Si, Cisco

McCall, Idaho

     Long Valley, Idaho once was home to a cross-bred, world-class, stick dog named Cisco.  By "stick dog" I refer to a critter with an obsession for fetching chunks of wood that overrides all other considerations crossing its mutty mind, like digging holes in petunia patches, rolling in cow manure or in Cisco's case, even the urge to mate.

     My daughter and I were living in a bunkhouse while I tended light steers on a couple of local summer-pasture pieces of flood-irrigated land that have since been converted to second-home acreage. Like all good cowfolks, we had to have a few dogs to decorate our truck when we went to town. 

      The foundation stock of our pack of dogs was an un-spayed Australian shepherd named Eagle, with one blue eye and a Ghandian attitude toward aggressive behavior.  She was bred to be a sheep dog, more of a feeler than a heeler, and was wary of cattle but looked good in a pickup truck. She had whelped a couple of times while we were working a Belgian horse ranch in Oregon, and because Delta and I were addicted to the smell of puppy breath, we kept one offspring from each litter, both females, both un-spayed.

     Cisco was not a pretty dog. He looked like a German shepherd with a Collie's snout and Greyhound’s legs wearing a camelhair coat. As I remember, he came to McCall from California with Banjo Louie.

     Cisco spent his evenings on the front porch of the Lardo Saloon, as did most of the town in those days. He kept a slobbery stick within easy reach and found plenty of humans willing to flip it out into the parking lot to feed his obsession.  Big Al claimed he had seen Cisco climb a tree to find the perfect stick.

     When you own three un-spayed dogs you expect to be visited by male dogs but somehow Cisco, from five miles away, was always the first to figure out that one of our pooches was receptive to courtship. One morning there he was, stick in mouth, ready to sire.  

     That first time, Delta and I looked the other way, let nature take its course, and ended up with nine of the plainest puppies in central Idaho, so plain that we had to spend three entire Saturdays in the grocery store parking lot before we located eight soft-hearted suckers who were willing to adopt semi-ugly pups. We finally resorted to calling two of the last three in the litter "Long Valley Money Retrievers" just to pawn them off.  

     The final, homeliest pup, the one that looked most like Cisco, we took back to the ranch where it took up residence under the bunk house and went feral. It ducked back into its lair when it saw a human. Although we seldom caught sight of it, we called it "Brownie."  Brownie wanted no part of organized society but he, too, carried a stick around with him.

     It was with some dismay that, a month later, I looked over a sink full of dishes out the east window of the bunk house and saw Cisco playing sniffies with another of our bitches. I panicked, ran out into the yard, and yelled at Cisco to stop that, right now by God, because I did not want to spend the rest of my adult life in front of a grocery store trying to distribute his genetic stock to a limited market. Right. Cisco looked at me over his left shoulder like he had heard that one before and prepared to put me back in the puppy business.

    In a moment of purely unconscious inspiration, my paternal hunter-gatherer instincts took control. I reached down and picked up ten inches of yellow pine limb and flung it at Cisco with the intention of driving his tail into his body and letting animal pain release him from his passion. I missed.

      But when Cisco heard that stick whizzing over his head, his doggy mind short-circuited and he completely abandoned our more-than-willing she dog. He smiled and went gallumphing out into the willow brush after the tree limb. Freud was wrong. Not all behavior is sex-based. In a world-class stick dog, the primal urge to fetch is stronger that the urge to procreate.  

     Cisco and I played stick while Delta gathered the three female dogs into our stock truck. We carried them the next day down to Doc Smith in Old Meadows and bought them each a spay job. Cisco followed the truck as far as Lardo's.

     But, if you are driving somewhere around McCall, Idaho someday and you see a homely coyote with a stick in its mouth, it is because Cisco's heritage is alive and well in the Salmon River Mountains. We never did catch his son that lived under our house. When we moved out we left a note for the next occupant that said "Your stick dog's name is Brownie."