Tuesday, June 08, 2004

The Adventures of Cosmo, the Mostly-Good Dog, Adventure the Third: Snowdoggie

Coz had been our dog for the better part of a year when we decided the three of us should have an adventure together.  We packed a tent and sleeping bags and a propane stove and loaded the dog into the little old station wagon, and we drove east, through the beautiful foothills that once ran with gold, and then further up, into the ragged mountains.  Coz still had a little problem with carsickness but he let us know when we had to let him out before anything happened.  Once we reached the snowline we stopped to let him pee and he seemed amused by the snow; he put his nose into it and looked to us with happy curiosity.

But we had quite a ways to go before we reached our destination - a campground just west of Mono Lake, an area where massive mountains rise up from the desert plain with startling suddenness.  Our first stop was the lakeshore itself.  The lake is large, but not huge, and the water was slick with alkali.  White fluffy towers poked up out of the water, made of calcium that bubbled up from the lakebed.  The sky was very wide and blue and the air was so clear we could hear things from miles away. 

Just south of the lake was an old volcano where we stopped to hike.  Cosmo and Kel and I scrambled up the steep cone, several hundred feet above the rocky desert floor.  At the lip of the cone, we all looked down into the caldera.  Its walls were shiny with black obsidian, jumbled into rocks and in broad tall walls like glass cliffs.  I wanted to see more and climbed down; Kel and the dog stayed behind.  After a few minutes I heard deep booming woofs.  Cosmo was on the alert.  He was telling another hiker, innocently following our trail, “Get Out!  Go Away!  This is OUR mountain!” It was funny, except that if I hadn’t known this dog myself, he’d probably have scared me. 

Later that day we got to our campground.  As it was April, no one else was there and we had the place to ourselves, surrounded by tall pine trees and wise old boulders.  We set up the tent, cooked some supper, and fed Cosmo, and then we all got into the small green tent for the night. 

In the middle of the night, I heard the wind pick up and a soft scraping against the roof of the tent. Too quiet for rain - I figured it for snow as I fell back to sleep. 

We woke up the next morning in the cozy tent, very warm and well-rested.  As I started to stir, Kel woke up; as we both starting chatting, the dog roused himself and started strolling among us, licking our faces.  We supposed he wanted to go out, so we unzipped the door.  Outside, the dry brown forest floor had been turned pure white - several inches of snow blanketed the ground.  Coz looked outside, then back to Kel and me, still in our sleeping bags.  His face was one huge grin, and then suddenly he was gone, having burst out of the tent like a balloon blown up and then released.  He had disappeared - though we peered out the tent flaps, we couldn’t see him in the narrow swath of forest visible to us. 

A few moments later we saw him briefly as he ran from left to right in front of us, fairly deep in the woods.  Then, again, silent quiet stillness.  A few more moments later he had reversed course, running from right to left across the small sliver of forest we could see.  For several minutes that’s all we saw of him - running from side to side, just for a second or two before we lost view of him again.  Eventually he poked a snow-frosted nose into the tent, panting happily.  “Come on, guys!,” he was saying.  “You’ve got to check this out!” And that’s how we learned that Cosmo likes to play in the snow.  I regret that it didn’t happen more often.  It was a hell of a lot of fun to watch.