Horses for Courses

Lisa and I started plotting Fairs’ Point before she got sick, and part of the fun for Lisa was the chance to indulge in some inside jokes about one of her great interests, thoroughbred racing. She wasn’t much of a gambler (we couldn’t afford it, for one thing), but she was passionately interested in the animals and the people involved in the sport. She volunteered with equine rescue organizations, and developed a wide-ranging network of friends — owners, trainers, jockeys (flat and jump), serious gamblers, and professional photographers. There was also a surprising overlap between the people who race horses and the people who race Jack Russell terriers, and the latter became the inspiration for the basket terriers that are raced in Astreiant. (It remains one of my great regrets that we never did figure out a way to translate the brilliantly named “Fleabiscuit” — owned, if I remember correctly, by a fairly important thoroughbred trainer — into something that would work in Astreiant.) The horse Philip so admires, King of Thieves, was owned by one of her friends, and had a terrible habit of eating buttons or any other bits of clothing he could get hold of. The astrologer Ardre Beier, with his elaborate canine horoscopes, was a play on racing journalist Andrew Beyer, inventor of the Beyer Speed Figure used to rate thoroughbreds, though Beyer was a much better person than his fictional equivalent. There were going to be more references, but once she got sick, she didn’t note them down, and after her death I didn’t know enough to pull them off. That’s still one of my great regrets. 

The other inspiration for the basket terriers and their sports was her membership in the Piscataqua Obedience Club. We had a dog, a mix of (probably) sheltie and whippet, who, like most herding dogs, needed something to do. Lisa took her to obedience classes, tried agility (Vixen tried it once, decided she didn’t like it and declined to run the course again), rally obedience (“Simon says” for dogs and trainers), and finally flyball. If you don’t know, flyball is a kind of relay race, in which a team of dogs take turns racing down a course over a set of hurdles to a box, which they must hit correctly to release a ball. They catch the ball and run back over the hurdles to their human. Fastest team wins. The height of the hurdles is set by the shortest dog on the team, so most teams have a terrier on the team to give the bigger, faster dogs as much advantage as possible. Vixen liked the game, but wasted too much energy barking — always an issue with a sheltie mix — and didn’t make the team. However, we still went to practices, and the semi-controlled chaos of the flyball run was another of our inspirations.

And it was Vixen who found us our visual inspiration for Sunflower. We took her to the town dog park, and there was a new dog there, a smallish terrier mix — about Jack Russell size — with an unusual coat. It was very dark brown, almost black, with a golden brindle pattern. A bit like a tiger in reverse, and it turned out his name was Tiger. Vixen was largely indifferent to other dogs outside of the dog club — when she was at the dog park, she wanted to run — but something about Tiger caught her fancy, and they actually played together while we admired Tiger and Tiger’s human admired Vixen. I always wanted to tell her we’d put Tiger in a book, but by then we’d lost touch.