Si, Cisco

Si, Cisco.

Thirty years ago, Long Valley, Idaho, was home to a cross-bred, world-class stick dog named Cisco. By "stick dog" I mean a canine creature with an obsession for fetching chunks of wood overriding all other considerations that cross 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 the teacherage at the Elo school while I was cow-personing for a couple of local summer-pasture pieces of flood-irrigated land. Like all good cowfolks, we had to have a few dogs to decorate the bed of 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 she looked good in a pickup truck. She mated 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 and ended up at Cody’s house when Lou rejoined the Navy.
Cisco spent his evenings on the front porch of the Lardo Saloon, as did most of the town riffraff in those days. He kept a slobbery stick within easy reach and found plenty of humans willing to flip the stick out into the parking lot to feed his obsession. A couple of the porch loons claimed they 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 the west end of McCall, was the first to figure out that one of our pooches, five miles away, was becoming 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 ugliest puppies in central Idaho, so ugly that we had to spend three entire Saturdays in a grocery store parking lot before we located eight soft-hearted suckers who were willing to adopt 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 Elo school, where it up residence under the teacherage 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 sinkful of dishes out the west window of the teacherage and saw Cisco playing sniffies with another of our bitches. I panicked, ran out into the schoolyard, 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 of my body. 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, by golly, 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 that day down to Doc Smith in Old Meadows and bought them each an operation. Cisco followed the truck as far as Lardo's.
But, if you are driving out Farm-to-Market south of 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 the cattle were moved to lower pastures, and we moved out of the teacherage to find a winter job in California, we left for a note for the next occupant that said "Your stick dog's name is Brownie."