Gone to the Dogs

FETCH THE MURDER WEAPON

The man pivoted slowly, his hands still primly and dutifully fixed behind his back. Clasped between them was a large hypodermic syringe. In the near darkness, I managed to tie Kimi’s leash tightly to the stair rail. At my side, Rowdy waited for the first command in this interesting new obedience event.

Rowdy and I moved forward into the dim light of the hallway. I unhooked his leash, bent down a little, held my left forearm and hand parallel to his head, and pointed directly at the syringe. If the man saw Rowdy coming? If Rowdy grasped the needle by the sharp, deadly point?

Suddenly, I moved my hand forward and said firmly, “Rowdy, take it!”

He was primed for the ring. He shot forward and bounded into the little room, opened his jaws, and leapt.…

In August of 1990, Janelle Fowlds and her associates at the all-volunteer Becker County Humane Society participated in a raid on a puppy mill near Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. Their efforts brought an end to the neglect, abuse, and suffering of more than a hundred Alaskan malamutes, golden retrievers, Norwegian elkhounds, Samoyeds, Siberian huskies, and dogs of numerous other breeds. For many months after the raid, Janelle Fowlds continued to work for the well-being of the rescued dogs and puppies. With thanks from the Alaskan Malamute Protection League as well as from the author, this book is dedicated to Janelle
.

For help with this book, I want to thank Barbara Beckedorff, Laurel Morrissette, Gail and Rick Skoglund, Joel Woolfson, D.V.M., and my beloved companions, Frostfield Arctic Natasha, C.D., T.T. and Frostfield Firestar’s Kobuk.

If your name is Holly Winter, Yuletide can be a real bitch. When I say
bitch
, I know what I’m talking about. I earn my living in the world of dogs. In the pages of
Dog’s Life
magazine, including the pages occupied by my column,
bitch
is a neutral word for “female dog,” and when I tell you that I have two Alaskan malamutes, Rowdy and Kimi, a dog and bitch, I’m not swearing. But Holly Winter? In December?

I make the best of it. Take Christmas cards. If your name sounds like an ecumenical version of Merry Christmas, you don’t have to wish anyone Season’s Greetings, Happy Holidays, or Health and Happiness Now and in the Coming Year. You just sign in the white space below the picture of your spectacular dogs. In this year’s picture, the best ever, Rowdy and Kimi are wearing snazzy red harnesses, and they’re pulling their sled across a field of snow. The sled is piled with red-blanket stand-ins for bags of toys. The dogs’ plumy white tails are waving over their backs, and their big red tongues are hanging out of their eager, grinning faces. Festive and woofy.

In case you wondered, I would like to add that Rowdy and Kimi are certainly not wearing those humiliatingly
stupid reindeer-antler headbands you can order from R.C. Steele, New England Serum, J-B, and the other discount pet-supply houses. My picture doesn’t reveal the detail, but the dogs have on Velcro-fastened red velvet bow-tie collars that I copied from the ones in the R.C. Steele catalog. The originals cost about twelve dollars apiece, and I whipped up Rowdy and Kimi’s for practically nothing. The R.C. Steele version, though, is presumably durable. My homemade collars were starting to fray by mid-December, when the dogs had worn their finery only twice, once for the Christmas card photo and once for pictures with Santa. And, no, I did not drag my dogs to some shopping mall to wait in line with the kiddies. The occasion, it so happens, was a benefit for the Animal Rescue League.

As I was saying, to preserve the velvet collars for Christmas, I was saving them for special occasions, one of which was Rowdy and Kimi’s visit to the vet for rabies boosters. The fancy dress wasn’t mandatory—you don’t really have to get spiffed up for church or temple, either—but I warn you: Ministers, priests, and rabbis may overlook dirty, ragged coats, tartar-encrusted teeth, untrimmed nails, and unswabbed ears, but veterinarians do not. All creatures bright and beautiful?

The late afternoon Boston commuter traffic zooming along in both directions in front of the clinic was so ferocious that I stopped wondering whether my Bronco would get hit before I could make the turn and instead tried to decide whether we’d get front-ended, rear-ended, or sideswiped. I suddenly wished I’d crated the dogs instead of leaving them loose behind the wagon barrier. When a break came,
I slammed my foot on the accelerator and roared into the parking lot. Ms. Evel Knievel.

I’d just killed the engine, scooped up the ribbon collars, and opened my door when a bright, educated voice rang out my name. A lot of Cambridge women have those classical-music-station voices. Maybe they’re what you get for a big donation to National Public Radio. For a pledge of a hundred dollars or more, you get an NPR voice or a radiotelegraphically correct sweatshirt. My friend and tenant Rita’s friend Deborah must’ve forked up twice: She never left home without the voice, but on that unseasonably warm December day, she also wore one of the sweatshirts. Deborah’s skin is either naturally oily or heavily moisturized. Some stylist must’ve promised her that with a body perm, she could just wash her brown hair and then forget it. Forget it? Whenever Deborah looked in the mirror, she must have noticed that sprouting from her scalp were the crisp liver-colored ringlets of an Irish water spaniel. I mean, how could she
forget
a thing like that? The woman with Deborah had very short, dark, distinctly human hair and wore a red jersey outfit I’d admired when I’d seen it in the window of Pirjo, a tiny place on Huron Avenue where I can’t afford to shop. Envy? Of course.

If you live somewhere normal, you probably think that after hailing me, Deborah introduced me to her friend, and you’re right, except that in Cambridge, names are incidental. An introduction here consists of telling each person what the other one does for a living. Psychotherapists, though, usually don’t even do that; unless stated otherwise, it goes without saying that everyone else is a therapist, too.

“Karla’s at the Mount Auburn,” Deborah said. I understood what she meant because Rita, who’s a
psychologist, speaks the same
patois:
Karla, Deborah was informing me, worked as a psychotherapist at the Mount Auburn Hospital. Then Deborah explained me to Karla. “Holly is Rita’s landlady,” she began, then added, “Holly’s a, uh, dog writer.” She sneezed, pulled a tissue from her pocket, and wiped her nose. “Is that what you say?”

“Dog writer,” I said. Self-explanatory, isn’t it? Still, I felt compelled to expand. “I write about dogs.”

People usually say, “Oh, isn’t that interesting,” as if it weren’t—it is—or they ask me whether there’s some quick, easy way to get their dogs to come when they’re called—there isn’t.

“Really?” Karla said. She paused. An unspoken word formed on her lips.
Outré?
or maybe
quaint
. “Rita talks about you,” she added ominously, extending a tentative hand for me to shake.

If she expected me to give my paw, the mistake was natural. Brush two malamutes, and you end up disguised as a third. Except for the knees, my jeans were okay, but bits of pale, fluffy malamute undercoat clung to my old black lightweight hooded sweatshirt, the one with the kangaroo pocket. Worse, my hairy, oversize, once-black socks were the pair my teenage cousin Leah had made me buy. Slouch socks? Is that what they’re called? Out of some misguided sense of family loyalty, I’d smooshed them around my ankles the way Leah always did. She’d persuaded me that the socks were definitely not too young for someone just over thirty. They were.

Anyway, the embarrassing thing wasn’t the shirt or the socks or even the fur. When I pulled my right hand out of the pocket of the sweatshirt, out tumbled a mess of semipowdered freeze-dried liver and some
desiccated, long-forgotten bits of cheese. I train with food.

“Dog treats,” I said feebly, wiping my palm on my jeans. I nodded toward the Bronco.

Karla withdrew her hand and said, “Huskies.” Malamutes aren’t, of course.

“Beautiful,” Deborah said.

Like most other malamute people, I have a spiel that I usually deliver when someone mistakes the dogs for Siberians—malamutes are bigger than Siberian huskies, never have blue eyes, and all the rest—but today I just said thanks. Deborah and Karla took off on long, confident strides. They probably discussed some fashionable topic in female psychology. Bonding rituals. Women and self-esteem.

I inched open the tailgate of the Bronco. I had the collars looped around my left wrist, and I groped with my right hand until I had a solid grip on the dogs’ leashes. Rowdy and Kimi wagged their tails, licked my face, and squirmed to get out of the car. Because Rowdy was a little closer to me than Kimi was, I grabbed his regular rolled-leather collar first and held it tightly while I wrapped the velvet ribbon around his neck and tried to line up the Velcro strips to fasten it neatly. The first time, I got it on too loose, and just as I was ripping the little plastic teeth apart, Kimi spotted something compelling across the street, a dog running loose, a child eating an ice cream cone, or maybe nothing more than freedom itself. I should, of course, have fastened her leash to some solid object in the car or, failing that, locked it in my fist, but as it was, the loop at my end of the leash hung around my wrist. When Kimi barged past Rowdy and shot out of the car, she and her leash flew beyond my reach.