The Wicked Flea

were away for the weekend, and since Rita was also going out, I decided that I was free to stink up the place by working on my own book. A friend had E-mailed me a new recipe for liver brownies. Like brownies for people, liver brownies (no chocolate, which is toxic to dogs) are an old standby, so I didn’t want to embarrass myself by including a recipe that didn’t work. To forestall another kind of embarrassment, let me mention that testing the recipes didn’t require my tasting the products. Ugh. Rather, the testing consisted simply of making sure that the goodies solidified in proper dog-treat fashion and held together after they’d cooled. As taste-testers, Rowdy and Kimi were useless, since they gave dew-claws up to absolutely anything. Their own recipes are simple and effortless, but a bit too disgusting and, in some cases, graphic to appear in my book. The dogs have, however, persuaded me to share a few here.
     
    Master Recipe for Garbage
    Toss on floor. Turn dog loose.
     
    Smorgasbord
    Open refrigerator door. Forget to close.
     
    Lapin Tartare
    Turn loose in confined area:
    1 live rabbit
     
    Turn loose in same confined area:
    1 live malamute
     
    Yield: I live malamute
     
    Revolting! You can see why I’d never publish so-called recipes like those. Having subjected you to dog recipes, I feel compelled to compensate by offering a real one. My basic recipe for the liver used to bait show dogs came from Charlene LaBelle, a comrade in malamutes and the author of the classic book about backpacking with dogs.
     
    Charlene’s Famous Liver Bait
    Put liver in a big pot, cover with water, and add one clove of garlic for every pound of liver. Boil for twenty minutes. Drain. Remove accumulated gunk by rinsing liver under running lukewarm water. Towel it dry. Bake it at 250 degrees for two to three hours, depending on its thickness.
    It’s done when it’s dry.
     
    A few hints. Unless you have truly nauseating food preferences, discard the garlic as soon as possible. You can freeze liver and probably should, because liver contains lots of vitamin A and therefore should be doled out in small amounts to prevent an overdose. Oh, and if you can’t stand the stink of liver, substitute beef heart, not that it smells fabulous. If it did, would dogs like it? And the very idea of eating heart !
    As in eating your heart out?
    Anyway, I was preparing to test the brownie recipe. The oven was preheating, and a mess of chicken liver was defrosting in the microwave when the phone rang again. The second I answered, Private Call Number Blocked hung up, but called again ten minutes later and then ten minutes after that, each time cutting the connection as soon as I’d said hello. By that time, the brownies were baking, and the house reeked, so I opened a lot of windows and took refuge in my study, which is the home of my computer and my cat, Tracker, and is off limits to the dogs. A short-haired black cat, Tracker was attractive if you couldn’t see her face, which was disfigured by a white splotch, a squiggly birthmark, and the remains of a tom ear. She was as ill tempered as she was homely. Steve Delaney was the only person she’d ever liked. She purred for him. So far, my efforts to befriend her hadn’t been reciprocated, and the behavior-modification program I was following to train the dogs to accept her was moving much more slowly than I had hoped. I still had to be careful to keep the study door closed, with Tracker on one side and the dogs on the other. Life in the confines of one room was less than ideal for Tracker, but she got food, water, shelter, clean litter, and offers of human companionship, and I continued to feel hopeful about convincing the dogs that she was a member of our pack.
    After slipping dogless into my study, I closed the door, dislodged Tracker from the mouse pad, checked my E-mail, and worked on organizing the recipes into chapters. I’d just finished inserting Liver Baba au Rhum in the dessert chapter when, to my surprise, the doorbell rang—and the bell for the front door at that. My friends use the back door. The front bell means a delivery from UPS or FedEx, or a visit from a stranger. On Saturday night?
    Taking care to shut Tracker in my study, I headed for the front door. The dogs were more interested in our unexpected visitor than they were in the cat, anyway. Malamute interest in visitors is usually inaudible. Rowdy and Kimi ran ahead of me, tails happily wagging, and waited