Stud Rites (2 page)

RELICS: venerated remains.

Buddha’s tooth, snatched from his funeral pyre.

The shroud of Turin. If not Christ’s image, whose?

The stole of Saint Hubert. Presented on the occasion of his consecration by an angel of the Virgin Herself, it was a narrow, yard-long band of silk interwoven with gold, but of incomparably greater spiritual than commercial value. Sacred coin, it was bound to appreciate. And so it did! When Saint Hubert died in a.d. 727, he bequeathed the stole to his budding cult; and for a thousand years, from all over France, vast hordes of pilgrims trudged in haste to a small abbey deep in the Ardennes in search of the miraculous healing that flowed from the Donor through the saint to the sacred relic. The need of the pilgrims was great. In the stole lay their only salvation. All, you see, had been bitten by dogs.

As had we—Heaven preserve us!—the hundreds of souls who’d made the pilgrimage across the globe, from Great Britain, from Holland, from Japan, from Canada, and from all over the United States, to the site of our annual gathering of the cult, which, like the cult of Saint Hubert, was the cult of the dog, although in our case, not just any dog of any breed or none discernible, but the cult of the living relic of the ancient peoples of the Kotzebue Sound, dog of dogs, breed of breeds, the highest link in the Great Chain of Being Canine, the noble and glorious Alaskan malamute.

But I exaggerate. Only a few people had come from overseas. Many proud breeders, their vans and RVs packed with dogs, had come from Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado, Wisconsin, Texas. With or without dogs, some had flown. Scores had driven for hours or even days to this little town in Massachusetts. I’d lucked out. I was a fifty-minute ride from home and could have driven from Cambridge to Danville and back each day. Instead, I’d been saving up for a year to splurge on a room at the show site itself, the Danville Milestone Hotel and Conference Facility. There wouldn’t be another Alaskan Malamute National Specialty in New England for ten more years. Damned if I was going to miss a second of the five days, the first of which, Wednesday, October 30, had already elapsed when my story begins, and the last of which would fall, as celestial design would have it, on Sunday, November 3, the Feast of Saint Hubert, the French patron saint of dogs, whose principal relic, as I’ve explained, was a miraculous garment.

Now, at eleven o’clock on the morning of Thursday, October 31, twenty-four hours after my arrival, I stood behind the Alaskan Malamute Rescue Booth in the exhibition area, the heart of the show, as Sherri Ann Printz presented me not with Saint Hubert’s stole, of course, but with a relic of equally legendary association.

The Presentation of the Lamp was not, I might mention, any kind of re-creation or reenactment of Saint Hubert’s consecration. I, the recipient, was merely a follower of the cult, no founder, no leader. Besides,

I’m a woman. And I’m no saint. The donor, Sherri Ann Printz, didn’t fit my image of the Virgin, either, whom I imagine as having a clear, radiant complexion, whereas Sherri Ann’s was pale, lumpy, and doughy, like a yeast batter in need of punching down. Indeed, I found it impossible to envision Sherri Ann as even the lowliest and most improbable of angels, whom I see as akin to the Alaskan malamute in the sense that both breeds exhibit considerable natural variation in size, shape, and coloration, but are never marred by coarseness or, in Sherri Ann’s case, outright dowdiness. A national specialty is an Occasion, with a capital O. Consequently, most of us had made an Effort, with a capital
E,
in the manner of appearance. Sherri Ann’s capital
E
Effort had, alas, produced a lowercase effect. Her gray hair was cut painfully short, and a heavy perm had given it so dense and wiry a texture that her coiffure resembled a small terrier victimized by overenthusiastic plucking and stripping. Sherri Ann wore what I think is called a duster, the sort of loose, knee-length blouse with buttons down the front in which persons quaintly known as ”housewives” were once apparently encouraged to drape themselves so that they wouldn’t need to wear bras and thus wouldn’t have any to burn. But, as I’ve said, Sherri Ann had made an obvious, if lowercase, effort: The robe was of a heavy pseudo-satin in the particular shade of pale rose-red that does a splendid job of camouflaging malamute undercoat.

So I was no saint, and Sherri Ann was neither the Virgin nor one of Her messengers. As a stand-in for the sanctuary in which Saint Hubert was consecrated, the exhibition hall was, however, approximately the right size: larger than a chapel, if smaller than the interior of a cathedral. Exposed steel beams elevated the ceiling toward the heavens, and the industrial carpeting
^w
as a deep stone gray. I seem to recall that early medieval churches didn’t necessarily have pews. I’m positive, however, that even Saint Hubert’s didn’t devote most of the empty floor space to baby-gated show rings.

The event taking place here, however, the competition known as the Futurity Sweepstakes, did suggest a satisfying timelessness in spiritual theme: the Hereafter, the world to come. The Futurity actually was a bet on the future, an innocent flirtation with organized gambling. The long, complex process of nominating the teenage pups now in the ring had begun before or soon after they 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 ”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.