Nacho Man-dog
- Apr 27
- 13 min read
“Yeah. Time sort of loses meaning when everything happens inside the same walls just like it does when you’re trapped in your head. You’ve got to find some way to measure your progress or you’ll go crazy.”
After we stopped for water the seventh time, the trees thinned enough for some weak sunbeams to leak through. After our eighth water stop, we stepped out of the woody dreadmill onto the shores of a lake surrounded by sharp peaks stabbing at the dull sky. The air stuck to my fur like a sock just out of the dryer. It felt as stuffy in my nose as breathing under a blanket on a warm day. Clouds billowed like smoke caught on a ceiling and the naked sky between the clouds had a flat neon glow that might have worked at sunrise, but the sun was far too old by this time of morning to pull off that look.
“Does it seem like it’s getting smokier to you?” Mom asked, pointing at the bubblegum-grey side of the sky.
“Seems fine to me,” I said. “Summer is just like that.”
Mom looked around with disappointment at all the ruined pictures. A colony of igloos took up all the spots where a dog might pose in front of the scenery. The villagers stood up from their folding chairs clutching mugs of poop juice and climbed out of igloos with pillow-shaped hair. I ran toward the one that looked most like their chief. She was standing tall and barking loud for all to come and see the distinguished guest.
“Hear ye, here ye! Come behold this outstanding canine specimen!” she shouted to the smoldering heavens. Only in her funny dialect, she pronounced it, “Nacho, where are you? Nacho, come!”
“Na-cho kum to you too!” I barked, carefully sounding out the greeting.
Before I could sit at her feet and politely kiss her hand, a dog came out of the bushes.
“Hi, my name is…” he said before he got distracted by the shouting lady and ran to see what she was carrying on about.
“NACHO! NAAAH-CHO!!!” the Loud One hollered. She grabbed my Friend by the collar as soon as he was within range.
Behind me, Mom yelled, “OSCAR! OSCAR! C’MERE, OSCAR!”
“Hi, Oscar,” the Loud One and Nacho said at the same time, although the lady was a little more friendly about it.
“Pleasure to make your acquaintance!” I wagged. “The noisy one behind me is named Mom. If you’ll please excuse me for a moment, I need to see what she’s screaming about.”
I found Mom standing on a rock and roaring like she does when she can’t see me. Half the time the reason she can’t see me is because I’m standing right behind her, so her screaming wasn’t a big deal. What was much more interesting was the frisbee next to her on the rock.
“What do you suppose this frisbee is doing here?” I sniffed. I’m not really a fetch kind of guy, but picking up a frisbee is a great way to start a game of tag, so I tested its texture with my teeth. Nobody came at first, so I was just about to do the next best thing and give it a good rip when Nacho burst out of the bushes behind me.
“Hey! That’s Na-cho frisbee. It’s mine!” He cocked his head, trying to decide whether to fight me for it or whether to work it out like a gentleman in a good old-fashioned game of tug.
“Finders keepers, losers weepers.” I put my prize down on the rock to pose victoriously with one paw on top of it.
Nyoink! Mom’s hand crept up behind me and snatched it from under my paw.
“Hey!” I barked. “Throw it! Throw it! Throw it!”
“Throw it! Throw it! Throw it!” Nacho agreed.
“Please don’t let Oscar play with Nacho’s frisbee,” the Loud One begged.
“Don’t worry, I’m giving it back to him.” Mom waggled the frisbee. “Nacho! Nacho! You want the frisbee?”
Nacho pointed like a notched arrow. “I want the frisbee! I want the frisbee so bad!”
“Throw it, you tease!” I screeched.
Mom threw the frisbee. It sailed through the air and landed right at Nacho’s feet. He nyoinked it up in his teeth and ran back to his village with it.
“Good job, Mom! You did it!” I cheered. Usually Mom throws balls to a spot where there’s no one to catch them. I have to chase them and knock them on the ground so they won’t get away before she can come pick it up. But now that Nacho had done the hard work, all I had to do was supervise. Nacho and I made a great team.
While Nacho was busy with the frisbee, I came back to the village to get to know his clan.
“Where are you from?” Mom asked the Loud One.
I pushed into her legs to encourage her to add her other hand to the butt scratching.
“We’re from Portland,” she told my back in a voice loud enough for Mom to hear.
“I’m from My Hometown,” I grinned. “It’s right near the City. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”
“We just came down from the eastern Cascades,” Mom added. “Was it smoky up here yesterday?”
“We could smell it last night, but a lot more seems to have blown in this morning. Where did you camp?” What she meant was, How did you get all the way up here so early in the morning? Are you a superhero?
“Why yes, I am a superhero,” I said. “They call me Tintin Quarantino because I’m an adventurous traveler with a fresh and unconventional approach to storytelling that fuses cinematic influences and humor to pay homage to the classic films I admire.”
“We slept in my van at the trailhead and got an early start,” Mom translated.
Both Mom and the Loud One looked around like they’d lost the next page of the script and it might be stuck under a rock or on a tree limb.
“Welp,” Mom said. “We should probably get going if we want to see the top.”
“It’s not much farther. About a mile,” the Loud One said.
“How many steps is that?” I asked, in case the suspense was too much for Mom to handle.
“Enjoy your trip,” Mom said, turning away. “I hope the smoke blows out soon.”
We turned our tails on the lake and followed the trail out of the forest. Once we’d left the trees behind, it led us up a slope that climbed over the treetops, giving Mom’s hungry eyes a blurry panorama to feast on. Faster than I thought, we turned a corner and ran out of mountain. There was no slope so steep and slippery that we might slide off, nor perilous rocks to scale before we claimed the summit. Instead, a trail draped delicately across a couple of boob-shaped humps. The humps dropped off in cliffs to either side, so we had a choice of which direction to keep back from. Beyond the cliffs, a crowd of mountains gathered in the haze, as if to get a better look at me.
When we reached the top, Mom took my most flamboyant hat out of the packpack and looked around for the best place for a picture.
“What’s the special occasion?” I asked as she worked a giant indigo-grey feather out of the packpack zipper and tried to stick it back between the jewels where it belonged.
“Because the feathers look dramatic in the breeze, and because there’s so much ugliness in the world right now that I want to remember that there’s softness and beauty too.”
Mom stepped back to admire her work before pulling the Witch out of her pocket and looking for a place for me to pose. Her eyes landed on a patch of bare rock with nothing behind it to block the view. She stepped closer to show me where to sit and froze. Stepping one foot back for balance, she stretched her neck out to peek over the edge. The ball in her throat bounced. After a long second, she shifted her weight back and sank into her joints for extra sturdiness.
“Oh dog doo. That’s a huge cliff,” she announced in the deep voice she uses when she’s unsure of herself, as if speaking low would keep her more grounded.
“Nonsense! There are treetops just beyond the edge of this rock we’re standing on, see?” I took a step closer and Mom flinched. “That means there’s land below us.”
“Yeah, but what’s around those trees?” She didn’t wait for me to guess. “A whole lotta nothing, that’s what. I don’t think there’s another level below us, I think there’s just a ledge barely wide enough for a sapling and then…”
She stepped backward without taking her eyes off the cliff and settled into an athletic crouch, ready to run away if the cliff made any sudden moves, or maybe just to be more stable in case it tried to pull her off. She tore her eyes away for just long enough to spot a tennis-ball-sized rock on the ground next to her shoe. Her eyes locked assertively back on the emptiness, letting it know to stay back. She leaned over cautiously, flicking her eyes at the ground only long enough to pick up the rock. She wound back her arm and threw it. The rock sailed into the smoky sky and began to drop.
“I’ll get it!” I volunteered.
“OSCAR, NO!” Her scream froze me mid-jump and pulled my butt to the ground as if by a powerful magnet.
I looked at her expectantly over my shoulder. “What? Are you going to get it?”
Mom just cocked her head and listened, so I listened too. A long moment later, a very quiet thump came from the far side of the cliff.
“Mom… where did the rock go?” I asked.
Her throwing arm was still frozen above her head where it let go of the rock, so she pointed with her chin. “It’s in those trees. Way down there.” She shifted more weight onto her back foot, as if leaning too far forward would catch the rock's momentum and make her topple over several steps of flat ground and over the edge.
My eyes followed the line of her chin into trees so far below that they looked like a piney smudge. “That’s impossible! They must be a mile away. You can’t throw a rock that far. You have a terrible arm.”
Mom finally dropped her terrible arm and wasted precious Witch vitality taking more pictures than she needed to keep the memory. She never took her eyes away from the cliff for long, screaming when I got too close to the edge, and growling when I stepped so close to safety that it blocked the Witch’s view of the scenery.
Before putting the Witch to sleep, Mom opened the mapp to see how far we were from the nearest town big enough for a car vet.
“Ah! There you are!” the Witch said. “You’re on top of Strawberry Mountain, by the way.”
“Where’s the nearest town?” Mom asked.
“There’s a Sinclair station twenty miles away,” the Witch offered.
“Thank goodness,” Mom sighed. “That’s not far at all, so the GPS won’t drain the battery on the way.”
“It’s going to take you like an hour and a half to get there,” the Witch cackled. “If you let me die, you’re sure gonna regret it. You’ll be cursed with ignorance, and I’ll haunt your thoughts forever with worries about all the things you can’t control because you don’t know about them!”
“We’d better hurry.” Mom swung the packpack back in place like someone late for a very important date.
She backed slowly away from the edge, but once we were out of range of the invisible monster that sucks moms off cliffs, she turned her back on the void and rushed down the hill like someone who had more to look forward to than the certain doom of a Witchless life.
We drifted peacefully back down the trail, letting the mountain do the work. Before I knew it, I could hear the stream gurgling through the trees. When we reached its bank, Mom ignored the dry rocks and marched straight into the water, shoes, socks, and all. She untied the sweatshirt from around her waist, threw it into the river, and stomped it to the bottom so it wouldn’t float away. She tucked the bottom of her shirt into her sports bra and sat down next to the sunken sweatshirt.
“What are you doing?” I asked in horror.
“I’m cleaning up.” She splashed the angry hole where the bee sting used to be and flapped her shorts around underwater. “I’m sweaty and smelly, and so is my sweatshirt. There’s sap in my butt crack, and it doesn’t hurt to rinse out this bee sting, either.”
When she was done splashing, she sat peacefully as the river muck settled into her shorts, and sweatshirt, and bee sting. “Nature isn’t always something to be overcome,” she said like she was the first one to think of it. “You can use the environment to your advantage.”
“Good girl!” I said. “Now you’re thinking like a caveman.”
Mom stood up and twisted the water out of her sweatshirt. She tied it around her waist, where its drips joined the drips from her shorts and ran down her legs into the river by way of her socks.
By the time we reached the trailhead, Mom’s shorts were dry and crusty again. We walked back into the car kennel without Mom wasting a single wish on wanting it to be over.
“I can’t believe that was more than 5 hours and almost 12 miles!” she said as she opened the Wagon door for me. “It felt like nothing at all! I’m not even hangry.”
I was glad I’d given Mom one last Best Hike Ever before the Witch got her revenge.
Mom clicked the seat leash, fastened her paws to the driving wheel, and set her shoulders to dauntless. “Now all we need is a new fuse,” she announced to show me that she knew how to fix the problem, and to reassure herself that she was still in control of the situation.
“Where do we find one of those, do you suppose?” I asked.
“I don’t know if it’s the sort of thing you can find just anywhere. And who knows if some small-town mechanic is going to take me for a ride.”
“We don’t need a ride,” I pointed out. “The Wagon can still hike. It’s just the Witch that’s on a hunger strike.”
“No, I mean that some men don’t think that women know anything about cars. He may not sell me the fuse and insist on charging a lot of money to run diagnostics.” She made bunny ears with her fingers to show diagnostics meant big, fat lie.
“That’s when they charge you a hunerd and eighty dollars to plug a machine into your Wagon and tell you what you already know,” I said to show that man-dogs know about cars, too. “Joke’s on him! You can’t plug anything into the Wagon. He’s gonna be so embarrassed when he has to ask you how to fix it!”
“Yeah, right. Like any mechanic would ask a female for car advice!” Mom scoffed. “Well if we can’t find a mechanic to help, we’ll have to find a bigger town with an auto parts store. This van is pretty old, though. I don’t know if the parts are specialized.”
That could mean real trouble. We’d learned that you can’t teach old wagons new tricks a few summers ago when the bedside door fell off its hinges. The man who eventually helped us told Mom that it would be very hard to find a prosthetic door for such an old Wagon, so instead he used his big muscles to force it closed. Mom locked it and buried its handle under layers of duck-it tape as a reminder to never open it again. Like a locked door in a ghost story, it had stayed closed ever since. We could live with a lame door, but Mom couldn’t live without the Witch forever.
“And what if they don’t have one in town?” I gulped.
“We’ll have to find a city where they have…” she gulped too, “… a dealership.”
“No! Mom! Don’t talk that way!” I begged. “Call it a dealer-doo!”
“It gets worse. At a dealership they definitely won’t sell me the parts without a diagnostic. Dealer diagnostics are the most expensive of all. And they’ll make us wait several days. And they’ll keep the van for hours. Maybe even a whole day!”
“No! Where will we live?” I howled. The last time something like this happened, Mom left me with the Wagon while she went inside to talk to the car-vet. A man smelling of grease and machinery tricked her into giving him the keys and dognapped both me and the Wagon while her back was turned. I thought I’d have to live in that noisy garage forever, but luckily Mom found me and brought me back to the waiting room. What would become of us now that waiting rooms were illegal?
“We’ll just have to hope that they have fuses in John Day,” she said through locked teeth. “What kind of a name is that for a town? It sounds like a breakfast joint.”
“That doesn’t sound like such a bad place to be stranded after all,” I said. “I hope they have bacon.”
I watched Mom’s thought bubble for all the ways this could end badly as the Wagon hiked back to civilization. After more than a lifetime, the Wagon pulled into the emergency drop-off spot outside the Sinclair station. Mom unhooked her muzzle from its hanger and hustled inside. A hunerd string cheese wishes later, she came back out carrying nothing but a piece of paper. She unhooked her muzzle to show the smile hidden underneath.
“Did they have cheese?” I sniffed her pockets hopefully. “I mean, did they have fuzzes?”
“No fuses and no cheese, but she gave me directions to a mechanic.” Mom held up a scrap of paper.
I sniffed the paper, but it wasn’t very appetizing. Mom studied it, memorizing the clues scribbled there before we set off. The Wagon wandered all three streets of the little town as Mom tried to solve the riddle on the paper. When she finally did, she was so excited that she forgot all about dognappers, and left me alone in the Wagon.
I waited a year-long minute for her to return. When the door swung open again, my heart jumped into my throat and my knees turned to jelly. I held my breath, hoping a greasy dognapper wouldn’t appear in the doorway. Instead, Mom stepped out with a smile so bright that it shone through the muzzle.
She opened the door and tickled the Wagon under its front windowsill. Before I could ask if she’d found the fuzz, she slammed the door in my face. The Wagon’s snout opened, blocking my view of Mom, but I could feel that she was still there by how the Wagon bounced and jiggled as she crawled into its mouth.
The jiggling stopped and Mom appeared in the doorway. She mounted the driving chair, stuck the charging straw into the Witch’s mouth and paused momentously to make room for suspense. “This is it, Spud: The moment where we find out if we have to drive all the way home in silence.” She took a deep breath like she was getting ready to blow out birthday candles and held it for as long as it takes to make a wish.
I watched her face as she twisted the key.
Bffffft, the Witch farted.
Mom hooted with joy. “It worked! It worked!” she laughed. “I fixed it! Me! All by myself! And it only cost a dollar!”
“Vacation is saved!” I cheered.
She held up a paw and I high fived it. She left the Wagon running so the Witch could drink her fill as Mom danced back inside to buy more doom breakers.
“Take that, you two-timing dingleberry!” I muttered, stomping on the Witch’s feeding straw and knocking her off the driving chair as if it were an accident. “That’ll teach you to sabotage our vacation.”
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
