Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

In search of the perfect climbing dog

Give or take 15,000 years ago a feral dog decided to hell with hunting all day. Why not instead hang around groups of semi-sophisticated apes who use hunting clubs and flint arrows? In return for helping with a few chores such as locating their food and a few well-placed barks at the lions creeping around camp, the dogs could pick up a few meat scraps and leftover bones, not to mention far more time for long naps. The symbiosis worked all too well.

Leap forward to last week and this less than sophisticated ape, albeit one who uses Camalots and carabiners instead of clubs and arrows, found himself staring into the eyes of a lost dog out in the front yard. There are a lot of loose dogs in Big Pine (14 miles south of Bishop, CA) not to mention loose people, in this town of 1,300 souls or so. And this being a decidedly rural county many people have a dog or two. It cuts down on the loneliness. 

I slowly walked up to the dog and stuck out my hand for the dog to smell. If I’d been more in tune with the canine mind I would have bent over and let him smell me properly. But thankfully my shoddy sense of smell spares me from such intimacy with strange dogs. The dog didn’t bite. It simply wagged its tail and lifted up its paw to shake.

Around the dog’s collar was a piece of rope, frayed and dirty. I figured it was a stray from the Indian reservation across Highway 395. The dog himself (after looking under the hood) was mottled gray and brown with big paws and an oversized head. I gave him a drink of water and he lapped it quickly, looking up at me with such kindness that I felt, at the risk of slipping poorly on a balmy patch of sentimentality, nothing short of an instant connection with the dog.

I figured the dog would have some water and then be on its way to wherever it was going. Leash laws? What be-damned leash laws? Most local dogs here are often seen doing what they wish, which to my human perception consists of a cat chase that goes hither and thither, a dip in glacier-fed creek or the Owens River and running to and fro for the good feel of it. This is probably entirely wrong. A lot of dogs, no doubt, are simply (or sophisticatedly) on the hunt for a good smell off a pole or a fence where they find the estrus of a heated, perhaps amenable bitch or the acrid testosterone levels of males indicating intent of territory. The 220 million scent cells per all-powerful nose (in comparison to our mere five million) must blissfully rapture them into the simple yet nimble world of dog.