Dogged Pursuit Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  CHAPTER 1 - To Dusty I Shall Return

  CHAPTER 2 - What the Dickens

  CHAPTER 3 - Class Struggle

  CHAPTER 4 - Dee-lightful

  CHAPTER 5 - The Obstacles of My Affections

  Part Two

  CHAPTER 6 - A Measure of Difficulty

  CHAPTER 7 - The Agony and the Agony

  CHAPTER 8 - Trial and Terror

  CHAPTER 9 - Doubt and Distraction

  CHAPTER 10 - From the Jaws of Defeat

  CHAPTER 11 - Tales from the Cryptic

  CHAPTER 12 - Friends and Neighbors

  CHAPTER 13 - A Glimmer of Glory

  CHAPTER 14 - A Day at the Orifice

  CHAPTER 15 - Magic Time

  CHAPTER 16 - Alley Oops

  CHAPTER 17 - Hounds for the Holidays

  CHAPTER 18 - A Rum Business

  CHAPTER 19 - One for the Team

  CHAPTER 20 - Polarized

  CHAPTER 21 - Bloodied and Bowed

  Part Three

  CHAPTER 22 - The Leash Tugs Both Ways

  CHAPTER 23 - Ifs, Andi, Buts

  CHAPTER 24 - Psyched

  CHAPTER 25 - On, Blitzen!

  CHAPTER 26 - Rescue Me

  CHAPTER 27 - Punc’d

  CHAPTER 28 - Not So FAST

  CHAPTER 29 - A Break in the Battle

  CHAPTER 30 - Hop Alone

  CHAPTER 31 - At the Crossroads

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  HUDSON STREET PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Hudson Street Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, June 2009

  Copyright © Robert Rodi, 2009

  All rights reserved

  Excerpt from “Friendless,” music by Benny Carter and lyrics by Paul Vandervoort II.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Rodi, Robert.

  Dogged pursuit : my year of competing Dusty, the world’s least likely agility dog / Robert Rodi.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-05091-0

  1. Shetland sheepdog—Training. 2. Dogs—Agility trials. I. Title.

  SF429.S62R76 2009

  636.7 ’ 0888—dc22

  2008051164

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  .For Haven Kimmel

  PROLOGUE

  Tragically, Hip

  Carmen plunged through the suspended tire. She sailed over a pair of jumps.

  She scampered up the teeter, and when it swiveled on its axis and bit the earth, scampered back down again.

  She took another jump, like an economy-sized gazelle.

  She braided herself through the weave poles with virtuoso ease.

  And then we arrived at the end of the course: just one final jump, no problem for my girl. She could clear it in her sleep.

  “Over!” I commanded.

  She galloped toward the bar, the wind in her ruff and a smile on her lips.

  But at the last conceivable moment, she banked and went around the jump instead of over it.

  Before I could bring her back to try again, she was past the finish line and out the gate, which meant she hadn’t qualified. “NQ’d,” as we say.

  I forced myself to clap my hands and say, “Who’s my athlete? Who’s my rock star?” and give her back a good rubbing, because in the field of canine agility it is never permissible to show anger or frustration. The philosophy is: when your dog screws up it’s your fault, not hers. So even after a disastrous run, you’re still meant to be upbeat and say what a fantastic little trooper she is, and who wants a biscuit then?

  I couldn’t understand why she’d deliberately blown a jump. She liked agility. She enjoyed competing. Hell, we hadn’t even been at it very long—it still had novelty value.

  In fact only a year before, at a dinner party, I’d found myself bemoaning the difficulties of raising a fiendishly intelligent, demoniacally driven Shetland sheepdog. My partner and I had just moved into a big Victorian house nestled on a city block between two apartment buildings, with a large backyard that seemed to cry out for a canine to complete it. But once we’d installed her there, we began to realize she required more than just real estate.

  “We’re basically sedentary,” I said to Sally, a longtime friend seated across the table from me. “Two middle-aged men who spend all their spare time staring at a computer screen. It drives the dog crazy. Then when we take her out for a walk, she goes berserk; everything overstimulates her. Maybe we’re selfish to have adopted her at all. Is it cruel to keep a herding dog in a city of two and a half million people?”

  Sally apparently had strong opinions on the subject, because she jabbed the air with her salad fork to hold my attention while she swallowed a bit of frisée, then gasped out, “She needs something to do; she needs a job to keep her happy.”

  The notion surprised me. Jeffrey had a corporate career that demanded long hours; and while I worked from home that still meant, well, work. I suppose we thought at least one member of the household would be glad to lead a life of leisure. Maybe the two of us, enslaved to our professional duties, had wanted to live vicariously through Carmen as she dozed the day away under the maple tree or basked in the sun on the deck.

  But Sally wasn’t having it. “No no,” she said, “these are working dogs. They aren’t happy unless they’ve got tasks, chores, something to challenge them.”

  For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine what she meant. What “tasks” could I possibly assign Carmen? Our only current need was for a little light bookkeeping, and I doubted this was within her skill set.

  “You aren’t suggesting I go out in the yard and throw a ball for her, are you?” I asked, aghast. Nothing would be more likely to sap my will to live. And I couldn’t imagine Carmen finding it any more felicitous.

  Sally briskly shook her head, and then she mentioned c
anine agility. I’d never heard of it and asked what she was talking about.

  “Doggie track and field, basically. There’s an obstacle course, and the dog has to run it. With you alongside, telling her what to do next.”

  “What kind of obstacles?”

  “Bar jumps, hoop tunnels, a teeter-totter—that kind of thing.”

  This sounded at least minimally diverting. “They have this in the city?”

  “You can train for it here, sure. I did it for a while with Pierre”— her late border collie. “And if you get good at it, you can compete in trials, though those are usually way out in the country.”

  “Oh, we don’t want to get fanatical,” I said, somewhat appalled at the idea of actual competition. I had the typical urbanite’s disdain for people who became too deeply enmeshed in their leisure-time activities—who, for instance, frequent Star Wars conventions or play golf. “But giving her a good workout a couple times a month? That sounds ideal. Where can we do this?” Sally directed us to a doggie day-care facility on Chicago’s Near North Side, which boasted a large training room and a full complement of equipment.

  I was intrigued, certainly, but I had a nagging fear that the activity might turn out to be terribly adorable. I spent the next morning researching it online, visiting agility Web sites and even watching some videos of agility dogs in action. To my relief, the cute factor was nonexistent. This was a real sport, and these animals were fierce competitors. As, it seemed, were the human “handlers,” who showed equal focus and drive as they ushered their dogs through the obstacles to a triumphant dash past the finish line. This was, beyond doubt, the only sport I’d yet seen in which one member of the winning team congratulated the other by licking his face.

  So I called the day-care facility. As luck would have it, a new session was beginning that very Thursday. And since Jeffrey was out of town on business, I undertook Carmen’s training on my own.

  Thus once a week, in a class with a dozen other students, I found myself learning from a wisecracking, charismatic instructor named Dee how to maneuver the “obstacles” employed in agility: the bar jump, the A-frame, the suspended tire, the dog walk (known anywhere else as a catwalk), the teeter, the tunnel, the chute, and the weave poles.

  Soon Carmen had perfected her way over, under, or through all these, and we progressed to the next level of training, in which the obstacles were arranged to form a specific course. I, as her handler, learned to guide her through it—off leash, using only voice commands and gestures—the object being to tackle the obstacles in the prescribed order, with a focus on accuracy and speed.

  Carmen seemed to thrive and became more enthusiastic even as the courses grew longer and more difficult. And as our grasp of these new complexities increased, so did my ambition. Inevitably, the once-a-week class led to an occasional weekend adventure. In other words, we crossed the Rubicon and went pro, traveling to agility trials around the Midwest and competing against other dogs and handlers. Not that we were like them, though: we weren’t fanatics. We were just out for some kicks.

  Carmen did well, earning a few novice titles and a fair number of first-place ribbons. Then she began to quail a bit, balking before obstacles in a manner that officially constituted “refusals,” and earned deductions from the total score.

  And finally, today, she deliberately evaded a jump.

  I wondered if she was feeling all right. She wasn’t yet a senior dog—she was only five—but purebreds are unfortunately prone to certain physical defects and ailments. So I took her to our vet, and sure enough she was diagnosed with canine hip dysplasia, a degenerative condition. While the problem wasn’t especially serious—her insouciant demeanor hadn’t been affected—it seemed clear her agility career was over. I couldn’t in good conscience put her in the ring and demand that she do things that caused her pain.

  And so, after a brief but valiant career, she was sidelined. Her box of ribbons would never brim over. I installed weave poles in the backyard so that I could still put her gently through her paces every now and then and treat her like a gold medalist afterward. With luck, she wouldn’t miss agility at all.

  And yet, paradoxically, I found myself missing it. The weekends on the circuit, which so alarmed me when I first heard about them, had become something I actually liked. Liked a lot. Needed, even. Not in a crackhead way, or anything. It’s just that agility had proven to be more than merely a way of providing work for working dogs. It was very much a matter of collaboration, a meeting of minds. I lamented that I would never experience that kind of intense rapport again.

  But then I realized I could. Not only that, I could return to agility with real purpose this time: no longer to dabble but to see how far I could go—to what lengths the peculiar alchemy of handler and hound could take me. To find out whether that strange, seemingly psychic bond could translate into real, quantifiable achievement; whether it could lead to mastery—to championship.

  And all I’d have to do was get another dog.

  Part One

  CHAPTER 1

  To Dusty I Shall Return

  I decided to stick with Shelties, because their diminutiveness, intelligence, and drive make them ideal agility competitors. (Also, excuse me, but gorgeous much?)

  I also decided my new Sheltie would be a rescue dog. I admired the work the various breed-based rescue societies were doing—seeking out orphaned, abandoned, and abused purebreds, housing them in foster homes, rehabilitating them if necessary, then en- deavoring to place them with responsible new owners—and the surest way of showing my support would be to adopt one of their foundlings.

  Like most such groups, Central Illinois Sheltie Rescue has its own Web site, to which I became a frequent visitor. The home page features photos of the available dogs, accompanied by descriptions of their ages, histories, and temperaments as well as a slug line denoting their adoption status. When I first visited, most of the photos revealed the kind of Shelties you’d expect: shameless charmers, working the camera, bright eyed and smiling, and just exuding gleeful positivity. Game-show hosts with fur. There was one, however, who broke the mold; Dusty was his name—presumably after his charcoal and ash coloring—and he looked, well, funny. In both senses of the word. His coat was thin and limp, not the usual luxurious Sheltie ruff that resembles the high-collared stoles worn by 1930s screen queens. And though the description praised his “long, elegant nose,” it looked distinctly anteaterish to me. His eyes were too big, nearly marsupial. And given that his limbs appeared to be made of pipe cleaner, the general impression was one of wiry, anxious misanthropy. If Iggy Pop were a dog, this is how he’d look. In fact when I first glanced at Dusty’s photo, the phrase that came to mind was “heroin chic.” A moment later I changed my mind and dropped the “chic.”

  His status was listed as “available,” which wasn’t much of a surprise. The accompanying text did mention that he’d make a good agility dog because he ran very fast and could jump a five-foot fence, but I had to wonder how they came to discover this. And how far they’d had to chase him once they’d learned it. He had a definite look of prison break about him, and what I wanted was the traditional Sheltie eagerness to please—the trembling, expectant look that said: “Anything you want—just name it. I’ll do it right now! Hey, are you listening?!”

  When I returned to the site a few weeks later, Dusty was still there, but his status was now listed as “adoption pending.” I was glad for him and had a momentary vision of him fitting perfectly into some Addams Family-type environment, where his close resemblance to a bat would be just the thing.

  There were a few new dogs, including a gorgeous sable, Stormy, so named because he’d been found wandering the streets in the midst of a downpour. I’m a sucker for that kind of thing: a good, visually evocative story. And the temptation to enter such a story and become its hero—to give it the ending it deserves—can be overwhelming to someone of my sensibility. “And so our rain-drenched stray finds happiness and fulfillment in a lovi
ng Queen Anne home with weave poles in the backyard.” Before I knew it, I was batting out an e-mail: “Hi, I would like to adopt Stormy.”

  It was several days before I saw a reply, and when Natalie, Stormy’s foster mom, finally did get back to me, she had disappointing news: he’d been adopted in the interim.

  I was astonished. How had this happened so quickly? Just a few days before Stormy’s listing still read “available.” “Actually,” Natalie replied, “a couple came up to adopt one of the other dogs and fell in love with Stormy instead.”

  By this time I’d gone back to the site and, sure enough, Stormy had been removed from the roster. But Dusty was still there—his status downgraded back to “available.” I asked Natalie whether the people who adopted Stormy had originally been interested in Dusty.

  “Exactly so,” she e-mailed back, a hint of resignation seeping from between the lines. “And it’s not the first time either. Just last month someone came up for Dusty and ended up going home with another dog.”

  I felt my throat start to constrict—the onset of an emotional investment. Here was a narrative that badly needed a happy ending. I could take this scrawny, scruffy, unsmiling little beast away from his life of unremitting rejection and set him up in fully rehabbed Victorian splendor.

  But I also wanted to train a champion, to get back into the agility ring, to go all the way to the top. I wanted ribbons, titles, glory. The desire was so strong, I could actually taste it on the back of my tongue—dark, smoky, and persistent.

  So there I was, torn by conflicting imperatives. The amateur athlete in me insisted on a conventional, ballsy, go-for-the-gold Sheltie. But the yarn spinner in me wanted to take charge of this dog’s story—to give it the kind of climax that would make readers weep and audiences cheer. What was I to do?

  I looked back at the Web page. Well, it did say Dusty had agility potential. That seemed to split the difference. I shot back an e-mail saying—as noncommittally as possible—that I’d be willing to have a look at him.