Animal Appetite by Susan Conant Page B

hoarse—but she agreed to tell me about the dog and promised me a photo of him. Actually, I asked for a picture of Skip. She sounded offended. “You’ve got it wrong,” she told me abruptly. “It was Chip, not Skip. Chipper. And he was, too.”

    Now, on Saturday morning, as I parked next to the black panel truck and opened the car door, loud barking emanated from behind a shiny black door set in the wall of a brick warehouse. Mounted next to the door was a glossy black sign with gold letters:

     
MUSIC HAUL
BRAT ANDREWS, PROP.

    I knocked. The dog fell silent. The door opened, and there stood before me the most extraordinarily muscular woman I have ever seen. It occurred to me that Music Haul might have no employees whatsoever; the proprietor looked capable of bench-pressing a concert grand all on her own. She wore her straight black hair in a crew cut and was dressed entirely in black: a Music Haul T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes. Her eyes were a startling shade of intense violet-blue. So were the bold tattoos on her immense biceps. The tattoo on her left upper arm depicted a leaping Rottweiler dog. On the right was a close-up portrait of the dog’s face. The model for both, a handsome male, posed like a sphinx in a down-stay about a yard in back of her on the floor of a cluttered office.

    “Winter?” she demanded.

    I nodded.

    “Brat,” she stated flatly. She did not smile. Now I understood why her voice was hoarse: from struggling to lower its natural high pitch. “Come in.” She nodded to the dog. “Okay,” she told him softly. “Good boy, Johann.” She didn’t bother to say that the dog wouldn’t hurt me.

    The unfriendliness of the reception compelled me to show off. I started with the dog’s name, Johann. I’d have bet a thousand dollars on what it stood for. I’d have won. “J. S. Bark,” I said.

    Brat’s nod was almost imperceptible.

    “I have dogs, too.” I smiled.

    She didn’t. She didn’t offer me a seat, either. Johann came up and sniffed the pockets of my jeans. “Good boy,” I told him. Ordinarily, I’d have asked permission to give him a treat, but I thought his owner wouldn’t like it. “When you taught him to down,” I informed Brat, “you taught a moving down. You didn’t teach him to stop or sit first.” I knew I was right. If you teach a dog to lie down by having him stop or sit and then lower himself, you don’t get that haunches-up sphinx look. Rather, you get a slow drop into what the dog thinks is a boring, static position. Although she’d addressed Johann in English, I blandly asked, “Schutzhund?” It’s a German system of dog training that consists of obedience, tracking, and protection work. It used to have a bad rep in the United States among AKC obedience people like me. We thought it was authoritarian. In truth, we were bigoted: What we really thought was that it was fascist dog training. Then we discovered—paws across the water—that while we, the good guys, had been hurting our dogs with choke chains and pinch collars, a Schutzhund trainer named Gottfried Dildei had been using fun and food. Schutzhund means “protection dog,” and the “bite work,” as it’s called, training in aggression, still puts me off, but I’ve had to wonder who’d really been the fascist trainers?

    A lot of people know about Schutzhund . Brat still wasn’t impressed. I’d begun to make an impact, though. She backed up, took a seat in a battered wooden chair in front of a littered rolltop desk, and silently pointed a finger at an old green-upholstered armchair about three yards from the desk. I lowered myself obediently into the chair. Johann nuzzled my hands. I stroked his head.

    “Beautiful dog,” I said. Then I really, really showed off. “Sally Brand did a good job.” I’d recognized Sally Brand’s work the second I’d seen those tattoos on Brat’s arms. Sally does genuine portraits. She has a great eye for a likeness. A great needle,