Gone to the Dogs (17 page)

“So Cliff followed Miner to Cambridge?”

“That’s not what he calls it,” she said. “He calls it
tracking.”

According to the American Kennel Club, every obedience judge “must carry a mental picture of the theoretically perfect performance in each exercise and score each dog and handler against this visualized standard.”
Mental picture
. An abstraction? Never. There is nothing abstract about a golden retriever, and make no mistake: The real standard is a golden. In developing that mental picture of the perfect golden, every judge also ends up with a photographic negative, the visual representation of monstrously rotten performance, this, too, embodied in the image of a particular breed. Again, make no mistake: The Alaskan malamute sets the real standard of ultimate disobedience.

All this is to say that it probably didn’t matter which dog I presented to Dickie Brenner: An experienced obedience judge—something Brenner certainly wasn’t—swiftly looks beyond the breed to the individual dog, but everyone else is ready to see
any
malamute as a monster. I’d chosen Kimi and taken her with me to the Bourques’ mainly because I predicted that Brenner would have a few dozen barking dogs, and, as I’ve said, in that situation, I trusted Kimi to act worse than Rowdy would.

To guarantee naturalness in my own handling, I pulled in briefly at a shabby shopping mall located about five miles south of the Bourques’ and maybe ten miles north of Brenner’s. In the pet supply section of a sprawling, depressing discount department store, I found what I needed: A bad collar and a worse leash. The right collar for a malamute is rolled leather. The one I picked was flat and wide, the kind that ruins a thick double coat. It was studded with silly, undignified blue and orange costume jewels. A good training lead is strong and soft. Whether it’s made of cotton webbing, nylon, or leather—the old-timers swear by leather—it folds easily and feels comfortable when you loop it neatly or just crumple it up in your hand. I tested one short, thick leash made of hard, scratchy braided plastic, but settled on the kind of chain leash that I’d always assumed to be good for one thing, namely, scraping the skin off your palms. Inadequately attached to the chain was a flimsy hard-leather handle designed to cut into your flesh and then fall off.

In the parking lot, I changed Kimi’s attire, replacing her good collar with the piece of junk and hiding it, together with my good leash, under the front seat of the Bronco. I opened the thermos of water I’d brought for Kimi, filled her water bowl, and, as she drank, delivered a rousing preshow pep talk. Then we set off.

We reached Brenner’s about twenty minutes later. He had quite a spread. A white sign with green lettering hung in front of a great big white farmhouse with neat, freshly painted green shutters. A gravel drive wound around the house to a long, low cinder-block structure reminiscent of a prefab barn but with row after row of chain-link dog runs along the sides.
There were at least sixty runs, perhaps more. I didn’t count. The setup reminded me so much of a modern, professional dairy operation that I half expected to see someone attaching a milking machine to one of the dogs. Even with that detail missing, the effect remained professional. Despite the pervasive, damp, dirty gray of New England in December, when the lifeless brown earth reflects the mucky slate sky, the paint looked dead white; the gravel, newly raked.

I deliberately parked as close as possible to one of the rows of runs, thus offering Kimi the stimulating sight and sound of an entirely black male German shepherd dog in ardent defense of his territory. At a guess, he stood thirty inches high, four to six inches above the standard. German shepherd dogs, GSDs, are supposed to be longer than they are tall—the ideal ratio of length to height is ten to eight and a half—and this one’s proportions weren’t bad. Oh, and in case that all-one-color rings a bell, it’s white shepherds that can’t be shown in breed. All black is fine. Attempting to bite the judge, though, is definitely disqualifying. I was glad that I didn’t have to examine this big guy, but Kimi was growling, scraping, and clawing for the chance.

While I was debating whether the hapless Holly Whitcomb should leave her dog in the car to shred the interior (would
Dog’s Life
pay for the repairs?) or whether a bona fide know-nothing would enter by malamute power, a man who turned out to be Brenner appeared through one of the doors to the building.

His command to the shepherd was loud enough to warrant a substantial penalty in the ring: “Sultan, down!”

The big dog hit the ground, quit barking, and stared at the man.

“Place!” the man shouted.

The dog slunk through a low door into the building. Obedience? Tyranny. Steve’s shepherd bitch, India, obeyed as quickly, but, when she did, her eyes radiated loyalty and self-confidence, not fear.

Nonetheless, I forced my face into an expression that said, “Wow! Just look at that!” I flashed a nervous smile of helpless admiration and edged my way out of the car as if expecting Kimi to leap ahead of me. Just before I shut the door, I softly cleared my throat, and Kimi, who’d been uncooperatively quiet since Sultan’s disappearance, responded on cue with the throaty roar that usually translated as her polite request for what dogdom euphemistically calls “exercise.” “Growl on Command” is an easy trick, no harder than “Speak.”

“You must be Mr. Brenner,” I simpered. “That was really amazing, the way that dog did exactly what you said.”

“That’s what we do here.” He shrugged—Aw, shucks, ma’am, it ain’t nothing—but his strange build spoiled the effect. As I’ve mentioned, proportion is important in the GSD, and it was one of Brenner’s most striking characteristics, too. In his case, though, the significant ratio was width to depth. As befit the pastoral setting, he was built like the door of a low barn: short, broad, and almost flat, as if he’d started out round and bulky but had been sat on by a genetically engineered mammoth cow and been permanently squished. Also, he was either naturally hairless, a gigantic Chinese crested, or else U.S. Marine bald. He had opaque pale-blue eyes.

After verifying that I was, indeed, Holly Whitcomb,
he offered me his pudgy right hand, and I took it briefly. Then, without even asking to look at Kimi, who remained in the Bronco, he led me indoors to a small office paneled in knotty pine and plastered with framed photographs of German shepherds interspersed with important-looking certificates purportedly awarded by institutions of canine this-and-that. I’d never heard of any of them, which is not to say that they didn’t exist. Some, I suspected, were diploma factories offering mail-order dog training. About a third of the floor space in the office was occupied by a long, wide fake-walnut desk. Quite unnecessarily, it seemed to me, a sheet of glass protected the top of the desk. What harm can come to wood-grained plastic? And even if it does? A throne-shaped pseudoleather black chair with a high back and broad arms sat behind the desk, and on the wall above hung a set of those shelves that kids make in junior-high shop classes. The wood was cheap pine, but at least it was real, and someone had made a laudable effort to cover it up by layering on at least ten thick coats of high-gloss polyurethane. On the shelves, like brand-new gilded tenpins arranged on the lanes of a virgin bowling alley, stood a display of ornate trophies. I was curious to know where they’d come from. Although I never got a close look, my bet is that Brenner acquired them all at the same place, and not an obedience trial, either, but a trophy shop.

Brenner enthroned himself behind the desk. I plunked down on one of the simple, hard wooden chairs facing the desk and said, “I really don’t know what to do about Juneau.”

“Well,” he assured me, “you’ve come to the right place. There’s a lot of people out there that’ll tell you they’re experts, you know, but just look around.” His
hand swept over the display. “And, you know, Holly, you want to ask yourself something, and you want to take your time and give yourself an honest answer. Because there’s no sense trying to fool yourself, is there?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Well, then,” he said happily, “what you want to ask yourself now, Holly, is you want to ask yourself this. Ask yourself, ‘Have I honestly got the hours and hours every single day of the week, week after week, that it’s gonna take me to train this dog?’ Holly, do you have all those extra hours?”

“No,” I said. “Actually, I don’t have a lot of free time.”

“Well, then, you see? You’ve answered your own question, haven’t you? Much as you hate to admit it to yourself, you don’t have the time it takes to train a dog.”

I wondered whether he had ever sold something door to door, vacuum cleaners or maybe knives that never need sharpening; or whether he’d ever demonstrated multifunction kitchen devices at home shows and country fairs, magical chopper-shredder-slicers that really, really work.

“I guess not,” I conceded.

May I digress? Amy Ammen is a legendary young trainer and handler who’s now up to three O.T.Ch. dogs, pronounced “otch,” Obedience Trial Champions, and not golden retrievers, either: a flat-coat, a Japanese chin, and—get this—an American Staffordshire terrier, yes, an O.T.Ch. AmStaff. For those O.T.Ch. results, Amy Ammen trains a dog on a schedule of twenty minutes three to five times a week, less time each week than most of us spend blow-drying our hair. No time to train the dog? Amy
Ammen’s real achievement has been to ruin that heretofore perfect excuse. She knows how, of course. Brenner got to that part next.

“And maybe you want to think of it this way, Holly,” he said sympathetically. “You need your appendix out, okay?” The happy expression on his pudgy face suggested that acute appendicitis was a delightful condition for which I was probably longing at that very moment. He went on: “And, sure, maybe you know that’s what’s causing this pain in your belly.” He punched his fist into his gut. “And, sure, you know it’s gotta come out, okay? But even if you’ve got all the time in world, you aren’t going to do it yourself, are you?” He nearly rose from the chair, stared directly at me, and pointed an accusing finger toward what I assume was supposed to be my inflamed appendix.

I smiled, crossed my legs, and said, “Hardly.”

Brenner smiled as if trying to convince me that I’d said something clever and surprising. Then he wrinkled his brow and, with a slow, solemn nod of his head, said, “And I know it might not hit you straight off as the same thing, but when you get right down to it, when you get to the heart of the matter and yank it up by its roots and take a good, hard look at it, it
is
the same thing, and I’m going to tell you why: You want it done right, and you want it done painlessly, you go to a
professional.”
He sank back in the chair and waited.

I tried to smile appreciatively.

“So what you want to do is,” he confided, “you want to give us a couple of weeks to work with her, and, then, before you practically even know it, you’ve got a fully trained dog.” He gave me a few seconds to contemplate that happy prospect, then went on. “We
spend a couple of minutes with you, we show you a couple of easy commands, and that’s all there is to it. You don’t even have to come all the way back here. We deliver her right to your own door. It’ll be just like getting a brand-new dog.”

“You can really get her to come when she’s called?” I asked.

“Like a shot,” he promised. “Piece of cake.” He stood up. “Let me show you something.”

I was hoping to get a close look at the kennels from indoors, but, according to Brenner, strangers upset the dogs’ routine. He had me wait in a large bare room while he got Sultan, who turned out to be what’s called a “robot,” a dog that works with more precision than joy, and not even a very good robot. Brenner dropped him a few times, and, each time, Sultan hit the floor promptly. Brenner also had Sultan retrieve, first a handkerchief, then a glove.

“Wow!” I gushed.
Big deal
, I thought. On command only, of course, Vinnie would answer the phone for me by picking up the receiver and depositing it politely in my hand. Rowdy, for God’s sake, could retrieve handkerchiefs and gloves.

The real test of an obedience dog, of course, the exercise that breaks a tie in any obedience trial, is off-leash heeling, which isn’t a test of the dog at all, but the ultimate evidence of teamwork. Yes, the dog never forges, never lags, never heels wide, never crowds, but so natural and so apparently effortless is his perfection that even the astute observer is temporarily persuaded to forget that such faults exist; and to the confident handler, they are evidently unknown. Never so much as sneaking a glance at the dog, the handler stands tall and straight, head high; smoothly follows the judge’s orders; glides into a brisk walk, a
fast pace, a slow pace; halts; turns right and left; makes an about-turn; and, all the while, moves and stops as unhesitatingly as if that perfect score were preordained. Flawless off-leash heeling is one of the most beautiful sights in dogdom.

One of the ugliest is the mockery that results when a self-aggrandizing handler mistakes terror-driven outward compliance for the joyful half of the relationship that we foolishly call “dog obedience.” Ordered to heel, Sultan slunk; when Brenner stepped forward, the dog did, too; whenever the man halted, the dog sat. In that sense only, the dog heeled, and heeled quite well. I acted impressed and said how good the dog was. I hoped that Sultan was listening. He might never have heard the word
good
before, but he’d understand it, anyway. All dogs do.

Brenner saved the highlight of Sultan’s performance for last. With no warning to me, Brenner gave the dog some signal that I missed, and the shepherd crouched low, bared his teeth, unleashed a monstrous and terrifying combination of growls and roars, and twisted his face into a mask of menace. Just as suddenly, on signal, the dog quit, and I started breathing again. I was half sorry I’d ever taught Kimi or any other dog that harmless warning growl. I was glad that I’d never trained beyond it.

“We can teach Juneau that, too,” Brenner offered. “Course, it takes a little more time.”