Rockweilers in terrier incognita

Hearing Mom’s bravery, the stream turned away from the trail. It wandered into the forest in search of someone less bold to harass, leaving us alone with the hills, whose pointy tips were lost in a mysterious fog. 

Read last week’s story

The sun faded as the mist turned the whole world smudgy like a bathroom mirror. No matter how far ahead of Mom I ran, I could never get far enough to see more than a few steps into the future. Stone towers faded into and out of the fog like stern statues as we walked. 

“Do you know what the Lakota called these rock formations?” Mom asked. 

“I love this game!” I wagged. “They must have sedimentary value. The people in these parts don’t take their land for granite!” I charged on before Mom could make a rule against puns. “Is it Steve Austin? A Stone Called Steve Austin? Get it?” I paused for Mom to laugh like they do on TV, but she missed her cue. “Okay, I’ll try another one. Do they call them rockweilers Terrier incognita? Schist tzu? I know! I know! A rock-schund!” 

Mom’s face did patient. 

“Wakka, wakka, wakka!” I added, so she might get the hint.

She waited a second to make sure I was done. “They called them owls because of their shape, and how they seem to look at you wherever you go. Owls were a symbol of imminent death.”

“You’re such a bummer. I think they look like hot dogs.” Still, I stayed a little farther from the rock-schunds after that. Just in case.

The mominous shapes were the size of park statues at first, but got bigger as we went until they were as tall as buildings. They gathered in clusters that grew like crowds gawking over an accident. Without warning, the ground under my paws flattened and a stadium-sized lump of rock took shape in the mist ahead. Its steep sides blocked the way in the direction that the trail arrows were pointing.

“Now what?” I asked the mist behind me, where I was pretty sure Mom would appear any second.

“It looks like we’re supposed to climb it.” Mom walked into a crack in the rock no wider than a ladder. Inside, the white dirt was piled against the back wall at an angle that just might be shallow enough to climb. She reached up and patted the wall beside where the slope flattened out. “You first. Up-up.” 

I took a running start and kept running faster than my legs could fall out from under me. Once I was high enough to reach out and boop Mom on top of her head, the ground flattened enough for me to stand. 

I let the speed wind out of my legs for a couple of steps and turned back to Mom. “Your turn!”

Mom stuck the water bottle into the crook of one elbow and turned the Witch’s face into her palm so her screen wouldn’t smash against the stone as Mom climbed. She held onto the wall with her free paw and stepped up one step, two steps, three steps… 

She lifted her leg for the fourth step when, still in a stepping posture, her whole body slid back through her pawprints to the bottom. 

She said something about dog doo and put the water bottle and Witch into pockets so her arms were free to behave like legs. She stuck a hand to the rock on either side and pushed hard to wedge herself in. She kicked at the white dirt to see the shape of the rock underneath and after a few practice bounces, she took a jumpy step, followed by a slippery step, and then used her belly as a foot as she flopped face-down at my feet. Her arms became fins as she pushed backward against white dirt, rock, and whatever else would help her slither the rest of the way to my side.

I’d never seen anyone hike like a fish before. “What are you doing down there?”

“It worked, didn’t it?” She rolled into a sit and gathered three of her legs under her. She stood up with a groan. 

“Why didn’t you just do it the normal way, like me?” I asked reasonably.

“I tried that. A better question might be, how did you do it?” 

“You never told me it was impossible.”

Mom wagged her head. “We’re capable of extraordinary things when we don’t know we can’t.” I couldn’t tell if she was talking about me learning to fly or her turning into a fish.

Walking on top of the mountain’s craggy helmet got easier with the steep ear flaps behind us. I could tell that we were on top of something tall because the smudgy air was equally empty in all directions. The anti-slip rock and dry white dirt let Mom hike as dauntlessly as if she were on a snowbridge over sock-deep water. 

“There’s supposed to be some sort of tower up here,” Mom said.

“What kind of tower? Like a Rapunzel tower?” 

“I don’t know. An observation tower, I guess.” 

“Observing what?”

“Danger? Fires? Maybe invading Canadians.”

“What’s the point of building a tower just for worrying in? Can’t you worry from the ground when you need to? Once you’ve built a tower, you’ll feel like you’re wasting it if you don’t worry enough.”

“All that grass on the prairie, I guess.” Mom looked into the milky blankness to show me where the grass was. “If you don’t have a healthy sense of worry you might not notice a brush fire until it’s too late. With those dry prairie winds, a fire could get out of control in seconds. Except now that we have satellites, the observation station is mostly for visitors.” 

“People visit a place just for the thrill of leisure-worrying? I’ve heard of making a mountain of a control hill, but not building a worry fort for worrywarts.”

“Well there’s little hope of seeing anything in all this fog, anyway.” Mom took a step onto a patch of white dirt. The ground flicked her paw away. “Ack. Is it just me or is it getting icier up here?”

“Look here, a clue!” I sniffed. A sign grew from the rock in the exact spot where regular rock turned white and glassy. “What does it say?”

“It says, SNOW AND ICE MAY MAKE THE TRAIL IMPASSIBLE BEYOND THIS POINT,” she read.

“Nothing is impassable. You just need to think creatively,” I reminded her. “What are we waiting for?” I ran onto the white dirt and smeared my face against its slick surface. I pushed my head around like a zamboni, searching for an un-slippery spot to somersault onto my back for a snow angel.

“No way!” Mom said. “I’m not walking on that. We’d slip and fall off a cliff!”

“Don’t be so drama-ah-ah—” I started to say, but my face-pushing paw slipped and flopped me onto my side. “I’m demomstrating how much fun it is to play in the white dirt,” I saved. I tried to demomstrate a snow angel by kicking all four of my legs in the air, but the darned dirt flipped me until I was lying on my other side, one Oscar-width closer to where rock became cloud.

“Come back from there before you fall,” Mom scolded. 

The emptiness beyond where the rock fell away could have held a drop shorter than Mom or a cliff a million feet high. The only thing that panics Mom more than looking down and seeing how far she is from the bottom is looking down and not seeing how high she is. When I looked back, Mom’s eyes were pointing down and she was almost as pale as the sky. 

“I didn’t know we were so high up,” she choked. 

I turned back toward the void. “How do you kn—… Oh.” The mist shifted and I thought I saw a drop taller than a fall from the moon.

“Let’s get out of here.” Mom crab-walked away without taking her wide eyes off the emptiness beyond where the ground ended.

“I thought we were being fearless now. Because: rebellion,” I reminded her. 

It wasn’t like Mom not to try something, even if she was scared. Usually she would walk timidly into danger until she was past crying and into bossy, screaming at my every move as she boot-scooted, crawled, or slithered back to safety. I waited on the white lump for her to come back until she was far enough away that I was sure she wouldn’t return. She took flinchy-winchy steps, carefully leaving both paws on the ground so she wouldn’t get sucked off a cliff. At least she wasn’t slithering like a snow-angel-fish again.

When we arrived at the slippery crack, she sent me down first. I ran down the slope, letting my legs roll under me like the Road Runner. When I reached the bottom, I steered to one side to get out of Mom’s path so she wouldn’t crush me if she came tumbling after like an Indiana Bones rock.

I waited, but there was no rumbling and no tumbling.

I waited some more, but still no Mom fell out of the Mom-return slot.

I would have to step onto her landing strip if I wanted to look for her. I was just about to take a cautious step onto the runway when I heard a whoosh. Two shoes shot out of the crack, followed by two legs. The rest of Mom followed, riding on her butt with her arms in the air like a stickup.

“What on earth are you doing?” my head-tilt asked.

“Sledding.” She stood up without the groan and brushed the white dirt victoriously from her tabottom. “That wasn’t as painless as I thought. There were some sharp rocks under there.”

“The trick to dealing with the sharp rocks is not to see them coming,” I said sagely. “Just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

As we walked back toward the car kennel, I spotted something in the distance that filled my heart with joy. “Look, Mom! Friends!” I squealed. Besides the Coloradog and his lady, I hadn’t made new Friends on the trail since I met Lily. This time, there was no leash to hold me back, so I ran ahead to introduce myself.

“What’s your name, little lady?” the one who was a man asked me.

“Bruh, why are there flowers on your jacket?” asked the one who was a dog.

“I’m Oscar,” I answered the Man, doing a little hello dance. “Because not many dogs have coats like it, and I like pretty things,” I explained to the dog.

“Whoa, you made a boy dog wear a pink coat?” the Man asked Mom. I could tell by his tone that he was impressed. 

“Sure, why not?” Mom said. “Dogs don’t have gender identities. And they can’t see the color pink.”

Now that my manliness was beyond doubt, the dog and I played tag while the humans did what humans do when they meet on the back side of a mountain. Mom explained that she’d never been here before, and the Man said he’d never been here before either. 

“I’m not gonna just sit at home if I can’t work, so I took the dog and hit the road,” the Man said. “We’ll just keep traveling until it’s safe to go home again.” 

“What a coincidence! Us too!” I said. When I looked at Mom, her face was strained in a mental game of tug. Her thought bubble said she wanted to judge him for being unsafe, but when she tried to come up with a reason why we were different, the bubble went blank.

“Have you been to the Badlands?” the Man continued.

“No, I don’t even know what the Badlands are,” Mom admitted. 

“You’ve got to go to the Badlands,” he commanded, like they were made of cheese and bacon. “It’s only like an hour away. You can’t go home until you’ve visited them.” 

“But what are they?” Mom asked again.

The Man took out his witch to show why a bad land felt so good. Horror gripped me as he took a step into Mom’s boogeybubble. I hoped he didn’t notice that she took a mini step back when his face-wiping arm reached toward her and his snot-face leaned in. Both Mom and I held our breath as they looked at his witch together.

Mom stepped back into private air before reopening the vents behind her frozen smile. “Okay, well, have a great trip. Stay safe!” She turned away before he could order her to do anything else.

“So, what’s a bad land?” I asked when we were socially distant again. 

“I’m not sure. All I saw was him sitting shirtless in the front seat of his truck showing off his pecs. There might’ve been something the color of dirt out the window behind him.” 

“Should we investigate?”

“We should probably start working our way back home.” Mom sighed. “The Badlands are east of here. We’d be going in the wrong direction.” 

“But he said we had to…”

“I’m a little tired of exploring, aren’t you?”

I looked at the owls with all their up-up energy and my legs sighed. “How far away is home?” 

“It’ll take us at least 3 days to get there, but we have a week if we want.”

“How many hikes in a week?” I asked.

“Seven.”

“And is three more or less than seven, do you think?”

“Let me put it this way: for every day that we can’t find something to keep us on the road, we have to spend a day locked in the house.”

I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Even though there were days when I was too tired to explore, I wasn’t ready to go back to the Stuck House. On the road, there was no knowing when the butt-shredding rocks would hit our tabottoms, so Mom could raise her arms in abandon as the world carried us from one surprise to the next. At home, we would only have the Witch’s lies to tell us what was happening in the world outside. 

“Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s break bad-lands before we go home.”

Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.

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