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When I got the mockup of the Dogged Pursuit cover, with Dusty sailing over the bar jump against a backdrop of Elysian blue while looking more handsome and serene than he had anything close to a right to, I couldn't wait to share it. I sent jpegs out to various persons who had had a role in Dusty's life, including Natalie, his former foster mom at Central Illinois Sheltie Rescue.

She emailed me back almost immediately, brimming with enthusiasm for the entire project-about which this was the first she'd heard. CISR has a "brag" page, mainly devoted to alumni who achieve agility titles; I used to envision Dusty ending up there. By Natalie's reaction, it seemed this dream was not entirely lost; though it wasn't his successes but his failures-by being sufficiently comic to merit a book about them-that might do the trick.

But one thing perplexed Natalie: "I didn't recognize him on the cover. He looks like a blue, and that threw me. You changed his coloring for the design, right?"

Well, now she'd thrown me. Because there had been no tinkering with his appearance; I wouldn't have allowed it. He looks on the cover the way he looks in reality. Which is...well, dusty. Ashen. Swirls of silver laced by jets of charcoal. In the book, I even attribute his coat to having inspired his name.

But...Natalie was right; he hadn't always looked that way. When I first met him, he was predominately black-the designation known as tricolor. Our other Sheltie, Carmen, is a tricolor as well; and I now remembered thinking that they'd make a striking pair, walking down the street together with all that ebony fur bouncing and glittering; yes, I admit it-I was accessorizing. I wanted a matched set. I took Dusty, in spite of his manifest deficiencies, for the same reason you'd buy a couch: he fit my color scheme.

Alas, he subsequently proved sufficiently disruptive to my well-ordered routine that I completely forgot this aspect of his ambition. There was never any chance of him trotting attractively beside Carmen anyway, because he never walked in a straight line; in fact he never walked at all. He zigged, he zagged, he spurted, he sprang. It was like having a bottle rocket on a leash.

So his coloring ceased to be of any note to me; and since I saw him every day, I didn't even notice when it began to change. Other people, who enountered him less regularly, made occasional comments-"He looks so gray; is he getting old?"-but I shrugged them off as the result of imperfect memories.

It was only when Natalie presented me with photographic evidence that I realized how dramatic his shift had been. Her group had been so fascinated by his color change that she'd posted some before-and-after pictures for their collective astonishment. He really did metamorphose into an almost completely different dog. (http://www.illinoissheltierescue.com/Dusty.html)

I've been conducting a very unscientific survey (i.e. asking people I know whenever it occurs to me) whether they've ever heard of a dog altering its coloring to this degree. No one has. Dusty, the world's least likely agility dog, might also be the world's first interspecies hybrid: part canine, part chameleon.

(That would explain the eyes and nose, too.)

Robert Rodi, Dogged Pursuit, dog shows, canine agility, Hudson Street Press, Penguin Books