Gone to the Dogs (13 page)

Should you ever find yourself vetless in Cambridge with a dog that’s contracted an embarrassing social disease, let me reassure you that you may safely go to Steve. Neither Lorraine nor Pete, the most talkative of the aides, ever violates the confidentiality of animal patients or human clients. Steve isn’t a client, of course, and they apparently distinguish between me in my capacity as dog owner and the other, discussable me, so to speak.

“In this case, it doesn’t make any difference,” Steve said, “because Geri’s got the same idea. Patterson’s, uh, friend. It seems like she’s been treating the whole thing like some kind of last fling, but now she
thinks it’s not so funny. She’s coming down here to check it out.”

“Really? Everyone was so sure. But how did she …?”

“How’d she find out about Jackie? For all I know, Lorraine called her. Lorraine’s the one who told me about it.”

We talked about Lorraine, then about Jackie and Lee Miner. I said nothing about John Buckley. When Steve turns protective, he overreacts.

When you hear how I slept that night, don’t blame the food at Michela’s. If you need to blame something or someone, blame Admiral Byrd. At about three
A.M
., I awoke from one of those long, confused dreams that seem to have been produced, directed, and cast by some maddened Cecil B. De Mille. I was in Little America, Antarctica, and I was frantically searching for a lost dog. The landscape was vast, white, and semidark, but lurid images of green and blue castles filled the sky. Burly figures in bulky, fur-trimmed parkas wandered among shabby huts and drifted off on brief and evidently futile treks. Admiral Byrd lounged in a doorway. Although heavy fog and thick sheets of falling snow hid most of the faces, I somehow knew that this was Byrd’s first expedition, but I wasn’t surprised to recognize Oscar Patterson and Jackie Miner among the wanderers. The shriek of the wind blended with human voices crying: “Gone! Gone!” A man who looked like John wept for his lost dog. I felt very cold.

Then I was fully awake but still cold, and the howling hadn’t stopped. Steve lay on his back with one knee bent upward to form a sort of tent frame for the top sheet, blankets, and comforter. I was lying naked. The radiator in my bedroom doesn’t work
very well. The temperature in the room may have been as high as forty-five degrees. I climbed into Steve’s tent, fastened my chilled fingers around the edges of the bedclothes, and yanked. Then I nestled up to him, pressed my icy body against the hard heat of his, and hoped that the dogs would shut up.

Even for a malamute, Rowdy had always singled himself out as a howler of feature-soloist caliber, but he and Kimi rarely performed, and I have no idea what got them going that night. They didn’t like being locked out of the bedroom, of course, but they were used to it, and it was absolutely necessary, because the murmurs, cries, and odors of human lovemaking drive them completely wild, and when they get wild, they yowl, yip, and bay even more loudly than they were howling that night. Mostly, though, malamutes are people: Making love in their presence feels like some kind of perverse group sex. So maybe they’d heard a cruiser or an ambulance with some extraordinary lupine siren. Or maybe, in fact, they were singing a lament for Groucho.

Even if they weren’t, I had to make them stop. In a way, it seemed a shame. Their voices were melodious, their tones happy, not at all mournful, but that’s not how their calls would sound to Rita, whose apartment is, of course, directly above mine. The wood floor of the bedroom felt like permafrost under my bare feet, and even when I’d grabbed a robe from the closet, shoved my arms in the sleeves, and knotted the belt tightly around me, I was shaking. As soon as I opened the kitchen door, though, the dogs quit howling and ran over to me. I hated to set a precedent by rewarding them for the middle-of-the-night chorus, but what choice did I have? In a high cupboard over the sink was a collection of brand-new
chew toys. I tore the heavy plastic wrapping off two Souper-size Nylabones, thrust them into the gaping but silent jaws of the dogs, and stumbled back to bed. As you’ve probably gathered, Steve can sleep through almost anything, but by that time, I was so desperately cold that I did a bad and inconsiderate thing: I eased my hands under him and wedged them between the small of his back and the warm bed underneath.

“Jesus Christ!” he hollered.

I removed my hands and slithered to my own, cold side of the bed. “I’m sorry,” I said, still shaking. “I’m frozen, and I had a bad dream. You took all the covers, and the dogs were howling, and I dreamed I was in Antarctica.”

His voice was low and bleary. “It’s all right. Come back here. Give me your hands.” He wrapped them in his and pulled me toward him, then under him. Is it possible that missionary women were simply the ones who had to get up with the dogs?

“It was a terrible dream,” I said over breakfast.

“Sounds awful,” Steve said. “You were cold, and you heard the dogs.” Rita says that on a psychological-mindedness scale running from zero to infinity, he would score zero.

“I like hearing the dogs, if they aren’t bothering anyone. The bad part was Antarctica. And the lost dog. And the man crying. And that son of a bitch, Byrd.”

“Hey, okay,” he said soothingly.

In August of 1928, the dogs of Byrd’s first expedition traveled by train from Wonalancet, New Hampshire, to Norfolk, Virginia, where they were loaded onto the Norwegian whaler
Sir James Ross Clark
for the voyage to New Zealand. In Dunedin, New Zealand, the dogs were transferred to the
City of New York
for the final leg of the trip to Antarctica. Ninety-seven dogs left Wonalancet, or maybe only ninety-five. No one seems to know for sure. At least four died on the way to Antarctica. No one kept count, but about twenty-six surviving pups were born in Little America, which makes about a hundred twenty-seven dogs, right? Some died in dogfights. Some froze to death. At least twenty-five were killed
and fed to their teammates. Of the seventy-seven still alive at the end of the expedition, seventeen were shot, and only sixty taken on board the ship. Our national hero, Richard E. Byrd. Steve knows about all that.

“It’s not okay,” I said, reaching for a piece of toast and then tearing it up. “It’s a nightmare. Hey, Steve? I just realized something. That crying man? You know who that was? The one who looked like John. That was Arthur Walden. And the lost dog was Chinook. That’s what the dream was about. It was about looking for Chinook.”

If this were the 1920s, I wouldn’t have to explain who Chinook was, or Arthur Walden, either, because Chinook was the most famous dog in America, and Walden, his owner, was pretty famous, too. Walden wrote a popular book,
A Dog-Puncher in the Yukon
, and he and his Chinook dogs—the famous sire himself and a team of his offspring—won the first Eastern International Sled Dog Derby in 1922.

“Did they ever find him?” Steve asked.

I shook my head. “Chinook died in Antarctica. They never even found his body. That part of the dream was true, that he wandered away, and that they looked for him, but he was gone. And Walden never got over it, I guess, even though he had the other dogs, the rest of the team. He took a whole team of Chinooks, sixteen, I think, and probably there were more back here. But I guess it just tore his heart out when he lost that dog.” Then I made the connection. “I have to call my father.”

“Your father’ll just get you more worked up,” Steve said. “He’s worse than you are about it.”

“No, it’s not about Byrd,” I said.

Even so, I waited until Steve had left before I
called my father. Their relationship is complicated. Buck raises wolf dogs, whereas Steve maintains that hybridizing wild and domestic animals is a big mistake. Steve is right, but Buck is my father. That’s one complication. Another is this: Despite Buck’s prejudice against veterinarians (“thieving charlatans”), every time Steve and I go to Owls Head, Buck wants Steve to examine the dogs, clean their teeth, immunize them against everything, and perform miscellaneous minor surgical operations. Buck’s requests would be okay if he had only three or four dogs, but he has eighteen: seventeen hybrids and one golden retriever puppy. My parents raised goldens, but this is the first one Buck’s had for a long time. Her name is Mandy, she looks like a stuffed toy come to life, and I hope she’s a sign that Buck is finally coming to terms with my mother’s death. It’s been more than twelve years since Marissa died. Vinnie was her parting gift to me. If a golden retriever puppy could console me for the loss of either of them, I’d get one tomorrow.

Anyway, ten minutes after Steve left, I was saying to Buck, “So I have this vague memory about their tails.…”

Buck swore a lot about the deficiencies in my knowledge of God’s Country, the beautiful State of Maine, home of the Perry Greene Kennels. He also cursed out Perry Greene and thus explained this gap in my expertise about my home state and Chinook dogs.

“And,” my father bellowed, “the fellow maintained a monopoly! A monopoly on the breed! You know how Perry Greene billed himself? ‘World’s Only Breeder of Purebred Chinook Dogs.’ And that’s how he kept it. The only dogs that left there were
males and spayed bitches, so he didn’t get a lot of competition, did he?”

“Evidently not,” I said.

“Nearly exterminated the breed. And God help you if you wanted to buy one.”

“You had to spend the night there, right?”

“
I
didn’t,” he said defensively.

I corrected myself: “The potential owner. If Perry Greene didn’t like you, you didn’t get a dog. I heard that. Or I read it somewhere.”

“No, no,” Buck said scornfully. “It wasn’t if
he
didn’t like you. It was if the
dog
didn’t like you! Or if he decided the dog didn’t.” I have heard Buck refuse to part with puppies on precisely the same grounds.

Do you ever have moments of sharp recognition about your parents? I don’t mean flashes of insight into feelings or character, but swift, clear perceptions of simple facts that are probably obvious to everyone else. Perry Greene, I suddenly realized, had once refused to sell Buck a dog. Furthermore, Greene’s explanation had been an intolerable insult: He’d said that the dog in question didn’t like my father. I’m convinced that it happened. Buck, I am sure, agonizes over the possibility that, after all, Greene might have been right, that in this universe of Buck-loving canines, one dog just didn’t take to him.

“So, look,” I said, tactfully keeping this vision to myself, “about the tail—”

Buck does know more about dogs than I do, and he’s always loved to pontificate about them, but ever since
Dog’s Life
hired me, he’s gotten worse than he was before. I’ll spare you most of the lecture on the six principal features that distinguish Chinooks from all other dogs. Among them is the distinctive structure
of the tail, which consists of a thick section that abruptly narrows about four inches from the base.

“Sixth,” Buck finally said, “and you can’t miss this one, their front teeth interlock. So the result is that you look into a Chinook’s mouth, and what you see isn’t like a dog’s mouth at all. Looks just like a bear’s. If you bother to look.”

The accusation was fair enough: I hadn’t examined Bear’s teeth. Yes, Bear. Most of the other distinctive features weren’t readily observable, either, but the general description fit perfectly: the beautiful, thick, tawny double coat, the size, the overall look of the dog. So how had I missed it? Oh, haven’t I mentioned this? In 1966, the
Guinness Book of World Records
listed the Chinook as the world’s rarest breed of dog. There were only about a hundred and twenty-five purebred Chinooks then. Later, the population dropped to about twelve breedable dogs, then rose again. I’d seen small pictures of Chinooks in atlases of rare breeds and faded old photos of the team Walden took to Little America, but there are hundreds of rare breeds. Although I’d’ve picked out a fila Brasileiro, a dogue de Bordeaux, or a Leonberger, I probably wouldn’t have spotted a Fell terrier, a New Guinea singing dog, or a Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever, either, and I can’t even pronounce Owczarek Nizinny, Owczarek Podhalanski, or Xoloitzcuintli, never mind recognize one. I still should have known Bear, though, especially because Rowdy and Kimi were Kotzebues, the strain of Alaskan malamute that originated at the Chinook Kennels. Arthur Walden didn’t develop the malamute, of course. Either he sold the kennels in 1930 when he returned from Antarctica; or, according to some accounts, his
wife sold them while he was still there. In any case, it’s a poor excuse. The Chinook is a sled dog, too.

John Buckley’s dog was a Chinook, and John was grieving for a bitch he’d lost, Bear’s mate. Cliff Bourque owned what Jackie had called “some weird kind of sled dog,” and Bourque had lost a bitch, too, the one that died the night Patterson vanished. A “weird” breed of sled dog? A rare breed. Not a malamute, not a Siberian, not a Samoyed. A Mackenzie River dog? So far as I knew, the breed was extinct. An American Eskimo dog? An Alaskan husky? Not exactly rare, not like a Chinook. Two men with unusual sled dogs who’ve lost two different bitches? Maybe. But the owner of a gorgeous Chinook who deliberately passes off this stellar rare-breed specimen as a shepherd mix? As a
mutt?
Well, in case you reside outside the land of purebred dogdom, let me welcome you to the shameless kingdom of brag, brag, brag.
Mutt
was John’s word, not mine.
Mutt?
Are you kidding? Never. Never in purebred dogdom. Well, never without a good reason. And it seemed to me that John Buckley had a very good reason. So did Cliff Bourque, I thought. The same reason? More than that. The same man. But it was only a guess.

An hour after I’d finished talking to my father, Geri Driscoll knocked on my front door and, as I discovered later, shook about half of the needles off the Yuletide swag I’d fastened there. My front door has a bell. She didn’t use it. Have I ever told you that Vinnie could press doorbells? Golden retrievers have great aptitude for that trick. Vinnie, I might add, not only could announce our arrival in a civilized fashion, but often did.