Stud Rites

better than to turn up in a diaphanous loincloth that poses the insurmountable problem of finding a place to fasten the official badge where it won’t look like a joke-shop fig leaf and inflict genital scarification if it comes unpinned.
    And it’s not just the Last Judgment. The Creation of Adam: Ever notice that sad little gap between God’s hand and Adam’s? Well, once you’ve torn your eyes away from the worrisome evidence that Adam suffers from the same demasculinization that afflicts those Florida alligators, you’ll notice that although God and Adam are trying hard, God more than the languid Adam, I might add, divine and human don’t quite touch. Feminist revisionist canine-cosmological Creation: The energetic Eve, her secondary sexual characteristics indicative of hormone levels in the high-normal range, eagerly reaches forth with not just one but two outstretched hands, as does the Great Breeder. In this version, the hands don’t touch directly, either, but instead of an empty space? Pre-Creation Adam lazed around waving a finger in the air. Eve put down a deposit. He got a gap. She got a puppy. And at the Final Judgment? When the last trump sounds, Eve will not walk alone.
    Nor, I hope, will I. But on the afternoon of the Eve of the Feast of Saint Hubert, after checking on the solidity of my links to the Infinite, I made a solitary sprint back to the exhibition hall and got there just as Mikki Muldoon was saying thanks, but no thanks, to a group of disappointed handlers whose dogs would doubtless make the Great Final Cut, but hadn’t made this one.
    Even celestial judgment is assumed to require paperwork, and in the earthly canine version thereof, the judge not only has to make entries in the official book, but, being human and fallible, has to keep taking and consulting notes, and, after temporarily excusing some dogs and then calling them back, is required to check handlers’ armbands to make sure that those same dogs have, in fact, reentered the ring. Shuffling through the papers on her table, Judge Mikki Muldoon prepared for the culmination of her assignment. Lined up ready to go before her one last time were the dogs who’d made the final cut, among them some I recognized: Daphne, who’d both beaten and been beaten by Rowdy; a local dog called Burlimute’s Malfeasance, sound and typey; a veteran whose name reliably aroused Pam Ritchie’s fury, the unpronounceable Koonihc, ”Chinook” spelled backward; Ironman, looking indefatigable; and pitted against Ironman, the blazing sable Casey, the dog of gold. Sherri Ann’s Bear was not among the elect. Her Winners Bitch, however, could still get Best of Winners.
    Near the gate, repeatedly pulling back the black jersey sleeve that covered her left wrist, was the L.L. Bean woman, as I thought of her, who had vanished for a while and now, like the dogs temporarily excused, had returned for the final judging of Best of Breed. Again, she checked her watch and then moved forward, almost as if she intended to speak to Mrs. Muldoon, who turned her head briefly in the woman’s direction and, in apparent response to the woman’s gaze, swiftly gathered her papers together, tapped them on the judge’s table, consulted her own wristwatch, and gave a definitive, confident smile. A dog-show pro, I had no difficulty in reading the interchange. The Bean woman? In seeing her as a plainclothes cop, I hadn’t been entirely wrong. Stationed by the ring, one eye on the judge, the other on the clock? She was, it seemed to me, a guard of sorts, and an official one, sent not by the police, but by the agency that rules the show ring. Monitoring the ring procedure, timing the speed of judging, the woman was—who else? at last!—a representative of the American Kennel Club, here to judge the judge. As she approached the gate, I noticed the inevitable layer of dog hair that now clung to the black jersey.
    ”Hey, you!” the L.L. Bean woman called to Mikki Muldoon. ”You, there! Can I have word with you?” Wrong again. ”Who is that?” I demanded of Lisa Tainter, who was squashed up next to me.
    Lisa pulled back the fur hood of her authentic parka to reveal thin hair sweat-matted against her scalp. ”She’s, uh, Mr. Hunnewell’s sister. It seems like she, uh, has some kind of thing about... It’s weird. It’s like she doesn’t understand he’s dead or something. Like she thinks his body is still him. She keeps talking about bringing him home and not