Stud Rites

the eligible list years ago.” After an uncharacteristic pause, she added grimly, ”Instead of leaving poor Freida to do it for him.”
     

 
     
    REMEMBER all those Old Testament begats? Men begat men. Cush begat Nimrod; Arphaxad begat Salah, who begat Eber; Terah begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Haran begat Lot, whose father, in violation of Jewish custom, wanted to call him Haran, Jr., but whose mother, an overlooked pioneer in the feminist movement, sensibly held out for a name that the other kids wouldn’t make fun of. ”You, Haran,” she snorted, ”can take your patriarchal tradition and shove it! I, for one, take it with a grain of salt!” Thus was cast and forecast poor Lot’s lot.
    In the beginning, though, God held a monopoly on the begetting industry. God alone created. Adam and Eve probably wanted to; they just didn’t understand the mechanics until a venomous industria 1-espionage agent slipped the secret plans to Eve, who is justly famous as the world’s first union organizer and the founder of the happy free-enterprise system we enjoy today.
    In Genesis, people first had to figure out how begetting was done. Only after that did they get busy creating new life: Cain and Abel. If therein lies a natural order, we at the national violated it. Among us, violent death came first. Thereafter, in innocent near-ignorance of how the deed was done, we mated motive to motive. Suspicion begat suspicion. It was fruitful. It multiplied.
    Freida Reilly had a motive as obvious as Cain’s, although rather different from his. As I recall, all Cain wanted was a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t, whereas what Freida craved was success. This show was Freida’s. If Hunnewell had botched the judging, the failure would have been hers. The gain was hers: Mikki Muldoon’s judging was smooth and efficient. The gain was Mikki Muldoon’s, too. Judging a national specialty? A prestigious assignment, one she’d prepared herself to accept. So everyone suspected Freida, who, as rumor had it, suspected Mikki, but who was also said to have raised questions about the culpability of some member of the wedding party, whether out of genuine suspicion or loyalty to Mikki no one knew.
    Betty Burley, who always suspected everyone, even me, of greater dedication to winning with malamutes than to rescuing them, raised questions about Sherri Ann Printz, whose Bear was supposed to be the favorite under Judge Hunnewell, but was definitely not so supposed by Betty Burley. Now that Hunnewell was dead, Betty vehemently asserted that Hunnewell would have shamed everyone by withholding the ribbons and thus announcing that the entire entry lacked merit—Betty insisted that she’d said so last night.
    I, by the way, did not merely suspect Sherri Ann Printz of stealing Cubby’s pedigree and the stud book Page from Betty’s tote bag; how Sherri Ann had known that those papers were in Betty’s tote, I wasn’t sure, but I had no doubt whatsoever that it was Sherri Ann who’d taken them. In Sherri Ann’s position, I might have protected my reputation just as I was sure she’d done. Although I didn’t know whether Betty had even asked to use Sherri Ann’s Bear at stud, I nonetheless suspected Sherri Ann of having insulted Betty by refusing. Whether Victor Printz suspected anyone remained a mystery to everyone except the Pawprintz dogs. They were the only creatures who seemed to comprehend a syllable of Victor’s disjointed mumbling.
    Bear’s true chances under Hunnewell? In predicting the would-have-been opinions of a deceased judge, the forecasters had the benefit of never being proven wrong. Sherri Ann Printz graciously accepted the condolences of supporters who were absolutely certain that Bear was just Hunnewell’s type, a shoo-in for Best of Breed. Rotten luck, they told her. She agreed: Rotten luck. If Bear’s boosters and Sherri Ann’s supporters were correct, the expression was grossly inadequate. In dogs, rotten luck is missing the judging at a little local match because of a flat tire. It’s watching your halftrained pup scramble to his feet on what was supposed to be the down-stay exercise (lie down and stay down) because of some damned toddler with an ice cream cone. Furthermore, Best of Breed at a national specialty isn’t just an honor, one more big win; it is the honor, the ultimate win within the breed. Consequently, discovering that your top contender for Best of Breed at a national has suddenly become just one more