Idaho: Classy Women, Fragrant Dogs

They met in Perry’s Bar in San Francisco’s Financial District where they discovered a shared love of good bourbon, western writers, Tonkin cane rods and honest bird dogs. Looking back, they should have stopped at rods on that quiet afternoon in early April for it was dogs that brought them together and dogs that drove them apart.

He told her his ranch nestled in the bend of a lava flow north of Twin Falls, Idaho, then mentioned his affection for Labrador Retrievers, octagon barrel Winchesters and record mule deer. 

She confessed she owned an apartment on Russian Hill that overlooked Alcatraz and though she did not put a price on either, described the Remington bronze in her entry, the Edward Weston prints above her white leather couch and the rare orchids that flourished in her Golden Gate picture window. 

She came from old money, he came from poor money and they were different enough to seem both exotic and familiar to the other. Along with their love of dogs, they also discovered a shared passion, savored it in various risky places and foolishly believed they had invented new steps to this oldest of rituals. 

When the man returned to his alfalfa fields and lava flows the phone calls grew longer, the promises more graphic and it was at his invitation that she traded her panorama of San Francisco’s Bay for his views of the Craters of the Moon. In light of his affection for Labradors he was surprised when she appeared with a frantic, toothless Yorkie named Yippi. 

And yet he was pleased to see her and watched with some amusement while she alternately cooed over Yippi and described how Yorkies were simply big, tough dogs trapped in small, delicate bodies.

Almost to prove her point, Yippi lasted a month before he choked on a chunk of imported ten-dollar-a-can horse meat.

“Yippi lived a happy, if not entirely peaceful life, ” he said to comfort her. 

“You never loved him,” she retorted through tears.

Watching her grieve, the man could not divine if her tears were fully for Yippi or, and this was his first dark thought, her cell phone that fell silent the minute she entered the Crater’s labyrinthine, iron rich flows. 

In the days following it became clear that Yippi’s timely demise had driven a thin, but felling wedge between them. As she keened over her Yorky, he poured her a stiff Old Fashion, which she had begun to prefer over bourbon on the rocks, then dug a small square hole for Yippi.

The Jack was already well grown when he turned down the potholed driveway of the Burley horse breeder in search of a compromise. Life, and the wrecks that are germane to work around horses had endowed the breeder with a bad limp at the same time it made him wary and wise. As the two men stood swatting at the horse flies that circled their sweat stained Stetsons the breeder expressed a passion for fine bloodlines, domestic beer and tough, black and white dogs that stood six inches at the shoulder. 

He said he did not care to sell the Jack, which he called Rock, but could be persuaded for the right price and right cause. 

Rock. The man liked the name. Defined by hard consonants with the barest nod to a minor vowel, the Jack’s name conjured a short, tough, light middleweight who could take a punch.

In was late May, close to the end of spring, well after the sap has risen in men and maples alike when he introduced the Jack to the woman. That morning a bull skunk had passed up wind, beyond the black cliff face where the taut wire fence started and the lava flows stopped. 

As she bent to pet the dog the woman detected the bull’s first unexpected perfume and lifting her nose in the fine way of a well bred English Pointer she commented, “Does this dog normally smell like skunk?”

Not that he could tell, he admitted. 

Before he met the woman, the man had kept Labradors. Blacks that would bust ice to retrieve downed ducks without complaint, were blessed with honest natures and did not foul in the clinch. Scooter, the arthritic last of that loyal line, now spent much of his day on the front porch, yipping softly as he dreamed of crippled mallards drifting far out on the Snake River. 

Rock was made of equally tough stuff. Though he was not much for cold water, he did drive off two missionaries who appeared on the porch with pious smiles and a complimentary book of Mormon. A week later, Rock took twenty, silent stitches after he evicted the old badger that had undermined the barn’s lava-rock foundation. The two contests spoke to the Jack’s courage and the man took to letting him sleep on their now placid, lodge pole bed.

Rock had not fully healed when the bull skunk claimed the shadows beneath the wide porch that circled the house. The Jack might have picked a more distant playing field to challenge the skunk, but often there is no choice in these matters. The wisest men, and the strongest dogs make the best of unequal odds. 

While the battle raged beneath the porch that early June day a powerful effluvium filled the house. The skunk died late in the afternoon but not without exacting a price. That night the woman departed for a Best Western in Twin Falls, leaving the man and the Jack with little but a good piece of venison, which he grilled medium rare, then cut in half and flavored with Lee and Perrins to celebrate the Jack’s hard won victory.

When the woman returned she distanced herself from the dog and the man. To satisfy her, he used a peroxide and baking soda mix she found in a ladies magazine that bleached the Jack orange, an indignity the dog ignored but the man could not. 

Two days passed before she sniffed the air above the breakfast table and said, “I smell skunk.” 

When she left for San Francisco he knew it was for good. In the weeks that followed he would sit on the porch, study the waning snow on the high distant couloirs and contemplate the great gulf between men and women as the Jack marked and remarked the fence line until there was no doubt who owned the property.