by Susan Conant
Now that I’ve presented an unbiased account of USDA-license holders, let me continue. I had the booklet. I just hadn’t bothered to see whether Walter Simms was listed. I hadn’t checked anything else either. I’d asked a couple of local malamute breeders, and I’d stopped there. And my family resources? If I’d phoned my father, I’d have told you, wouldn’t I? Of course I would. I hadn’t.
So I made a big pot of tea and settled down to work. Let me summarize the results of my research. Walter Simms didn’t advertise Alaskan malamutes in Dog’s Life, Dog Fancy, or DOGworld. His name was absent from the listings of malamute breeders in the Gazette and the Malamute Quarterly. If he advertised malamutes anywhere, he didn’t include his name in the ad. No one called Walter Simms belonged to the national breed club or to any of my local clubs, either.
In case Walter Simms belonged to some local kennel club for which I lacked a membership list, I checked with the Dog Breeders’ Referral Service. You know about that? Kennel-club-member breeders take turns having their phone numbers listed in the paper and answering calls from people about where to find Skye terriers, boxers, whippets, or whatever. February happened to be Ray Metcalf’s month. You know Ray and Lynne? They raise Clumber spaniels. We train together. Anyway, Walter Simms wasn’t listed, and Ray had never heard of him.
Then I made more tea and got out the USDA booklet. If you’ve ever consulted the damn thing, you’ll remember that the Class A dealers appear in the front section of the booklet, the Class A dealers at the back, and that, in each section, the names are listed alphabetically within each state. Consequently, you can’t just look under Simms, Walter to find out whether he’s licensed and, if so, where he does business. No, if you want to be thorough, you start with the Class A dealers, and you check through Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, and so forth for forty-one pages of single-space type with one dealer per line. Then you do the Class A dealers. They’re easier: only thirteen pages. By then, you have a headache and a heartache. In an attempt to spare my eyes and my soul, I checked the A and B lists for the New England States first, but I didn’t find Walter Simms. Then I turned back to the A dealers in Alabama and went through every single state. When I’d finished the A dealers, I did the A dealers. Walter Simms didn’t have a USDA license. Neither, by the way, did Bill or Janice Coakley.
Finally, feeling something like one of Enzio Guarini’s soldiers, I called the don of my family, namely, my father, who lives in Owls Head, Maine, where I grew up. In the dozen or so years since my mother died, though, Buck has transformed the place. My parents raised and trained golden retrievers. Marissa was also a dedicated gardener who labored over her perennial borders. The peonies have survived, and so have some lupins, but the only day lilies left are the orange ones she never really liked. Her beloved delphiniums vanished in a few years. Buck took her death very hard. What yanked him out of his despondency was his discovery of wolf dog hybrids, which, I am delighted to report, he has now quit breeding. The last litter (Clyde ex Millie) was whelped a while ago, and Buck refused to sell any of those pups or any of his adult wolf dogs, either. Also, he’s built a ten-foot security fence around the once-red barn. In Marissa’s day, the barn was a model kennel building—she paved the outdoor runs herself—and the inside has held up pretty well, but from the outside, the place now looks like a correctional facility for canines convicted of white-collar crimes.
But the great news isn’t the increasing disrepair of the place, the permanent neglect of the garden, the appearance of the ten-foot fence, or the apparent cessation of wolf dog breeding. Buck hasn’t actually sworn off wolves, at least not yet, but he has finally returned to the fold, which is to say that he not only worships his half-grown golden retriever puppy, Mandy, but has rediscovered dog shows, matches, and obedience trials. He never stopped attending them, but I’m sure he’d forgotten the thrill of entering. By the way, in case you ever spot him in the ring, let me warn you that he’s not the trainer and handler Marissa was. She taught him a lot, though. Also, even before the current attention-training craze (Watch me! Ready? Ready, ready? Watch me, watch me!), Buck understood the principle that you get what you give. “A handler always ends up with the dog he deserves.” Slogan of the Royal Air Force Dog Training School. When my father trains a dog, he’s so overwhelmingly present that no matter where the dog turns his attention, there’s Buck again.
“So,” I said to my father, “how are you?”
He answered like the real dog person he is; he bragged about Mandy. “This is undoubtedly the most remarkable obedience prospect to set paw upon God’s green earth in the last decade,” he proclaimed.
I refrained from mentioning Vinnie.
Buck continued. “This little Mandy character is the most alert, curious, bright-eyed creature … never takes her eyes off my face. Did I tell you how she did at her first match?”
“First place in Pre-Novice. That’s really wonderful. Another Winter Wonder,” I blurted out. That’s what everyone called my mother’s dogs, Winter Wonders—they were, too—but the words brought Marissa back so vividly that my eyes watered. I shouldn’t have spoken the phrase aloud, not to my father.
To my surprise, though, Buck seemed flattered. He thanked me. Then he kept on bragging about Mandy, who is, by the way, almost as perfect as Buck claims.
“Future DOGworld, huh?” I said.
Stranger around here? A DOGworld obedience award requires earning all three obedience titles within twelve months or earning a C.D., C.D.X., or U.D.—Utility Dog title—in three consecutive trials with a score of 195 or higher in each trial. 195? You’re kidding. Where are you from, anyway? Neptune? Mars? Well, welcome to Sirius, the dog star. That’s 195 out of a perfect 200.
“Bernie Brown better watch himself,” Buck said happily.
Bernie Brown, in case you don’t already know, is a top handler and a famous obedience instructor. Needless to say, Bernie Brown does not have malamutes. In fact, a quote from one of Bernie Brown’s books is tacked to the bulletin board in my study: “Malamutes make excellent pets, but I wouldn’t want to train one.” What breed does Bernie Brown have? Take a wild guess.
To avoid undermining my father’s self-confidence by offering an estimate of his chances against Bernie Brown, and also to get to the point of my call, I said, “So has Jim Chevigny seen her yet? Or Marian Duckworth?”
Jim and Marian are two of Buck’s oldest friends. He has a lot of friends. These two happen to work at the AKC, and they don’t sweep the floors there, either.
“As a matter of fact, Marian was at the club last week,” Buck said. That’s the Mid-Coast Obedience Club. I was astounded. To the best of my knowledge, Buck hadn’t trained there since Marissa died. “Jaw dropped open when she saw this little lady work,” he went on. “Dropped open and just hung like that. You’d’ve thought she was waiting for the dentist.”
Mandy’s heeling is impressive, of course. Well, damn it, she’s a golden. What do you expect? But Marian Duckworth has seen lots of perfect heeling. What had astonished Marian had certainly been my father’s sudden return to apparent normality.
“Well, maybe you could ask Marian something for me,” I said. “Or Jim Chevigny. Or someone else. I need a favor.”
Sympathy filled Buck’s voice. “It’s this X, isn’t it?” he asked gently. That’s the X in C.D.X., Companion Dog Excellent, Rowdy’s next obedience title.
“NO!” I answered more sharply than I’d intended. I softened my tone. “We’re working on it. We’ll get there.”
“Never be ashamed to ask for help, Holly,” he said. “No one knows everything. We all have a lot to learn. Now, I, for example, have given a lot of thought to that last column of yours.”
Buck almost never admits to reading my column, but I know he does because he invariably drops minor corrections into our conversations. As it turned out, though, the gist of his “thought” about the column was that I lacked the spirit of healthy competition that he and Marissa had worked so hard to instill. In
the column, which was about non-AKC titles granted by national breed clubs, I’d mentioned an Alaskan malamute called Clifford. Clifford, who is owned by Robin Haggard and Jim Kuehl, is, in fact, Am./Can. Ch. Poker Flats Ace of Spies, C.D., W.P.D., W.W.P.D., W.T.D., W.L.D. Translation? American and Canadian Champion, in other words, breed champion; Companion Dog; and Working Pack Dog, Working Weight Pull Dog, Working Team Dog, Working Lead Dog. The Working titles were what the column was about; they’re granted by the Alaskan Malamute Club of America, not the AKC. Buck’s complaint was that I hadn’t put a single one of those Working titles on either of my dogs.
“Now take this Working Pack Dog title,” Buck said. “If I understand this correctly, the requirement—”
“Buck, I have other things to worry about right now. I don’t really need any help putting titles on my dogs. What I need is some information about a registration. I need to know what the AKC has on a malamute called, uh, Icekist Sissy.”
“Well, Icekist,” Buck said. “That’s Lois Metzler.”
“I know. She’s the breeder, but what I want is the owner, anything about the owner, like an address, and also anything about changes of ownership. Also, have you ever heard of someone named Walter Simms?”
“Simms. Used to be a fellow up near Rangeley. English setters, he had. There was one called Ranger—”
Once Buck starts to describe a dog, you have to choose between cutting him off immediately or listening for the next hour. “That was Simpson,” I said. “Harry Simpson. He died in a plane crash about ten years ago.”
“Harry. That was it. Never heard about it.” Buck sounded alarmed and grieved. “Damn shame. That dog, Ranger, was—”
But I was able to reassure him. “The dog wasn’t with him,” I said. “He was alone.”
“Even so, the poor fellow,” Buck said, as if to accuse me of gross insensitivity. “Abandoned like that. One day Harry was there, the next day he was gone. An English setter isn’t like a malamute, you know. This Ranger was—”
“Ranger was fine. I ran into Harry’s widow five or six years ago, and she had Ranger with her, and he was fine. Anyway, this is someone totally different. Walter Simms.”
“Never heard of him,” Buck said. “What breed does he have?”
“Malamutes. Maybe some other breeds, too. Probably. I don’t know. He isn’t necessarily around here. He could be anywhere. See if you can find out, would you? It’s Walter Simms, with two m’s.” I paused to give Buck time to make a note of Simms’s name. Buck wouldn’t need to jot down Icekist Sissy’s, of course. He wouldn’t even need a reminder. Buck never forgets a dog’s name. “Buck,” I added, “this is important. Simms is the breeder shown on the papers of a malamute called Princess Melissa Sievers. I need to know about him.”
“Puppy mills,” Buck said. “That’s what this is about. Puppy mills. AKC ought to blast those goddamned places off the face of the earth.”
The American Kennel Club has no individual members. Its members are clubs, each of which has a delegate. My father is not an AKC delegate. Maybe he should be.
18
Maybe you’ll remember that at the Shawsheen Valley show, when Betty Burley and I broke the news to Lois Metzler that her line had shown up on the pedigree of a pet shop dog, Lois turned pale and acted horrified. On Monday, though, the day after the show, Lois didn’t call me for the information I’d promised her on Missy’s pedigree, and by midday on Tuesday, I still hadn’t heard from her. I’d been on the phone for most of the morning, of course. Maybe she’d tried to reach me. I was pretty sure that if Lois had actually had a heart attack or if she’d fallen into a state of nervous prostration, someone would have let me know. Could Lois be ashamed to call, afraid that I’d blame her for not screening her buyers? Or possibly she was sick after all, and I hadn’t heard.
But when I reached Lois, she sounded healthy enough, which is to say, fit enough to have taken the initiative instead of waiting to hear from me. “Oh, yeah, I’ve been meaning to call you,” she said rather vaguely and mildly, as if she’d been neglecting a promise to pass along the name of a wonderful new brand of coat conditioner. “But I can’t talk now,” she added. “I’ve got some people coming to look at a puppy. They’re supposed to be here now. But they won’t stay too long. Why don’t you come out here in an hour or so?” She made it sound like a summons, not a question or an invitation.
I agreed, but hung up feeling resentful. Who was Lois to order me to drop everything and drive out to her place? We could have exchanged information over the phone. Furthermore, although it was Lois whose bitch, Icekist Sissy, had evidently ended up in a puppy mill, I was apparently more eager than Lois was to find Sissy and maybe even to reclaim her.
But I was eager, and I did drop everything. Lois’s place, which I’d visited before, was north of Westbrook, but about the same distance from Cambridge, that is, a drive of forty-five minutes or so. The temperature had suddenly risen to the high thirties, and with the roads wet but free of ice, I made good time. Just as I arrived, a Volvo station wagon was pulling out of Lois’s driveway; the people who’d been coming to look at a puppy had apparently arrived and were now leaving.
If you don’t have malamutes, you’ll probably assume that when I parked, got out of the Bronco, shut the door, and followed the concrete path to the front door of Lois Metzler’s many-times-expanded and thus sprawling yellow split-level, I was greeted by an eardrum-puncturing chorus of barking, but I wasn’t. As a watchdog, the Alaskan malamute is less useful than the average canary, which might sing or at least chirp or peep. When my doorbell rings, my dogs don’t just ignore the signal, of course. Far from it. They instantly dash forth to welcome whatever friend, burglar, or rapist is calling on us. Unless the visitor’s arrival happens to coincide with Rowdy and Kimi’s dinner time, though, the only sound they emit is the almost inaudible swish of two wagging tails.
In a kennel situation like Lois’s, a big pack of malamutes will usually manage some token growling, but her dog runs, I remembered, were located at the extreme end of her back yard, nowhere near the house. If she’d had near neighbors, the distance would have made sense. Malamutes aren’t silent, of course, and, like all other dogs, they have fantastic hearing. For instance, if you so much as think about feeding them, they hear the whir of your mental wheels, and they start roaring and wooing. But Lois’s house had a pond on one side, woods on the other, and an empty pasture across the road. In any case, I reached the door unheralded, and even when Lois opened it and led me through a small trophy-laden den to her bright, cramped kitchen, there still wasn’t a dog to be heard or even smelled. I mean, a whole kennelful out there in the backyard? And not one dog in the house? Yes, acute self-inflicted auditory and olfactory deprivation. The only sound in the house came from a radio tuned to a country station.
Lois, though, looked reassuringly normal, and her kitchen was outright supernormal, which is to say that almost every object that could possibly bear the image of an Alaskan malamute did so. Lois herself bore only one: Smack on the front of Lois’s gigantic blue denim tent dress, an embroidered malamute happily rested his life-size head on the generous cushion of her bosom. The selection of breed-adorned garments in size Queen XXL Tall is probably quite limited, and I wondered whether that enforced near-sterility in personal adornment might explain the population explosion in Lois’s kitchen. On the walls hung two malamute posters, a malamute calendar, and two framed needlepoint pictures of guess what. Malamute potholders and a malamute dishtowel dangled from magnetized malamute hooks on the stove. On the front of the white refrigerator, additional malamute magnets held sheets of lined paper from malamute memo pads. A malamute apron hung on the back door, on the floor beneath which rested a malamute door mat. Yet another malamute grinned at me from the toaster cover, and the same dog also tried to disguise the identity of a box of tissues. Piled on a counter were malamute place mats, and malamute mugs and glasses drained in the sink. You think I’m done? Switch-plate covers, doorstops, a
tote bag, candles, two candy dishes, and decals on every pane of every window. Oh, and the walls were plain white. I concluded that Alaskan malamute wallpaper didn’t exist. Yet. But the demand is there, of course. It’s definitely there. And, in case you think I’m making fun of Lois, let me point out that anyone who was sponsoring a contest among her own body parts to decide which one would win a tattoo of two Alaskan malamutes was not in a position to accuse other people of excessive breed loyalty. Okay?
“My God,” I said, tucking my Alaskan malamute key ring into my shoulder bag, “where did you find all this?” I took off my parka to reveal my new yellow malamute sweatshirt. My question, by the way, was perfectly serious. If you have chows, cockers, goldens, shepherds, Yorkies, or some other really popular breed, or if your breed is considered highly decorative—Scotties, Dalmatians, and Labs—it’s pretty easy to have a generic picture of your dog on practically any object you want. A Dalmatian shower curtain with matching towels and washcloths? Of course. But just try to find a Chinese crested shower curtain, a Border collie towel, or a malamute facecloth, never mind a whole set of coordinated bath accessories.
