he reacts to stress. Besides, he likes being groomed, and he likes being the center of attention. He’s having a good time.” Then, either because I’m slow to catch on or because Ivan looked like a little kid and, damn it, was one, I put on a high-pitched talking-to-dopes voice and inquired, “Do you know what kind of a dog Rowdy is?”
    “Kotzebue,” Ivan said, “but not pure Kotzebue. Is that how you pronounce it?”
    Kotzebue? About one adult in five hundred thousand can recognize an Alaskan malamute, never mind tell a Kotzebue from a M’Loot. To malamute fanciers, the distinction between the two principal lines is sharp and clear, but practically no one else even knows that it exists.
    “Does your family breed malamutes?” I asked. If so, Ivan would have known how to pronounce Kotzebue, and, besides, Leah would certainly have told me, but I was so surprised that I didn’t think.
    By now, Ivan was ineffectually running a porcupine brush over the top layer of guard hair on Rowdy’s tail. “My father’s dead,” he said.
    “I’m sorry.” For Ivan. For asking.
    “He died a long time ago. In Cameroon.”
    I struggled to remember where Cameroon was. “Oh,” I said feebly.
    Ivan looked up and stared at me. “Men don’t live as long as women,” he informed me. “Most men don’t. On the average. It’s a matter of probabilities.”
    “I guess that’s true.”
    “It is,” he said decisively.
    I wondered whether to assure Ivan that his mother would live a long time. Leah had mentioned her, so I knew she was alive, but I was afraid that she might have some terminal illness I hadn’t heard about or that Ivan would inform me that one in every nine American women gets breast cancer or that he’d produce some other argument I’d be unable to rebut. I wished Rita were there to advise me. I was forced to follow my instincts. “Do you have a dog at home?” I asked.
    He switched to Rowdy’s left rear leg, someone else’s territory, and began to brush vigorously. “No,” he mumbled.
    “A cat?”
    “We don’t have anything.” He made home sound like a vast empty space.
    “Then how come you know what a Kotzebue is?” I asked a little too brightly.
    “Because I read it in a book. My mother got it for me. It’s called This Is the Alaskan Malamute. It’s a pretty good book.”
    “Yes, it is. It has good pictures.” The remark wasn’t as condescending as it probably sounds. The book does have good photos, including an extraordinary number of the legendary Floyd, Inuit’s Wooly Bully, my favorite of which isn’t one of the show-win shots but a snap of that gorgeous dog in the ring at Westminster in 1968. The handler isn’t even looking at the dog—he’s bending over to set him up for judging—but the great showman, the pretty boy, is glowing and grinning. That picture captures the independent show-off joy of the dog and of the whole breed. The photo also happens to highlight Rowdy’s almost uncanny resemblance to this extraordinary creature, but that’s incidental.
    So I said that I too liked the pictures, and Leah, who was leaning over to supervise the application of grooming spray to Rowdy’s left