Stud Rites

out of Faith’s way.
    Faith showed none of Rowdy’s extroverted energy. On the contrary, as she busied herself with last-minute details, her face wore an expression of cultivated composure. Tightening her grip on Rowdy’s lead, she smiled at me, then at him. Snapping her fingers and gesturing to Rowdy to get his ninety pounds off the low table and onto the blacktop, she told him, ”Okay! Let’s go, Buster!”
    Just as the Disobedience Champion of the Western World was about to do exactly as he was told, Finn Adams made his escape, and Timmy Oliver finally put down the glass bottle and got a grip on Z-Rocks. As he lifted her, her tail swept the glass bottle off the edge of the grooming table, where that stupid Timmy had left it, and sent it crashing down. I have never blamed Z-Rocks. Or Faith, either. She’d warned Timmy about that bottle, and until a second earlier, it hadn’t been sitting on the table where it could tumble down and smash to pieces. And Rowdy? When his feet left his grooming table, he had no idea that in the second before he landed, the Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote would get knocked to the blacktop.
    I suppose that if the bottle had shattered into hundreds of tiny fragments, Rowdy might have escaped unharmed. Maybe, just maybe, fine shards of glass would not have penetrated the thick leather of Rowdy’s pads. As it was, the power of Rowdy’s descent drove his left front foot into a thick chunk of jagged glass, and almost immediately, his blood flowed into the foul-smell-ing brown pools of Timmy Oliver’s damned greasy snake oil.
    To anyone who believes that show people treat dogs as nothing but objects, let me point out that Faith Barlow, a ferocious competitor, knelt in broken glass beside Rowdy, and that in her determination to spare him further injury, she shoved me aside, wrapped her arms under and around him, and, murmuring gently, managed to lift him straight up and back onto the grooming table.
    Shaking their heads and calling out in sympathy, the exhibitors heading out of the tent took a safe route along the opposite side, and people who weren’t handling dogs scurried around cleaning up and offering help. Timmy Oliver, who hadn’t removed poor Z-Rocks from the glass-strewn blacktop, made abortive efforts to speak, but the mere sound of his voice inflamed Faith, who briefly raised her head and snapped, ”I am telling you once, Timmy Oliver. You get yourself and your bitch out of here before you end up hurting her, too. There’s broken glass scattered all over. Now, you pick her up and carry her, and don’t put her down until you’re out of this tent, and the next time you lay eyes on me, you turn in the opposite direction and run, because I never intend to look at your ugly face again, and if I see it, I intend to do something about it!”
    I did not see Timmy leave. My eyes, my hands, too, were on Rowdy. A dog of another breed, maybe even another malamute, might have been whimpering and would have had a right to cry. A deep pad cut must be incredibly painful. This was not Rowdy’s first. The last time Rowdy’d had one, I hadn’t even realized that he was injured until we returned from a walk and he tracked blood all over the kitchen floor. He’d resisted my efforts to examine the wound. Now, unexpectedly hoisted back up on the grooming table, he wagged his tail and put his weight on all four feet. Oily brown splotches stained his forelegs. Blood seeped from his foot. Faith finally convinced him to raise it. With blood on her hands, she said, ”It’s way beyond me. We need—”
    As if in reply, the little group of bystanders parted, and a tall, lean guy with green-blue eyes made his way calmly and purposefully toward Rowdy, who doubled the tempo of his tail wagging and sang a resounding peal of woo-woo-woos. Ignoring everyone but Rowdy, Steve Delaney moved immediately to him and, before examining the injury, wrapped gentle hands around Rowdy’s head, brought his face so close to Rowdy’s that the two rubbed foreheads, and spoke so softly that no one but Rowdy could hear him. Then Steve held out his hand, and Rowdy offered the injured paw.
    Steve never hurries. I expected him to spend twenty minutes examining the wound before he uttered a word. I was wrong. After a glance, he lowered Rowdy’s paw and, still addressing Rowdy, said, ”Sorry, my friend. We’ll patch you up, but for today, you’re out of the running.”
     

 
     
    M.D.s AREN’T the only M. Deities;