Hounded to Death (6 page)

Lost in contemplation, I actually, for a moment, thought I'd conjured up the dog that suddenly came trotting out of the woods and onto the path in front of me. He was a good-sized German Shepherd, tan with black markings. His body was muscular, but thin. He wasn't wearing a collar.

“Hey, boy,” I said.

The dog stopped in his tracks. He seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see him.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

Not surprisingly, he didn't answer.

I stopped walking, too. We stood and stared at one another.

After a moment, I held out a hand. The dog lifted a lip, showing a row of strong white teeth.

“Shhh,” I said, “it's okay.”

But I pulled my hand back, just in case.

The dog had a wary, skittish look about him. He was an attractive Shepherd, clearly a purebred. His eyes were sharp and shifty, though. He didn't look like someone's pet.

“Are you hungry?”

The dog cocked his head. Clearly he was listening to me. Just as clearly, he wasn't about to come any nearer.

Slowly I reached in my pocket and pulled out a granola bar. Probably not the best thing for him, but it was all I had. If the dog was a stray and had missed a couple of meals, he wouldn't be too choosy.

He watched me unwrap the treat. His body was still, his dark eyes riveted.

Once again I held out my hand. Once again he declined to step toward me. Someone, somewhere, had destroyed his trust in people.

“Here you go,” I said, giving the granola bar a gentle toss.

I thought he might catch it, but he was too cautious for that. Instead he let it land in the pine needles at his feet. His head dipped down for a quick sniff; then his teeth opened and he snatched it up. Immediately then, he spun around and disappeared back into the trees.

“You're welcome,” I called after him.

I might as well have been talking to myself.

The woods were thick with underbrush, but the Shepherd slipped through the thick cover effortlessly. No sound alerted me to the direction he had taken. When I stepped off the path and peered into the trees, I saw no sign of him. The dog had vanished as suddenly as he'd appeared.

If I hadn't still been holding the empty wrapper in my hands, I might have wondered if I'd imagined him.

“T
here you are,” said Aunt Peg. “Bertie and I were wondering where you'd gone off to.”

The two of them were waiting for me outside the door to the main lecture hall. It was nearly time for Charles's speech, and judging by the crowd that had gathered, most of the symposium participants planned to attend. The room's double doors were wide open; even so, with the crush of people in the entryway, there was a wait to get through.

“I hear you're supposed to be keeping an eye on me,” I said to Bertie.

She flushed guiltily. “Frank made me promise. I think Sam put him up to it.”

“And you gave in? You of all people should know better. I'm pregnant, not incapacitated. When you were pregnant, did anyone follow you around?”

“Actually, yeah…Frank did. It just about drove me crazy. Eventually I had to tell him that if he didn't stop, I'd reconsider the whole idea and not have the baby.”

“I'll bet that worked,” Peg said dryly.

She ushered Bertie and me into the flow of traffic. “If we don't find seats soon, we'll have to settle for a back corner somewhere. Considering what Margo said last night, I'd just as soon have a good view of the proceedings.”

“Have you heard any more about Charles's speech?” I asked, as we found three empty chairs on the aisle in the middle of the room.

“Not a blessed thing. If Charles is up to something, he must be planning to spring it on us as a surprise. Or maybe Margo was mistaken and it was all just a false alarm.”

At the front of the room, Margo stepped up to the podium and asked for silence. Stragglers found their seats. Conversations died away. Everyone waited expectantly.

“I'd like to welcome you to the first annual Rockwall Mountain Symposium,” she began. “I trust you're all having a wonderful time so far?”

People nodded in agreement. There was a smattering of applause.

“Excellent. It's my pleasure to present our keynote speaker, Charles Evans. For most of you, I would imagine that this is a man who needs no introduction. Charles has been a force in the world of purebred dogs since he won the Junior Showmanship class at Westminster in…” She paused as if trying to come up with the year. “Well, let's just say it was quite some time ago.”

Charles, standing off to one side, nodded in acknowledgment of the teasing jab. The audience laughed appreciatively.

“In due course Charles became one of the top professional handlers the sport has ever known. Some of the dogs he presented are known in the annals of their breeds as legends. His skill, his flair, his innate ability to bring out the best in every dog he showed changed the look of presentation for the generations of professional handlers that followed.”

She was laying it on pretty thick. I wondered if Margo was hoping that if she piled on the accolades, Charles might be convinced to abort whatever subversive plan he had in mind.

If so, the symposium director was certainly giving it her best shot. The introduction droned on and on. Finishing with his handling career, Margo began to praise Charles's superior skills when he moved into the next phase of his profession and became a knowledgeable and discerning judge.

I slumped in my seat and reconsidered my earlier opinion. Maybe Margo's plan was to bore the audience to sleep before she relinquished the podium in the hope that that would mute the effect of whatever it was Charles had to say.

I took a look around the room. Though a majority of the attendees were already aware of Charles's accomplishments, most were listening politely.

I'd have expected to see Caroline Evans sitting right down in front. Instead she was seated not too far from us. Rather than listening to her husband's introduction, she was fooling with something in her lap. It looked like she was text-messaging someone on her phone. No doubt she'd heard all this before.

When Margo finally stopped speaking and Charles stepped forward, the applause was thunderous. Whether the response was for Charles himself, or whether the audience was simply relieved to finally have the program move forward, it was hard to tell.

“Good afternoon,” Charles said.

His voice was deep and soothing. It rolled out across the room like the voice of wisdom. And the voice of authority.

We all sat up and began to pay attention.

He looked around the room. “What a pleasure it is to see so many familiar faces here today. Old friends and, I hope, some new ones too. I'm here to talk to you about the future of a sport that we all know and love. Of course, I'm referring to the sport of dogs.”

Despite his opening, Charles spent the next fifteen minutes speaking not about the future, but rather about the past. He gave a brief history of dog showing in the United States and talked about how much the dog world had changed in the thirty-plus years of his own involvement.

Earlier sportsmen, he told us, had defined the different breeds of dogs by their function and usefulness. In the intervening years, however, generations of dog fanciers had revised and reshaped those breeds with the result that the dogs we knew today often looked very different from their forebears.

None of this came as a shock to anyone in the audience. Some of the listeners were nodding as he spoke; others were desultorily taking notes.

Then Charles paused and took a deep breath. “We now come to the heart of the message I want to deliver. Conscience compels me to say something that may not be entirely popular. Something that many of you may not want to hear. Please bear in mind that throughout my entire career, one thing has remained true. I have always,
always
put the welfare of the dog first. It is something I shall also attempt to do today, no matter what the consequences of my actions might be.”

People who had begun to relax, sat up straight again. Those who were taking notes, turned to a fresh page.

“Uh oh,” Aunt Peg said under her breath. “Here it comes.”

I could see Margo, sitting off to one side of the dais. Her fingers were knit together tightly in her lap. Her expression was strained.

Charles, by contrast, looked calm and composed. He grasped the sides of the podium between his hands and gazed out over his audience.

“Unfortunately in its current state, the sport of dogs has become a somewhat unnatural activity. Driven by the desire to produce dogs that will excel in the show ring, putting the need to win above all else, breeders are manipulating canine genetics in the quest to produce a perfect specimen. A quest that has not only proven elusive but has also worked to the detriment of many breeds. One only has to look at the narrow, pointed head of the Collie, the profuse, almost unworkable coat of the Poodle, or the reproductive difficulties of many of the Toy breeds to see how true this is.”

“I would beg to differ,” Aunt Peg said under her breath.

No surprise, she sounded annoyed. As soon as Charles had uttered the words, I'd known that the reference to Poodles would make her bristle.

“We have taken animals that, in their pure and natural state, are a thing of grace and beauty, of intelligence and fierce loyalty, and we have turned them into little more than puppets for human entertainment.”

“What's your point?” somebody called out from the back of the room.

Angry muttering followed. It was, I suspected, directed more at Charles than at the heckler.

“I'll tell you my point,” Charles said. Despite the obvious opposition in the room, he remained unruffled.

“Dog shows were originally intended to be a sporting competition to determine whose dogs were best suited for the purpose for which they'd been produced. That is obviously no longer true. In the show ring, we have retrievers who can't retrieve, Newfoundlands who've never been allowed to swim, and terriers who wouldn't recognize vermin if it ran between their legs. One by one, the usefulness of our breeds is slipping away. They're being ruined by what has essentially turned into a canine beauty contest. And that is a damn shame.”

The audience—all of them dog lovers, and all of them dog show aficionados—was growing mutinous now. People were speaking loudly among themselves. Other voices joined those of the initial heckler.

Caroline rose, excused herself, slipped from the row of chairs, and left the room.

Charles, still speaking, didn't appear to notice.

“As we look toward the future, we need to recognize that not only are the animal rights groups not going to go away, but they are going to increase their base of support. It would be a show of wisdom on our part to accept the fact that they have some valid points. Rather than dismissing their agenda, we need to find a way to reconcile and to work together with them.”

“No way!” someone called out.

A woman I didn't know stood up. “You want us to reconcile with people who think it's all right to stage protests by showing up at dog shows, opening crates, and turning defenseless dogs loose to run in traffic? That's the kind of agenda you think we ought to support?”

Charles looked to see who had spoken up.

“I'll admit that in an effort to get our attention, some of their tactics have been extreme. But that doesn't negate the fact that some of what they're saying has merit. We are the ones who are to blame for letting dog shows reach their current state. We have work to do, people, and it's high time that we accepted that fact.”

Charles may have firmly believed what he was saying, but if he had expected to find even a shred of approval or agreement in this room, he had sadly misjudged his audience. He tried once again to drive home his point.

“In a perfect, future world the huge dog shows that we know today, the events that are little more than testimonies to artificiality, would cease to exist. Instead, our breeds would be allowed to return to what they were meant to be in the beginning—friends, companions, helpmates to man. Dogs would be bred for function rather than the need to conform to a pre-set standard. And they—and we—would be much the better for it.”

Charles finally stopped speaking. No applause greeted the end of his speech. He didn't seem to expect any.

In this crowd, what he'd said was tantamount to heresy. If he hadn't realized that in the beginning, he certainly had to know it now.

After a moment, he stepped away from the podium and strode off the stage. Margo, already on her feet, turned and hurried after him.

“That was interesting,” I said.

“Interesting, my foot,” Aunt Peg snorted. “Whatever else Charles hoped to accomplish, he's just committed career suicide.”

“He probably doesn't care,” Bertie said practically. “Considering that he just issued a call for the abolishment of dog shows.”

“Nobody will take him seriously on that score,” said Peg. “They couldn't possibly.” She looked around the room. “Where's Caroline? I imagine she's about ready to kill him.”

“She slipped out five minutes ago.”

“I don't blame her. She probably didn't want to listen to that drivel any more than the rest of us did.”

“It wasn't entirely drivel,” I said. “He made a few good points.”

Aunt Peg disagreed. “A well-reasoned call for reform would have been one thing. But asking us to align ourselves with the animal rights groups? Charles had to have known he was going much too far taking a stand like that.”

“Why do you think he did it?” I asked.

Now that the show was over, the room was emptying quickly. We gathered up our things and prepared to leave.

“I have no idea,” Aunt Peg replied. “It's hard to imagine that Charles actually believes all those things he said. He's been a highly respected judge, firmly embedded for years in the system he just thoroughly excoriated. So why the sudden turnaround?”

“Maybe he needs new meds,” said Bertie.

We both turned and looked at her.

“Just a thought.”

Under the circumstances, it wasn't a bad one.

 

Sad to say that while Bertie and Aunt Peg went off to do fun and exciting things, I went upstairs and took a nap before dinner. When I rejoined them two hours later, Aunt Peg was holding court at a large corner table in the bar.

I recognized most of the people she was seated with. Richard was there, along with his two buddies, Marshall and Derek. Bertie was sitting next to a woman I didn't know and on the woman's other side was Tubby Mathis, whom Aunt Peg had dismissed so firmly at the last gathering.

I slid into an empty chair beside Bertie, and Richard immediately raised his hand and called for another round of drinks.

“Name your poison,” he said to me.

“Just water, I'm afraid.”

“Water?” Tubby lifted his head and looked at me balefully. His arms were cradled possessively around a tall whiskey and there were several empty glasses nearby. “You've come to the wrong place if all you want is water.”

“I'd like some pleasant company too,” I said. “Presumably I might be able to find that here?”