Stud Rites

were born. Now that the future had arrived, the payoff would be in cash.
    In place of shrines and confessionals, booths lined the four walls. A few concessionaires offered all-breed, any-breed goods or services, but two or three vendors whose wares I’d only glanced at sold dog sleds, harnesses, dog packs, snow hooks, gang lines, and expensive three-wheeled rigs that looked like giant tricycles. Artisans stood behind tables piled with hand-knit sweaters, hats, mittens, wooden carvings, weather vanes, mailboxes, silver earrings, pewter pendants, and a bewildering number of other items that paid tribute to the object of our annual rites and, with few exceptions, did so with unusual accuracy. The depictions, for once, showed Alaskan malamutes that looked neither like Siberian huskies nor like mixed-breed sled dogs, but could only have been our Arctic bulldozers: big, heavyboned sledge dogs with blocky muzzles, smallish ears set on the sides of the head, and plumy tails sailing over the back.
    On display at our national breed club’s booth lay dozens of items that would be auctioned on Saturday night after the banquet that would follow the Best of Breed judging: Copenhagen collector’s plates, oil paintings of malamutes, books autographed by authors’ dogs, framed photographs of puppies, drawings in charcoal and pastels, decorative little wooden dog sleds, and a battered old board with faded paint and the words ”Cleo, BAE I,” a relic of the Chinook Kennels, the lower forty-eight home of the Alaskan malamute, the very sign that had proclaimed the name of a veteran of Byrd’s first expedition to Antarctica. It was a treasure I couldn’t begin to afford. But someone could! The high bidder would pay dearly. And rightly so! Ceremonies don’t come cheap! Ever paid for a wedding, a bar mitzvah, a lavish wake, or even a modest funeral?
    Ever paid vet bills? Behind the Alaskan Malamute Rescue booth, I was filling in for Betty Burley, who was the national vice president of the organization, which has nothing to do with the search-and-rescue dogs that sniff out earthquake victims, but is a combination dog-rehabilitation-and-adoption agency and cult-within-a-cult that devotes itself to the malamutes that no one else wants. More often neglected than actively abused, some rescue dogs are given to us by their owners. Others have been abandoned at shelters or just found wandering. Before placing the rescue dogs with adopters, we check out their health and update their shots, and to avoid creating additional business for ourselves, we have them spayed or neutered. In rescuing dogs, that’s what costs: the rehab. Our booth consisted of two long tables laden with issues of our newsletter, an album bulging with photographs of dogs we’d placed, reprints of gruesome articles about the puppy mills that mass-produce the dogs sold in pet shops, and the numerous and varied items donated to our silent auction, not to be confused with the post-banquet live auction to be held on Saturday night. How many auctions? Two. One silent: ours. Rescue’s. One live: Saturday night’s, when Alaskan Malamute Rescue would be allowed to include ten valuable items among the scores donated to raise funds for our national breed club. And Sherri Ann’s lamp would certainly number among Rescue’s ten valuable items on Saturday night.
    The lamp’s height, from the bottom of the base to the top of the hand-painted shade, must almost precisely have equaled the length of Saint Hubert’s stole: thirty-six inches. The stole, however, a two-inch band of silk and gold, must have been a cloud in the hand, whereas the lamp base alone, a massive slab of polished pink granite, felt like the rock that it was. Also, had the gold threads of Saint Hubert’s stole been interwoven with the silk to depict row upon row of miniature auric Scotties or, perhaps, the image of a single stretched-out dachshund, history would have bequeathed us a sketch of the canine motif, and I myself might even have been wearing a miraculous-stole T-shirt with the pattern flowing across my breasts.
    The lamp, in contrast, was about as representational as a lamp can get. It took the form of a massive ceramic Alaskan malamute atop the pink granite slab. Extruding from the middle of its back was a shiny brass post on which perched a shade of skinlike material that bore a red, white, and black painting of a sled dog team and, in bold scarlet letters with a black exclamation point, the word