By Ray Bilderback
Most families have a favorite pet of some sort and there is a great variety of these companions: dogs, cats, chickens, snakes, aquariums crowded with fish and horses. Mustn’t forget the horses. I have had three pet dogs over a marvelous stretch of time and they have all been “working pets.” This first story involves Spot. Not a very inventive name for a dog, but a very exceptional dog nonetheless. He was responsible for a hundred acres of farm. His charges included cows, pigs, chickens and a growing group of grandchildren that would come and go. In the late 1940s, I spent as much time as I could at my grandparents’ farm where Spot was in charge.
One bright summer day, I made such a visit. Spot had been sick for two days and the banty (bantam) chickens felt bold and entered into forbidden territory. They got behind the netting that protected grandmother’s prize ferns and scratched to their heart’s content. There were bits of five-fingered ferns scattered across the sidewalk. The third day Spot rose from his sickbed and herded the banties back where they belonged. Too late for the ferns, much too late. “Oh, Pshaw,” exclaimed grandmother (as close to cursing as she ever came), “Ed brought those ferns to me for my birthday. He took a day off from planting the garden and traveled to Bear Valley. That was a long years back.”
I came close to missing her next words. She said them more to herself than me, I suppose. “And Ed gone just six months now.”
Sometimes I actually knew what to do. The next morning we made sandwiches and lemonade, left Spot in charge, and packed a blanket, lunch, and ourselves into her little Ford for the two hour drive into the Sierra Mountains. We traveled past Gold Run, Dutch Flat, Alta, Emigrant Gap and down the long grade into Bear Valley. Once there, she found a grassy place and laid out our lunch, while I crawled back under the flume and dug five fingered ferns from the deep, black soil.
There were grey squirrels and blue jays in the black oaks and wildflowers in the shade of the flume. “So peaceful,” she murmured. “We spent our first two married years in this place. Ed was hauling lumber to build the first flumes and I was helping the camp cook feed a hungry bunch of carpenters. Ed would be here overnight and maybe a night more if the horses needed rest. Then he would be gone for several days to the mill at Rattlesnake Creek to fetch another load of lumber”
After lunch, she rested in the shade while I caught little silvery trout from the meadow stream. It was a rare day away from the farm for her and a trip back in time.
Note: In the late 19th century, the area around Dutch Flat and Gold Run was torn up by hydraulic gold mining. They were digging up an ancient riverbed and the damage extended eight miles across in places. That sort of mining was stopped by the federal government but not before it had laid waste to wide swatches of riverbed. Such mining took great quantities of water and little companies throughout that part of the Sierras developed complicated systems for gathering the needed water. These systems and their water rights were eventually acquired by the Pacific Gas and Electric company for use in a series of power plants. The flumes at Bear Valley were part of such a system.
I don’t remember so much about Mickey. We had to part with him when my father took a rigging job in the shipyards at Vallejo, California in 1940. I do know that Mickey found my youngest brother, Jack, when a search party couldn’t. Jack had just wandered off into the woods. Mickey knew where he was and took the search party to him. Mickey was a working dog.
Hazel was a different matter. She was a solid member of our family for almost 15 years. I was in my 30s and married when we got her. She was a border collie-black lab cross and we thought she was the dumbest dog either of us had known. She would lay in the sun and the chickens would come and lay on her back, sometimes two at once. Then we adopted Julie. Hazel brightened up. She would come into the house whenever she got the chance to be with Julie. Then Jason came into our family and Hazel redoubled her efforts. Julie told me recently that Hazel would protectively force herself between Julie and visitors even if they were regulars at our house.
When the children were a little older, we went to the Lincoln County farm of my wife’s family to help with the cattle. Hazel found farm life a pleasant challenge. She found 4-year-old Jason when he was lost just like Mickey had done with brother Jack long years past. Jason claims that he was not lost. We had simply lost track of where he was.
Our house on the farm was just across the fence from Aunt Kate’s. She couldn’t see the house but viewed the barn and a stretch of sagebrush pasture from her kitchen window. We had consented to dog sit while friends took a vacation. They were small city dogs and when the coyotes called a welcome, they wandered into the sagebrush. They had just about joined their new friends when Hazel arrived on the scene (coyotes love to eat farm cats and dogs when they can get them). Aunt Kate said she saw Hazel throw one coyote over a sagebrush and saw the other one in full retreat. Hazel put the two little dogs in front of her and marched them back to the house.
Hazel was a prized member of our family and a working pet.
Ray Bilderback, creator of the Reuben Braddock novels, was born and raised in the Sierra foothills of California. He served in the U.S. Navy Seabees during the Korean War and taught for many years in the west. He makes his home in the mountains of eastern Washington with his archeologist wife, Madilane Perry. “In the 1930s and 1940s, where I lived, we still used horses and hand tools, canned and preserved what we grew or raised, lit our kerosene lanterns, stoked our woodstoves. In my writing, I draw from those times like water from a sweet well.”
