A Dog with No Name

From the open skies of Wyoming, here’s this month’s short story about ranch life, an insight I learned from my family, and a piece of trivia, along with a bit of book news.

Story

In 1969, my dad hired my brother, Rod, to build a fence line dividing the Coal Creek country

into two pastures. He took a former high school buddy along to help, but the friend got drunk in town and ordered 30,000 fence posts from the feedstore for the ranch project, far more than they would ever need. He left the ranch after that embarrassing mistake, and Dad sent me out to help my brother finish the job.

One day a feral dog walked into our fence camp. Abandoned by her owners, she stayed with us the whole time we built the fence, sleeping under our sheep wagon and walking along as we dug fence posts and stretched wire. She was a nervous dog but trusted us. For wont of any other name, my irreverent brother started calling her “Bitch.”

We gave her a pronghorn carcass to feed on as she lay in the shade during our lunch breaks.

When we woke up the last morning in camp, she was gone, somehow knowing that we were

close to finishing.

Rod and I walked the surrounding country hollering for her, worried that a pack of coyotes

would encircle her and move in for the kill. I walked along a rock-strewn terrace at the foot of a low hogback ridge, my nose to the ground, looking for paw prints she might have left behind. None were there.

I didn’t see her trail, and I also didn’t notice small fragments of sun-bleached bone and pieces of sharp chert eroding out along a contour of the terrace that three years later would be recognized as the five-thousand-year-old Scoggin Site Bison Kill.

Insight

From my dad: Accept responsibility and execute it no matter the cost to yourself.

Trivia: Did You Know?

The Scoggin site yielded the oldest known animal corral in Wyoming.

Book News

We have close to 350 Amazon reviews and ratings for A Sometimes Paradise! My gratitude to all of you who have provided feedback. I’m looking forward to more books events this spring.

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Until next month,

Mark Miller

Dogs adapt and can assume “an air of ascribed nobility at the top of the rangeland hierarchy.” From A Sometimes Paradise.