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lots of other dogs on the wind.
    Patsy wanted to turn right to go to the industrial estate at Karratha, but Red Dog had other ideas. He made her stop at the turning, and jumped out through the window, crossing the road and then trotting off into the town centre. He amused himself for a while by chasing the shadows of birds, and pouncing on them, and then he caught that smell of dogs again.
    Red Dog liked some other dogs, but he often got into fights with the ones that he didn’t. He was never afraid of a fight, but was annoyed by being dabbed with stinging antiseptics, so he avoided fights unless it was absolutely a matter of personal honour or extreme dislike. In this case he didn’t catch a whiff of any of his enemies. He followed his nose until he arrived at a patch of wasteland that would one day be a carpark forKarratha City shopping centre, and found to his delight that there was indeed something interesting going on.
    Most people had cattle dogs or kelpies, or mongrels, but some people in the Pilbara had pedigree dogs. These folk were proud of their animals, and regretted never having a chance to show them off, so they had formed a kennel club, and begun to organise shows and competitions. They met up on agreed dates, judges were appointed, rosettes and certificates were made in advance, and competitors obsessively snipped off stray hairs, shampooed and combed coats, tried to disguise blemishes, and put their pets through strict regimes of obedience training.
    Here they all were. There were whippets from Whim Creek, Rottweilers from Roebourne, poodles from Port Hedland, cairns from Carnarvon, Pekinese from Paraburdoo, pugs from Pannawonica, corgis from Coral Bay, Dalmatians from Dampier, English sheepdogs from Exmouth and even a mutt from Mungaroona, which its owner was claiming to be a new breed.
    They had got to the point in the proceedings when all the competitors were lined up in a row, waiting to step forward for their awards, and when all the judges were conferring in order to add up points and finalise their decisions.
    Red Dog surveyed this curious scene with much interest and decided that, of all the people there, the judges were clearly the most important. In order to make his mark he walked with great dignity up to their table, and peed onto one of its legs. Having thus left his visiting card he paraded slowly along the line of smart dogs and their equally smart owners. The dogs he ignored altogether, but he recognised many bitches that he had flirted with all over the Pilbara, and whom he visited whenever he could get a lift in their direction. He greeted them happily with sniffing and play fighting, much to the horror of their owners, whose comical and panicky attempts to shoo him away he ignored.

    The judges in the meantime were watching Red Dog’s intervention with both concern and amusement. Some of them had given Red Dog lifts in their own cars, and knew that he was a local celebrity. In later years they would even vote to have a picture of his head as the official badge of their club, but just now they were wondering what to do. Red Dog saved them any further trouble, however, because, having paraded along the line in one direction, he now paraded along it in the other, as if he himself were a judge with some difficult decisions to make.
    Finally he went over to the judges’ desk and peed on it again, although this time on a different leg, and then he decided to go home. He loped off back to the roadside, and waited for a familiar car. This time it was Nancy Grey who took him back to Dampier, and she made extra sure that all the windows were wide open.
    One of John’s friends telephoned him that evening and told him what his dog had been up to that afternoon. John looked down at Red Dog, who was fast asleep in the corner, and laughed. He said, ‘I’m surprised that he didn’t just jump right up on that table and award himself all of the prizes.’

RED DOG’S EXPENSIVE INJURY
    One morning