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appealing species shown in the field guides with a single illustration and the notation “sexes alike.” After I heard about the five dead husbands, I wondered about them whenever I saw Ginny. So complete was her dedication to dogs that I found it difficult to imagine her being interested in one man, never mind five, unless they’d all looked like Labrador retrievers. Or maybe, with canine opportunism, she’d married the men to support her dogs. If the full truth be known, I also wondered what had killed the five husbands and how much life insurance each had carried. As it turned out, everyone else in dogs harbored the same suspicions about Ginny that I did. Never having been married, however, I kept mine to myself until the day a dog acquaintance of Ginny’s and mine confronted me on the subject. “Look,” she said, “here are the rest of us, fighting and scheming and begging whenever it’s time to get a new show puppy, and then there’s Ginny, and, I mean, you have to ask yourself: What did she do to deserve that kind of luck?”
    “Prize b-i-t-c-h,” Cam repeated. “And in my area, everywhere you go, there’s Eva.” Cam’s area, if I remembered correctly, was New York or New Jersey. By everywhere, she did not mean supermarkets, movie theaters, and dinner parties; she meant only the places that counted. “You can’t go to a show without seeing her! And she is so obnoxious. She’ll stand outside the breed rings and say awful things about everyone’s dogs—”
    “At the top of her lungs, too,” added Ginny, who was not, by the way, wearing a hat. We were standing in the shade of a big old white birch midway between my cabin and the main lodge.
    “Yes,” Cam agreed, “and she doesn’t know what she’s talk-lng about, either, and Ginny, I am really sorry to say this, but that dog does not belong on the grounds of an AKC show.” Cam and her husband, I remembered, had connections at AKC. Among other things, he was a delegate. For AKC types like Cam—and like me, as well—the fancy spins on the axis of the American Kennel Club. A dog with Bingo’s temperament, I should point out, didn’t belong on the grounds of any show, AKC, UKC, or any other KC, either.
    “I don’t mind,” Ginny said. “I know when I’ve made a mistake. I should never, ever have sold to Eva. She ruined that lovely puppy. I have never had temperament problems in my lines. My dogs live right in the house with me, and they all get along, and I can take them anywhere, and they never so much as look cross-eyed at another dog.” As if to verify Ginny’s claim, the chocolate Lab bitch she had with her strolled over to Rowdy, lowered her head, tilted it, stuck out a long pink tongue, and licked Rowdy’s muzzle. He regarded her with the air of an emperor accepting obeisance from a serf. “This one’s the worst of all,” Ginny commented. “Her name’s Wiz, but everyone always ends up calling her Kissy Face.”
    “I knew that dog of Eva’s looked familiar,” I said happily, “but I couldn’t place him. Bingo. Bingo looks like that big male of yours. I knew he reminded me...”
    Ginny’s face contorted in pain. Her body seemed to shrink. Cam caught my eye, frowned, and briefly raised a finger to her lips. “Merlin died,” she informed me quietly.
    “I am so sorry,” I said. “I had no idea. He was a wonderful dog. So beautiful.”
    And he was, too. Without spilling the sordid contents of “the Labrador mess”—a prolonged controversy about revising the AKC standard of the Labrador retriever—let me explain that the breed has become separated into two distinct lines, bench and field, show dogs and hunting dogs, and that Ginny’s were show dogs. So dirty and slippery are the grounds around the Labrador mess that I’m afraid to say what Ginny’s dogs looked like lest I skid on some politically charged word and tumble in. Let’s say that Merlin had been a big-boned, flashy-looking yellow dog with many titles and