Stud Rites

”Iditarod!”
    Sherri Ann pointed a puffy hand at the thick gray-and-white fur glued all over the body of the ceramic dog, and declared, ”That’s Comet’s!”
    The lamp’s full weight shifted from Sherri Ann’s hands to mine. Awakened to its reliquary value, I took special care not to drop it. Northpole’s Comet was a famous show dog, a long-dead legend, an Alaskan malamute, of course; and, in Sherri Ann’s eyes, her gift to Alaskan Malamute Rescue was a sort of inverted shrine lovingly fashioned not merely to display but to illuminate what was no trivial keepsake of Comet, but furry tufts of his venerated remains. The holy human dead also get spread about. They have to, really. It’s a matter of supply and demand. Saints and martyrs being lamentably scarce, they don’t leave enough to go around, and what there is get divvied up: a skull here, a hand there, a tooth, a lock of hair, disjointed bones and scraps reverently dispersed in what isn’t exactly a watering of the spiritual soup, but is nonetheless a transparent effort to make a transcendent little go a long way.
    ”It takes a three-way bulb,” said Sherri Ann.
     
     

 
    I WAS SPEECHLESS. Sherri Ann said, ”Look, I was going to give this to Freida, and if you people for some reason don’t appreciate—”
    ”Oh, we do!” I exclaimed hastily. ”We’re really very grateful.”
    At the risk of revealing myself as thankless, I’ll add that the purity of Sherri Ann’s motivation in donating the relic to Alaskan Malamute Rescue instead of our breed club was, I thought, heavily contaminated by revenge. As every one of the hundred or so people in the exhibition area knew, Sherri Ann Printz, the chair of the previous year’s national, had arrived at the show to discover that this year’s chair, Freida Reilly, had chosen a previously unannounced theme: Putting the special Back in SPECIALTY! In and around the show ring, a lot of things get dropped: gum wrappers, paper coffee cups, scraps of sandwiches, bits of the liver used to bait the dogs. Insults? Let fall, yes. Seldom by accident. And if you happen to be a stranger to the dog fancy, let me explain right now that unless you’re a lifelong hermit, you’ll understand the competition and politics as well as any insider does. Little League competition? Church politics? The PTA! Stranger, you’re right at home here.
    Sherri Ann cleared her throat. ”When,” she demanded, ”is Betty getting back here?”
    ”Any minute,” I said. Then I introduced myself. ”I’m Holly Winter.”
    There was no reason why Sherri Ann Printz should have known who I was. I write a column for Dog’s Life magazine, but even if Sherri Ann subscribed, she didn’t necessarily read it. Furthermore, I wasn’t a breeder, and I had only two malamutes. Rowdy, my male, finished his championship easily, and I was still showing him now and then, but only in the Northeast. My cousin Leah was just starting to show my bitch, Kimi, in breed. Leah and I concentrate on obedience, but in Sherri Ann’s view, conformation—competition for championship points and beyond—was all that mattered; obedience trials barely existed.
    But I knew who Sherri Ann Printz was. Everyone did. She’d had malamutes for decades. Only a few years earlier, the Malamute Quarterly had published a two-part interview with her. She lived in Minnesota. Her kennel name wasn’t her fault; she’d been brainwashed by the cult. Failing deprogramming, she’d had no real choice: last name Printz, therefore Pawprintz Kennels. Sherri Ann had bred a lot of top show dogs, including the favorite to go Best of Breed on Saturday afternoon under Judge James Hunnewell, a dog called Bear—officially, Pawprintz Honor Guard—a big, heavy-boned dog named by Sherri Ann’s husband, Victor Printz, U.S.M.C., retired, who, according to rumor, had never been heard to utter an intelligible word to a human being, but was reputed to murmur and grunt to his wife’s dogs and to christen all of them: Tripoli, Montezuma, Few Good Men.
    So, if Sherri Ann thought that I was no one—no one in malamutes—she was right. Rejecting my suggestion that she wait for someone who counted—and Betty
    Burley did count—Sherri Ann departed to watch the judging and missed by only a minute or two the return of Betty, who was carrying two cups of that substance without which a dog show isn’t a dog show, namely, horrible coffee. Somewhere in South America, I’m convinced, dwells an