Stud Rites

suppose we’ll have to save it for Saturday night. You don’t care for the ugly thing, and I wouldn’t give it house room, but someone will just love it.” From her overstuffed tote bag, Betty removed a manila folder and added a note about Sherri Ann’s lamp to her list of donations. At Betty’s request, I started to move the lamp from its temporary place among the silent-auction items to the long, narrow table that ran along the wall at the back of our booth, where we were displaying the ten special donations reserved for the Saturday post-banquet live auction.
    ”Don’t drop it!” Betty warned me. ”If it lands on your foot, it’ll crush it, and then where will I be?” Betty had started checking animal shelters for abandoned malamutes thirty or forty years ago. She was one of the pioneers of the breed rescue movement, which is an effort to tackle the otherwise overwhelming problem °f needy and abandoned dogs by dividing the responsibility. It’s hard to understand why dog people would have devalued kindness to animals and rejected the simple, practical idea that we should take care of our own, but Betty spent decades being ridiculed for wasting her rime and money on what people called ”trash dogs.” She sometimes found it hard to believe that support was growing. If the lamp had smashed my foot, Yvonne, Nancy, Isabelle, Gary, or one of the other rescue people would have filled in for me. But Betty remained sensitive.
    A woman who’d been examining the album of rescue dogs moved along the table. Picking up a book— Frozen Future, a book about Antarctica—she asked, ”How much is this?”
    ”It’s a silent auction,” I explained for the thousandth time. ”You look at the piece of paper, the one there, and you see how much the last person bid for it. And if you’re willing to pay more, you write your name and the amount on the next line. And then on Saturday afternoon after Best of Breed, you come back and see if you’re the highest bidder.”
    Ever the proselytizer, Betty Burley pounced on the woman and offered her a pamphlet about Alaskan Malamute Rescue. Then Yvonne Johnson appeared and took over for me so that I could make the rounds of the vendors. The booth that especially interested me was run by R.T.I., Reproductive Technologies, Inc., a company that specialized in ovulation timing and semen preservation.
    Yes, indeed. I had to see a man about some frozen sperm.
     

 
     
    ”THE BITCH that Lois calls Angel is actually quite decent.” Pam Ritchie eyed the young—and by implication, far from decent—male that another New England breeder, Lois Metzler, was at that moment gaiting across the ring.
    With apparent astonishment, Tiny DaSilva gasped, ”Do you think so?”
    ”Yes, I do,” Pam snapped. ”For those lines.” Finding the R.T.I. booth staffed only by a sign that read back soon, I’d spotted Pam and Tiny and decided to catch some of the judging. Fond of my jugular, I’d avoided even the appearance of partiality by moving °ne of the hotel-supplied chairs to a position behind and directly between Pam and Tiny, whose knees almost brushed the baby gate.
    Tiny gave a loud snort. Lowering the volume, she mumbled, ”Ball of fluff on toothpicks!”
    Everything about Pam, from her big-boned build to the distinctive shape of her head to a familiar and characteristic expression in her eyes, suggested an origin in the lines that had produced Tiny’s dogs; and if Tiny had been a malamute, she’d have been one of Pam Ritchie’s own breeding, a pure Kotzebue, a descendant of the malamutes bred by Milton and Eva B. Seeley at the old Chinook Kennels, which supplied the dogs for the Byrd expeditions. But the colors were wrong, the coats incorrect: Pam had a mane of unacceptably fluffy curls in non-malamute chestnut. If Tiny had shampooed out the blue tint and let her blunt cut grow, she could have entered herself, I guess, but as it was, the evidence of cosmetic tinkering was unmistakable, and she was obviously out of coat.
    Appearances mislead. Despite the incessant exchanges of growls, Pam and Tiny often traveled to and from shows together. At meetings, they invariably sat next to each other. A few months earlier, Pam had had a miscarriage while her husband was away on business, and Tiny had nursed her and taken care of her dogs. Observing what often seemed like an imminent and bloody scrap, a stranger wouldn’t have known that Pam and Tiny were self-chosen kennelmates linked by