Ruffly Speaking

dead-center, mouth-to-jaw spit. Kimi’s error. Leah’s fault.
    Morris picked the greens, Morris made the salad, Morris ate it. How could he have been so stupid? Morris’s fatal error. If the grill had exploded? In a way, Matthew was right. His mother knew she shouldn’t smoke. Stephanie’s fault. And Ruffly was charged with hearing for her. If he had failed to detect the gas? Then Ruffly’s fault, too. But the grill hadn’t exploded. Kimi had sat crooked, too.
    Only a few minutes earlier, bound to Leah’s side, Kimi had been deliberately set up to take credit for perfect heeling, and she had heeled perfectly, too. She’d had no choice. Any experienced dog trainer would have realized, however, that at this stage of training, most of the credit belonged not to the dog but to the handler. Old-fashioned trainers would have disapproved. They’d have told Leah to keep Kimi on a loose lead and to treat every error as the opportunity to get in a collar-jerk correction. In watching, they wouldn’t really have understood what they were seeing. But an up-to-date trainer? Whether Leah succeeded or failed, any, absolutely any, contemporary trainer should have taken one look and said, “Oh, binding. Bernie Brown.”
    And a professional dog writer, trainer and handler of numerous consistently high-scoring golden retrievers, columnist for Dog’s Life, member of the board of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, occasional contributor to Off - Lead, and every-word-of-every-issue front-to-finish reader of Front and Finish! An individual who continued to harbor the intense, if delusional, hope of putting a C.D.X. on an Alaskan malamute? A person who had spent the previous three weeks enduring her cousin’s increasingly irksome proselytizing for the Bernie Brown method? Well, I’d have expected better. I could hardly believe how slow I’d been. I of all people should have spotted it: binding. The no-force method of murder.
     

29
     
     By the time Steve arrived, I’d fed the dogs, taken a shower, and put on a black L.L. Bean tank-top dress with a wide jersey belt. Black may not seem like a festive choice for the Fourth of July, and it sure shows dog hair, but the weather was hot, the dress was cool, and, to my way of thinking, L.L. Bean’s closest approximation to the rich and varied shades of Rowdy’s coat was a perfectly patriotic choice. If I’d been Betsy Ross, the American flag would display a head study of an Alaskan malamute against a field of stars and stripes, and our national colors would be red, white, blue, and dark wolf gray.
    Steve turned up in a new white polo shirt and tan pants devoid of any particular canine or nationalist associations. Before he’d even entered the kitchen, Rita came pattering down the back stairs carrying a bottle of wine and wearing a red linen dress and red heels so high that it made my feet hurt just to look at them.
    “Tah dah!” she announced. “Am I all right? Have I gone too far?
    “No,” I said, “not at all. You look wonderful.”
    “Fetching,” said Steve, D.V.M. and dog trainer, but not usually punster, at least not intentionally.
    “ Fetching ?” Rita was delighted. “What higher compliment?”
    Steve still didn’t get it. While Rita explained, I called out, “Leah! Leah, you’re due at the Bensons’ at seven-thirty at the latest. Can you hear me?”
    She was in the bathroom, but the shower wasn’t yet running.
    “Yes,” she called out.
    “Don’t spend an hour on your hair, okay? And don’t bring Kimi. Do you understand? There’ll be food, and she’ll steal everything, and there’s a hearing dog in the house. I do not want you showing up with her. Is that clear?”
    “Okay!” The shower started.
    To console Rowdy and Kimi, who were prancing around depositing dog hair on our clothes and begging to go along, I doled out two lams biscuits. Then I took two bottles of wine from the refrigerator, handed them to Steve, and picked up the present I’d wrapped for Ruffly, a squeaker-free polyester fleece toy in the form of a person —great toy, by the way, but if your dog chews, watch out for the ones with squeakers, and if you don’t know why, ask your vet, unless, of course, your vet happens to be out of town enjoying a luxury vacation paid for by all those other dog owners who also didn’t know why to watch out for squeaker toys until their dogs ended up in surgery and their vets ended up in Barbados. Got it?
    Steve’s van was parked in my