“Now that you’ve chickened out again, do we have enough time to go potato picking before we leave Idaho?” I asked as I mounted the Wagon, still panting from running away from the invisible moose.
“I’m no farmer, but I don’t think you could grow much of anything in this terrain.” Mom looked from the swamps in the valley to the mountains behind us. “The potato farms must be by Boise, down in the butt of Idaho.”
“Goody goody tater tots! Boise is the perfect place for a good boise like me!”
Mom’s eyes rolled off the Witch toward the ceiling. “Boise is like 100 miles away in the wrong direction, Spud. We’re headed east to Montana. There isn’t much of the panhandle left, so why don’t we save potato country for the way home?”
“What’s in Montana?” I asked suspiciously. It couldn’t possibly be better than white dirt, moose wrestling, and regular dirt filled with hidden potatoes.
Mom shrugged. “Beats me. I’ve never been. People call it Big Sky Country.”
“The sky is a different size in different places?” I knew the sky could be high or low—if the sky in Oregon were any lower, I could’ve reached out and chewed a hole in the clouds—but it never occurred to me that the sky could be big or small. “Doesn’t that just mean there’s less on the ground to sniff?” I asked suspiciously.
“I don’t know. Everyone talks about Montana like it’s great, but no one ever says why.”
“So... are we just gonna let adventure find us?”
“Good god no!” Mom twisted the key and the Wagon took a deep breath as the windows came down. “You remember what happened at Lake Berryessa and that logging road in Oregon when we didn’t have a plan.”
“You got scared?” I asked.
“Nothing!” Mom chopped her hand through the air like she was swatting a moose. “That’s what happened!”
“Oh. I thought nothing happened when you wanted to climb over that river under Mt Hood. And when you ran away from an imaginary moose just now.”
Mom plugged in the Witch’s straw and started twiddling away. “We need to find a trail that isn’t too dangerous, so probably not the ones marked hard on AllTrails. And it’s got to be easy to get to—none of this dirt road crap.”
“Good idea,” I said.
“And near water.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Why?”
“So I don't have to carry as many bottles for you. And so you can swim.”
Swim? Who did Mom think I was? “Fat chance!”
The hand with the Witch dropped to Mom’s lap and she cocked an eyebrow at me. “Even if you get hot?”
“That’s why mountains wear white dirt in the summer, Mom. Let’s go somewhere with white dirt.”
“Ug, no! Not again! Veto. The road has to be paved and clear of snow.” Mom went back to scratching intently at the Witch. “But we have to be able to sleep there without the cops or paranoid gun-nut neighbors messing with us.” She held out the Witch. “How about this one? It’s around a lake so it’ll be flat. And there are 3 reviews from the last week that say it’s clear all the way around. There’s even a campground at the entrance so we can stay there.”
“What’s in it for me?” I asked. She hadn’t mentioned any potatoes, or cheese, or white dirt, or giant horned beasts to chase.
“A hike we can actually finish without having to turn back,” Mom said. “And I promise to try not to trick you into thinking there are serial killers behind every tree.”
“Deal!” I took my position in the copilot’s seat.
The Wagon wiggled through an eleventy point turn until its nose was facing Montana.
Compared to the dog-years it took us to ride into Idaho, it took no time at all to get to Montana on a paved road.
When the Witch welcomed us, I ran to the window to check out the sky. It wasn’t so much that the sky looked big as it made the world look small. The hills looked like mountains do from far away, but they came up faster than expected and seemed to shrink instead of grow as we got closer. Maybe it was all that flat space in between that made it feel like I could see all the way to the end of the world. Or maybe everything under the sky just looked smaller because there was so much space between the houses. Even on the freeway, a Montanner could listen to a whole song start to finish on the drive to his nextdoor neighbor’s house. The houses looked tiny, too, swallowed by all that empty land under that enormous sky.
“Well if the campground sucks, at least it’ll be easy to find a place to sleep,” Mom said.
"How do you know?” I asked.
Mom waved at the land that probably looked the same as it had when Suckergewea first discovered it. “No neighbors to complain.”
When the Witch ordered the Wagon off the freeway, we rolled onto a smaller abandoned road without a human in sight. A wooden fence ran beside the street, holding back even more empty land. There was a kind of house inside the fence, but not the kind that dogs live in with their humans. I wondered how all of this got here without humans to build it. Something about it made my tail twitch. I couldn’t put my paw on what it was until I saw...
“Mom! THERE ARE HORSES HERE!” I practically screamed.
To my surprise, even Mom looked impressed. “I never understood why people got obsessed with horses, but hot damn!” She said dam the long way, like how people who can’t whistle say it. “Look at that rump! Dare I say, that horse is sexy?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” My tail wagged so hard that I had to stand up. “If you think that looking at them is fun, you should try barking at them. Here, I’ll show you.” I touched my nose to the window and when we passed the next horse-house, I shouted, “HEY YOU! THE SEXY ONE! I HATE TO SEE YOU LEAVE BUT I LOVE TO WATCH YOU GO!”
The Witch spoiled the fun by warning us that we were almost there. The last horse disappeared out the back window as a lake appeared in the front one.
The Wagon rolled into a cozy car kennel. Where the pavement slid into the water, an unenthusiastic wooden bridge reached a short way over the lake. It wasn’t a very good bridge, though, because it gave up long before it reached the other side.
The Wagon stopped and Mom ordered me outside. I sure hoped Mom would’t make me walk the plank.
I sniffed the grass around the outside of the car kennel. I was just about to lift a leg and mark Montana as my own when a cannonball came out of nowhere and crashed straight into me.
“Sorry, not sorry!” a black lab barked over her shoulder as she bounded across the car kennel in the loose-pawed stride of a puppy.
“Hey! Get back here! You can’t just crash into someone and run away without sniffing his sexy butt.” I barked. “Hey! I’m talking to you! Don’t make me come over there...”
“Sorry, she’s a puppy,” the only human in Montana called from up the road. He must have come from somewhere, but I couldn’t guess where. The sky, maybe? But he was Mom’s problem. I had a puppy who needed to be taught some manners.
We ran in fast-forward circles as Mom and the man each wandered toward the bridge from different corners of the car kennel. Suddenly, the rascally puppy stopped short. I stopped too, just to see what she was looking at.
The man had an arm held high above his head. In his paw was a tennis ball. He threw it with all the grace of a guy who never misses the trash can, even from across the hall. It flew through the big sky and landed in the lake beyond where even the bridge quit.
“I GOT IT!” barked my frienemy, taking off down the plank like a wagon without brakes.
“Make sure you bring it back so I can inspect it,” I called, running after her in supervisory sort of way.
As we got close to the end, the puppy kept running like the bridge went on forever. I wasn’t so dumb.
I slowed down long before I got to the edge, but she just sped up like she was going to take off at the end of the plank and fly into that big ol’ sky like an airplane. For a moment she did, legs, ears, and lips flapping in the wind.
She belly-flopped into the lake with such a splash that I barely had time to step back to keep from getting soaked. That dope splashed around in the water like she thought she was a duck.
“Hey! Bring me that ball!” I barked. “Are you listening to me? I said bring me the ball!”
She caught the ball and started paddling toward me. I stepped forward, ready to catch it when she threw it.
But when she got to the end of the plank, she just kept swimming back to shore with my ball in her mouth.
“Hey! You can’t do that!” My toes curled over the edge as I watched her go. Everything in my heart said to chase her, but I couldn’t do it properly without jumping in after her. I wasn’t going to fall for that one again.
Suddenly, an invisible force came out of nowhere and grabbed my butt, but not in the nice, scratchy way. It scooped me upside-down and the next thing I knew, I was surrounded by lake.
Luckily, this time I found my way back to the big sky more quickly than when Mad George tricked me. When I came up, I was relieved to see Mom standing at the end of the plank.