Black Ribbon (2 page)

“Boy, oh, boy,” said my editor, “do you ever need a vacation.”

Any editor who phones at seven
A.M.
deserves a brush-off. But a
dog writer’s
editor? Sorry, but if you can’t endure the ordeal-by-pun, you don’t belong in dogs, the land of Lixit waterers, Rebark booties, Pupsicle frozen beef treats, and antiparasitics with brand names so gut-wrenching that you don’t even need to shove the products down Fido’s throat, but can just catch his eye and holler:
Erliworm! Panacur! Evict!
or
Good Riddance!

“And the other organizations are even worse off!” I exclaimed into the phone. “Thirty-six dogs per Elk, and the Moose are really trying hard, but you’ve got to feel sorry for them, because for them, it’s—”

Bonnie groaned. “The camp is called Waggin’ Tail,” she said. “It’s in Maine.” She paused. “Vacationland,” she added significantly.

“I grew up there,” I reminded her.

“On the coast. This is in Rangeley. Doesn’t your grandmother …?”

“She’s in Bethel. It’s nearby.”

“There. You see? The cool north woods of home. And, Holly? Maxine McGuire has mortgaged her soul to get this thing going. You will
love
it.” Bonnie was instructing, not predicting. “And your dogs will love it even more than you will. That’s very, very important. They’ll adore every second. Focus on the dogs. Their reactions, their quirks, their experience. You’re in the picture, but you’re in the background.”

Teaching your grandam to suck rawhide.

Bonnie persisted. “Max is sending you the preregistration packet. Camp’s the last week in August. I want the article as soon as possible after camp ends.
Compris?”

“ ‘How We Spent Our Summer Vacation in Dog Heaven.’ ”

“Wonderful! There you go. And I also need something very, very positive about …” Bonnie’s voice faded.

“I can’t hear you.”

“AKC!” she shouted. For those of you new to the fancy, I should explain. AKC: Antiquated Kennel Club. “Write me something about AKC. About shows?”

Bonnie is a good editor. If there’s one thing that AKC does splendidly, it’s a dog show. The American Kennel Club itself does not hold shows; it approves them. Clubs run shows—kennel clubs, national breed clubs, obedience clubs—1,169 all-breed shows, 1,729 specialty shows, and 405 obedience trials last year alone, and if I were a few hundred people instead of just one, I’d have attended every all-breed show, every specialty, and every trial in the country, and I’d have had fun at every one. Have I lost you?
Specialty:
a single-breed dog show, limited to Siberian huskies, Pulik, German shepherd dogs, whatever. Preferably, from my point of view, Alaskan malamutes.

“Sure,” I told Bonnie. “Anything you want except one more article on the search for a new president. That one’s been done to death.”

“Do me a nice hands-on, how-to piece,” Bonnie said.

“How to Amateur-Handle Your Dog to Best of Breed at Westminster.” Short article. Entire text:
Don’t. Hire a professional.

Bonnie added a thought. “Something about judges. Etiquette for exhibitors. Making the judge’s job easy.
Do’s
and
Don’t’s.
You have the guidelines?”

In what may at first seem like a digression, let me point out that in conventional Masonry,
G
stands for God and Geometry. In the fancy, it means Guidelines: “Guidelines for Dog Show Judges” and “Guidelines for Obedience Judges.”
R
is also sacred to us: “Rules Applying to Dog Shows,” “Rules Applying to Registration and Discipline,” “Obedience Regulations,” single copies of which used to be free, sort of like Gideon Bibles, but now cost a dollar apiece. Before long, the Gideons’ll start tacking a nominal rental fee onto motel rates. Anyway, in Masonry,
G
refers to God’s compass, and in our order, it refers to Guidelines, which is to say that in both orders,
G
, the last letter in you-know-what, defines the limits of good and evil. Have I lost you? Well, the Moose may have discarded the
tah
, but in the fancy, we’re as backward as ever.

The promised preregistration packet arrived a week after Bonnie’s call, on a July day when the sun burning over Cambridge, Massachusetts, was as red as the letters that spelled out the camp name and motto on the big white envelope:

Torn open and upended on my kitchen table, the thick envelope yielded one color-glossy promotional brochure for Waggin’ Tail Camp and dozens of photocopied pages that I
spread out and sorted through. The brochure, a slick professional product, displayed several appealing photographs: one of a sunset reflected in a sapphire blue lake; one of a gigantic log cabin with miniature clone-cabins arrayed on either side; one of a mastiff bitch, Maxine McGuire’s, no doubt, with a large litter of pups similarly clustered about her. Maxine and my editor, I might mention, belonged to the same lodge—Bonnie’s mastiffs went back to Maxine’s lines—thus Bonnie’s loyalty to Maxine and the eagerness of
Dog’s Life
magazine to support Maxine’s new enterprise.

The text of the camp’s brochure contained a great many exclamation points. It was principally devoted to persuading the reader that, in contrast to competing institutions, Waggin’ Tail offered a high degree of—and here I don’t just talk the talk, but quote the quotes—“civilization.” For the last week of August, Waggin’ Tail, it proclaimed, had exclusive possession of the newly refurbished Mooselookmeguntic Four Seasons Resort Lodge and Cabins, located in Maine’s beautiful and unspoiled Rangeley Lakes region, where campers would enjoy home-cooked gourmet meals featuring sumptuous regional delicacies (“including lobster!!!”), a daily cocktail hour, wine with dinner, and various other alcoholic and nonalcoholic extravagances unavailable at competing camps!!! “Ruff It in Luxury!”

Despite the promises of lavish accommodations, epicurean delights, and copious tippling, what obviously set Waggin’ Tail apart from numerous similar camps was that it cost a ridiculous amount of money. The fees appeared not in the brochure, but on one of the photocopied enclosures. Of necessity, the figures were in fine print; otherwise, they wouldn’t have fit on the page. I had no idea why I’d even been sent the fee schedule. In return for the laudatory piece I’d been assigned to produce, my dogs and I were on full scholarship.

The remaining material consisted of a five-page welcome-to-camp form letter from Maxine McGuire; a tentative schedule
of camp activities that included every dog sport and activity I’d ever heard of and a bewildering number of workshops, seminars, and courses on topics such as leash-braiding and canine first aid; detailed directions to the resort; a long list of items to pack; two copies of a lengthy contract entitled “Waiver of All Liability and Release and Indemnification Agreement,” one of which had to be signed and returned; and two health certificates to be filled in by my veterinarian. The absence of a corresponding form to be completed by my M.D. was, I thought, a sure sign that Maxine McGuire was a real dog person, which is to say, someone who demands written proof that a dog is fecal negative and up-to-date on his shots, but assumes that a mere human being doesn’t have anything worth catching, anyway.

Ah, but speaking of real dog people, let me explain why my bitch, Kimi, didn’t go to camp by remarking on how ill-deserved is the Old Testament’s reputation for antidog bias! It’s there, of course, and it’s perfectly understandable. Even by my standards, the ancient Egyptians really were dog nuts, and I can imagine that if I were held in bondage by a bunch of reptile-worshippers, I probably wouldn’t run out and get a pet chameleon the second I finally got free, so if establishing the Mount Sinai Kennel Club and chairing its first all-breed show wasn’t exactly Moses’s top priority, you can’t blame him, or God, either. I mean, by comparison with Job, Biblical dog lovers got off easy, and in return for their trials, received more than fair compensation in the consoling verse that I recited to myself on the morning of Sunday, August 22, when I left Kimi, as well as my Cambridge three-decker, in the care of my cousin Leah, and headed for Rangeley, Maine, accompanied only by my male malamute, Rowdy, a creature of many purposes and times, but one blessedly free of the cycles to which Kimi is subject. Indeed, in the words of Ecclesiastes, to every thing there
is
a season.

EXPERIENCED WORLD TRAVELERS, I’m told, pack lightly. Experienced dog people do, too, at least for ourselves: By the time we’ve jammed in everything the dogs will need and found room for such absolute dog-show necessities as folding chairs and ice chests, it’s a miracle if there’s room left for a change of human underwear. But Waggin’ Tail Camp wasn’t a show: So by leaving the grooming table at home, I squeezed in an entire suitcase for myself. When I backed out of my driveway, the remainder of the Bronco held Rowdy’s crate and the bare minimum of paraphernalia he’d need for the week: an orthopedic dog mattress with a fake fleece zip-off cover, a small bag of premium dog food, a canister of liver treats, a supply of cheese cubes in a Styrofoam cooler with two freezer-packs to keep the cheese fresh, a container of large and small dog biscuits, Rowdy’s five favorite chew toys, an X-back racing harness, a longe line, a tracking harness, a thirty-foot tracking lead, two obedience dumbbells—one wooden, one nylon—three white work gloves for the Directed Retrieve, a set of scent discrimination articles in a plastic mesh
carrier, a twenty-six foot retractable lead, assorted metal and nylon training collars, a Wenaha doggy backpack, three leather leads, a wire slicker brush, an undercoat rake, a finishing brush, grooming spray, dog shampoo, a food dish, a water bowl, and a king-size sheet to protect the bedspread of my own bed in case Rowdy decided to sleep there instead of in his crate and in case I decided to let him, as he certainly would decide and as I certainly would, too.

Within the folding crate was Rowdy, who’d realized for a week that we were going somewhere and, now that we were finally heading out of Cambridge on Route 2, rested his big head smugly on his big white snowshoe paws and eyed the front passenger seat.

“Forget it,” I told him. “You hated that seat belt harness.”

Having used the rearview mirror for the incidental purpose of checking to see whether a Boston driver was about to smash into me, I again caught Rowdy’s eye and, just as Ford intended, admired my big, beautiful dog. AKC judges have done so too, not in mirrors, of course, but they have, conformation judges somewhat more ardently than obedience judges, I might add. Rowdy finished his breed championship easily. Putting the X for Excellent on his Companion Dog title, however, had taken us more attempts than I care to report, thank you. Need I explain? The Alaskan malamute is the heavy-freighting dog of the Inuit speakers of
Mahlemut
, a dialect of Inupiat in which the sounds rendered in English as the command
Come!
actually mean: “Hightail it in the opposite direction, dash in giant figure eights, drop to the ground, roll onto your back, and wave your paws in the air until the judge cracks up and the spectators are in stitches.” That’s Mahlemut for you: succinct. I’ve studied up. My research has given me a great respect for the people who developed this breed. Extraordinary language. Ungodly beautiful dogs. Big-boned. Low-slung. Like small-eared wolves with dark, gentle eyes
and an expression warm enough to melt the Arctic night and sweet enough to turn blubber into honey, and …

And what does all this have to do with dog camp? Let’s just say that five hours after we left Cambridge, when I parked the Bronco in the Waggin’ Tail lot, leashed Rowdy, and led him across a field of rough, weedy rural Maine grass toward what a cardboard arrow informed me was the camp registration table, I had a dog I was proud to be seen with. And he had heavy competition, too: a handsome young mastiff; three sleek basenjis; numerous Labs in yellow, black, and chocolate; a darling papillon; a perfectly matched brace of Pomeranians groomed for the show ring; three English springer spaniels; a pretty briard with a barrette in her hair; one bichon; two Boston terriers; a very old Pembroke Welsh corgi; a young whippet; a beautifully proportioned, well-balanced Chesapeake bitch with that dark brown coat favored in this part of the country; an Australian cattle dog; a Bernese hitched to a festively decorated cart; two drenched goldens and a flatcoat fresh from the lake, all three cooling off everyone in shaking distance; dozens of multiethnic, culturally pluralistic mixes and crosses, and … Well, I could go on and on, and, if I’m not stopped, will probably do so at extreme length and in minute detail. But, as I’ve indicated, even judged against heavy competition, mine was certainly the most outstanding dog of all. This happy realization, of course, filled me with the comforting sense of being exactly where I belonged, right in the midst of my own Blue Lodge, secure in the knowledge that everyone around me shared the Unifying True Secret known in our fellowship as the Transcendent Paradox: Everyone else present at Waggin’ Tail at that moment was thinking exactly the same thought I was. And every single one of us was absolutely right.