Gone to the Dogs (15 page)

New Hampshire information gave me Cliff Bourque’s number. I dialed it. A woman answered. I told her my name, explained that I wrote for
Dog’s Life
, and asked to speak to Cliff Bourque. He wasn’t
available, she said, but she liked my column. Could she help? I told her that I wanted to do a story about Chinook dogs. By then, I did.

You know anything about rare breeds? As has been demonstrated, I’m no expert, but I do understand what moves a breed from the faceless hell of nonrecognition to the heaven of acceptance by a major registry. In the words of the American Kennel Club, what’s required is proof of fanciers’ “substantial, sustained nationwide interest and activity in the breed.” People, not dogs, right? Fair enough. Dogs already recognize themselves, and they admit the existence of their brethren, too. Anyway, for admission to the happy purgatory of the AKC’s Miscellaneous class or for recognition by the United Kennel Club (no purgatory there, just damned or saved), you need a national breed club with a registry, as well as sires and dams to enter in the stud book. And you’d better promote the breed. For example, get it written up in
Dog’s Life
. Thus Anneliese Bourque was delighted to hear from me. I didn’t have to fish for an invitation, and although she must have been surprised that I not only accepted hers but said that I could arrive in an hour, she seemed pleased.

The Bourques lived not far over the New Hampshire border, but far enough north of Cambridge so that our previous night’s rain had crystallized and fallen in a light dusting of snow that clung to the pines surrounding the lime-green fifties ranch, a tract house with no tract. Like all peace-loving kennel owners, the Bourques had no near neighbors. As if to create the illusion of suburbia, though, someone had installed an iron lamppost at the bottom of the long drive, where I parked the Bronco to prevent my traveling companion, Kimi, from clawing up the interior
in a frantic determination to introduce herself to the Chinooks. As maybe you know and maybe you don’t, I’m Kimi’s third owner, but that’s a long story. The point is that if she’d spent her puppyhood with me, she’d have had plenty of opportunities to socialize with other dogs. As it is, she’s pretty good except when she finds herself staring through a window at a lot of strange dogs that she can see, hear, and smell only from a distance; the mystery of who they are drives her crazy. Her reliably horrible behavior in that situation was the reason I’d brought her with me: Kimi was going to be the monster dog I’d present to Brenner. His place would be directly on my route home from the Bourques’, and I’d decided to bring Kimi with me instead of having to drive all the way back to Cambridge to get her.

I walked up the Bourques’ driveway and approached the house. A shingle suspended by the door of a small addition read: “
PINE TREE SALON
,” and a row of slats hanging from a post announced:

PINE TREE KENNELS

Purebred

Chinook Dogs

Yet another sign, this one nailed to a garage door, advertised, “
PINE TREE ELECTRIC. SUPPLIES AND SERVICE.”
As I’ve mentioned, economic survival efforts in rural New England generate these oddly juxtaposed enterprises.

From the first of four immaculate chain-link runs attached to the garage, a smaller version of Bear barked softly and wagged his tail at me. His voice carried no menace.

“I’m here,” he told me.

“Me, too,” I answered. “Nice to meet you.”

Kenneled next to him was a pretty, fine-boned bitch with a rich, tawny coat. The other two runs were empty. I rang the bell by the front door and studied the Bourques’ wreath while I waited. It was much more elaborate than my plain swag of evergreen with its simple red bow. Wired into this wreath were real pine cones and a few dozen sprigs of artificial holly. Responsible people, I decided. Real holly is poisonous to dogs. Leaves, berries, everything. Talk about irony. I told you it was a bitch.

Anneliese Bourque must have been in her midthirties, and, in case you’re one of
those
people, let me add that she looked nothing whatsoever like a Chinook. Her eyes were blue, her hair was shiny black, and she had lots of it. A gigantic mane of ringlets, either natural or credible, softened her thin oval face. Perhaps because Anneliese was very slim, everything she wore looked a little too big for her, as if bought with the expectation that she’d keep growing. Her round-collared white blouse had been starched and pressed, and the long skirt of her loose blue denim jumper covered the tops of highly polished, flat-heeled tan boots. She had delicate hands with short nails buffed to a high gloss. I admire anyone who manages to raise dogs without simultaneously lowering standards, but what I immediately liked most about Anneliese Bourque was the gentle way she spoke when she welcomed me in. Although her accent was definitely north of Boston rather than pure Southie, she greeted me as Miss
Wintah
, and then, at my insistence, switched to
Hawley
. Especially when she pronounced my first name, she sounded exactly like the best teacher I ever had, Miss Ginty—
fifth grade, a collie fancier from Manchester, New Hampshire, who not only accepted ten separate reports on the same book but gave me an A on every one. (You’re joking, right?
The Call of the Wild.)

When I entered the Bourques’ living room, I realized that Anneliese didn’t merely observe Christmas, but really did it up. A sparsely branched tree held an extraordinary number of tiny blinking lights and plain round ornaments, glass globes up high, unbreakables on the lower limbs. A pristine white skirt masking the base of the tree displayed a collection of artfully wrapped packages; the Chinooks were either kennel dogs never allowed indoors or else paragons of non-leg-lifting and non-present-chewing. Mistletoe, also poisonous, of course, dangled safely above the archway to the kitchen. On every windowsill, a ceramic elf or two danced around, little reindeer pulled a sleigh, a Santa silently ho-hoed, or an electric candle awaited the dark. On a low table, a miniature forest of pine surrounded a tiny manger. Pink-cheeked plaster figures of Mary and Joseph smiled ambiguously down at an unnaturally red infant. Also admiring the baby were the usual Wise Men, donkeys, sheep, and shepherds, the latter unaccompanied by the multitude of china sheep dogs my mother always added as guardians of the flock and, in her theology, the true intended recipients of the good tidings of great joy. The room smelled of pine and coffee against a subdued chemical background of perms and beauty-shop color.

After I’d taken a seat on the couch and accepted some coffee, I asked, “So how did you get started with Chinooks?”

Perched primly on the edge of a vaguely modern but overstuffed chair, she said, “Cliff did. My husband.”
She settled back in the chair. “This was, like, seven years ago, he’s walking down the street somewhere in Boston, and he sees a guy’s got two of them. And Cliff says, ‘Hey, Chinooks.’ And the guy’s surprised that Cliff knows what they are. So they get talking. And a couple of months after, Cliff buys a puppy, which is Karluk, he’s out there. And we got married.”

“Oh,” I said. “How did he know? I mean, how’d he know they were Chinooks?”

“Well, once you know what they are, you can’t miss them, and he knew one in, like, the strangest place to find a Chinook, when you think about it, which was Vietnam.”

“Vietnam?”

“Yeah, it seems like a crazy place to send a Chinook. It was a crazy place to send anyone, if you ask me. It was a mascot, I guess. They’ve been used for a whole lot of things. Maybe that’s something you want to write about? There’s one that’s been trained to be a helper to a handicapped person, and they’re basically sled dogs, of course, but you can teach them to do anything. They’re so smart, and they really want to please you. One time we saw one that’d been trained for obedience. Utility? And this dog was really amazing.”

I nodded. You want to know how hard Utility is? One year not long ago, when there were about 11,000,000 AKC-registered dogs in the United States, the AKC awarded 785 U.D. titles. Even if you add in the dogs that already had their U.D.’s, the proportion of dogs who finish graduate school is minuscule. I haven’t gathered the statistics, but there are probably more Ph.D.’s in Cambridge alone than there are
U.D.’s in the entire country, which explains the mess we’re in. Have I digressed?

Anneliese went on. “We’d never seen anything like it. We’d read about obedience and all, and we’ve got good dogs, but when we saw that? It was amazing. This was at the roundup last summer. You know about that?”

“Yes.” A Chinook roundup is the equivalent of a national specialty, an annual show limited to one breed that draws entries from all over the country. She looked a little embarrassed when she used the term, as if a basically AKC specimen like me might find “roundup” silly. Silly? Hey, this is the world of doggie bagels, Happy Breath dental powder, and See Spot Go. Yes, it’s a stain remover. We’re used to dogs with polish on their nails and snoods on their heads who’ve been perfumed with Rodeo Drive cologne: Beverly Hills (“Giorgio type”), New York (“Chanel type”), Rio (“Obsession type”). We don’t look twice at the ruffled britches on the hindquarters of a bitch in season. “Roundup” might sound silly? Not a chance.

“It’s too bad you weren’t there,” Anneliese said. She pointed to one of the framed photos that rested amidst the greenery on top of the television. “That’s from there.” It showed a smiling, suntanned John Buckley kneeling down in a field with one arm around Bear and the other around a much smaller Chinook. “But there’s still lots to write about anyway,” she assured me. “And I have to tell you, everyone’ll be glad to have you do it, because most people have never even heard of a Chinook, and they used to be famous. You know they almost became extinct?”

Chinooks could be registered with the American
Rare Breed Association, and, mostly because of a long-ago AKC rebuff, Chinook owners were more interested in UKC than in AKC recognition. She gave me some reprints of old articles and a copy of the breed standard. Then I followed her through the kitchen and out the back door to the kennels. As Tolstoy remarked, more or less, all good kennels resemble one another; every bad kennel is bad in its own fashion. These were good: large paved runs giving access to shelter, spotless pails of fresh water, one dog per run, a really big fenced exercise area, and clear-eyed, tail-wagging, well-fed, carefully groomed dogs eagerly wiggling all over in expectation of love and attention.

The inhabitants of Pine Tree Chinooks consisted of the two I’d seen when I arrived—Anvik and Kaila, they were called—plus a half-grown puppy bitch named Taku, and Karluk, the foundation stud, who occupied the run of honor closest to the kitchen door. Those are pretty common names for malamutes, too. Why? Study the map of Alaska. Kasegeluk? Ouzinkie? Kwigillingok? Thus all the Anviks, Karluks, Kodiaks, and Kobuks. Four runs were empty, the two I’d seen earlier and two in the back. An empty dog run isn’t a sad sight unless you know that the dog who left is gone forever.

Anneliese must have read my face. “We lost a bitch. And our big male isn’t here right now.”

I shifted my gaze from the dogs to her blue eyes. “Bear. Is that for Bering?”

“Yeah. It is. Did you hear about him?”

“I met him,” I said. “With Cliff, only I didn’t know his name. In Cambridge.”

She understood. Her voice was angry. “Who are you?”

“I really am going to do this story,” I said. “But, look. I owe your husband a big favor. He saved one of my dogs. You can see her if you want. She’s in the car. I have two malamutes. You read my column, right?”

She nodded.

“Then you know about them. You know how I feel about them. This one, Kimi, got loose. She ran into heavy traffic, and your husband went after her.”

I told Anneliese most of the story: Kimi’s rescue, dog training, Bear, his tail, the talk about Oscar Patterson, what I’d heard about his client and the dog that died, Geri’s story, all of it.

“So,” I concluded, “what’s Cliff doing in Cambridge?”

“He actually went and took Bear to a dog training class?” She made a wry face, then smiled. “He’s not half as crazy as he used to be, but he’s pushing it again. Most of the time now, he’s just crazy about dogs is all.” She stopped smiling. “How much is he drinking?”

“Some,” I said. “Not a lot.” I rubbed my nose. It wasn’t growing. Yet.

“Damn. You mind if we go back in?” She opened the latch on Karluk’s run and whistled to him. He followed us. “It’s kind of a long story.”

I’m still not sure why Anneliese trusted me.
Dog’s Life?
My forthright manner? But she did. We sat in the kitchen this time, drinking too much coffee and patting Karluk, who was about seven, but so playful that he was almost puppyish. He was a good-looking dog, but his color was paler than Bear’s, and he had one ear up and one ear down, like Walt Disney’s Tramp. Bear’s ears were both pricked. I wondered whether they’d gone up on their own or whether they’d been taped. Malamute breeders do that sometimes, anyway.

“Let me tell you about Cliff,” Anneliese said, her hand resting lightly on the dog’s head. “Like I said, he was in Vietnam, and what I know about that is two things. One was, like I said before, the Chinook. The other was that he lost a lot of buddies. Oh, and three: He came back a mess. I didn’t meet him for a long time after that—I’m a lot younger—but he pretty much stayed a mess for a long time, except that he did get through a program and get his electrician’s license, not that he worked a lot. He doesn’t talk about Vietnam, but he’ll talk about after, at least to me he will. So then a couple of things happened, which was the two of us.” She smiled at Karluk and
stroked his lopsided leathery ears. “But the Chinooks came first, before me. And that’s pretty much the way it is.”

I may have looked sympathetic. It’s a response I’ve learned to feign whenever a nondoggy spouse complains that the dogs always come first.

“But that’s okay,” she said quickly. “It’s more than okay. The dogs basically keep Cliff in one piece. Then my job is to keep him on track. But they’re, I don’t know, what got him over it? Not that it’s totally gone or anything, but …”