Read Stud Rites for Free Online

Three months before Jeanine had adopted
    Cubby, a man had broken into her apartment. She’d tried and failed to fight off the attack. Although the rapist was caught, Jeanine had remained terrified of aggression. She’d asked me for a big, gentle dog. Cubby was immense, a rangy, gangly creature with long, thin legs, a gigantic barrel chest, light eyes, propeller ears, and so many other faults that he might as well have had puppy mill via pet shop tattooed across his forehead. But he was as gentle as he was homely. He didn’t look gentle, though, and he was really, really big. I’d omitted Jeanine’s story from my script, of course. I’d also had to leave out the other interesting feature of Cubby’s history. Turned in by a man who’d bought him at a pet shop, Cubby had come with AKC papers. I’d run his pedigree—in other words, traced his family tree. As Cubby’s appearance suggested, most of his ancestors had been owned and bred by operators of wholesale commercial kennels in Missouri and Arkansas, in other words, by the people we aren’t supposed to call puppy millers in case they take offense and sue us. Four generations back, though, I’d found a dog with the kennel name Pawprintz, a male bred by Sherri Ann Printz and, according to the Alaskan malamute stud book register, owned by a G. H. Thacker. G. H. Thacker was, I’d figured out while running other pet-shop pedigrees, a USDA-licensed puppy farmer in Missouri, a woman named Gladys H. Thacker.
    In writing Cubby’s part of the script, I’d had to omit Cubby’s true role in Jeanine’s life, and I certainly wouldn’t have humiliated Sherri Ann Printz by informing the assembled membership of our national breed club that a Pawprintz dog had somehow ended up in a puppy mill. Sherri Ann would have been totally disgraced. Suppose you’re a pooh-bah in the Daughters of the American Revolution, and there you are at the national D.A.R. convention when over the loudspeaker booms the announcement that your eldest daughter is a white slave in a brothel in Thailand, and that you’re the one who sold her into bondage. No, no! Consequently,
    I worried that my deletion of the unmentionable would focus attention on the dog’s unfortunate looks. At the end of the afternoon’s rehearsal for the showcase, however, Duke had taken possession of Cubby and vanished with him into the grooming tent. There, the Michelangelo of fur, he’d applied grooming mousses, sprays, gels, combs, brushes, and a powerful force dryer to sculpt a new animal out of Cubby’s hair. In so doing, he’d freed the dog from the coat. The transformation was superficial, of course; even Duke Sylvia couldn’t get great movement out of faulty anatomy. But Cubby moved as well as Cubby could move. To my left, Jeanine was clinging to Betty Burley and sobbing hard. In those few seconds, I fell in love with Duke Sylvia.
    The sixth and seventh dogs had what are ordinary stories in Rescue: abandoned in shelters, saved from gas chambers. The eighth dog, Frosty, another obvious blue blood of unknown origin, drew silence, then noisy murmurs of speculation. Frosty’s looks maddeningly proclaimed an origin in a show kennel, any of dozens, without specifying which one. Ninth was Juneau, who’d been turned in after she’d repeatedly broken loose, located an astonishing number of henhouses and duck ponds, and done what malamutes do.
    We’d saved Czar for last. Old and frail, he gamely tottered around the ring at the side of his owner, Lorraine. As Lorraine and Czar approached Freida to receive his sash and plaque, the announcer read my commentary. ”Anyone familiar with the history of the Alaskan malamute,” he announced, ”has heard stories of legendary lead dogs that unerringly followed the trail home through blinding blizzards. Ice-encrusted eyes frozen shut, those legendary dogs used what remained to them: their wonderful noses, their keen ears, their mental maps, the intelligence of this breed, the