Crossing the Rockies: Day Three (9/25/09)

Duke can’t go today.

He’s moving better than he was last night.  He walked around camp and selected a couple spots requiring anointment with his urine, and has used his paw to tap me and remind me to pet him, but he limps noticeably with every step.  I think the problem might be more than just the one cut – it’s probably the cracking on all his pads.    If he’s not better by tomorrow morning, we’ll have to hitchhike back to the truck.  We can lay around this camp and rest today.  But we don’t have the supplies, and I don’t have the patience, to sit around here forever.

I should have foreseen this problem.  We’ve hiked over twenty miles on this bone-dry gravel road.  That would be hard on any animal’s feet.  Duke has been wading and swimming in the streams we passed.  Probably getting his feet wet and tender, then walking on dry gravel, has caused the cracking.  I ought to have been prepared for this.  The dog booties I brought won’t fit Duke, and I don’t know how much my treatment of antibiotic salve and chap-stick has been helping.

So I’ve flagged down a couple passing trucks with dogs in them to ask for advice.  The first truck had an Aussie in the bed.  I told the driver about my problem, and he dug around in his truck until he found an old tin first aid kit.  It contained a tube of “First Aid Ointment,” which was supposed to cure, among other things, “chapped hands.”  He gave me the tube, and I thanked him.  I applied it to Duke’s feet.  But when the driver looked at Duke’s feet, he was dismissive.  “I’ve had cracks in my dog’s feet as deep as the cracks between their toes,” he said.  “That’s just a lazy old lab that doesn’t want to do anything.”

The second guy had a cab full of pointing dogs – a Llewellyn setter, a rangy English setter, an English pointer, and a gray-faced Irish setter.  Cash Mizner was his name, and he was a bird hunter.  He talked about raising quail to train his dogs.  “I got attached to the little bastards,” Cash said of the quail.  “Came walking up to you at feeding time like a bunch of Mormon bankers.  Little fuckin’ pot-bellies.  I couldn’t kill ‘em.”  He was also an elk hunter.  “But I don’t usually hunt during the rut.  During the rut, the elk are stupid.  Anyone can kill one.  Fat people can kill them in the rut.  And that pisses me off.”  He was a conservationist: “I’m pretty conservative, but if you think starting a billion cars up every morning isn’t going to do something, that’s crazy.”  Most of all, Cash Mizner was a dog man.  He loved dogs.  He rubbed the white stubble on his jaw and jerked his thumb toward the cab of his truck.  “I got a couple in there that I have to load ‘em up in the truck, they’re so old, but I can’t bear not to hunt them,” he said.  Duke liked Cash immediately, and Cash liked Duke.  Cash looked at Duke’s feet, and said he had what I needed.

He spent ten minutes digging through his truck looking for the right medicine.  In the end he found what he was looking for – pad toughener.  He gave some to me, and I started to smear some on Duke’s paws.  “No, don’t do that,” he said.  “That shit stinks.  I’ve got some rubber gloves in here somewhere.”  With a more digging, Cash found some latex gloves and applied the ointment to Duke’s feet.  I told Duke that he was getting treatment from a real dog man.  Cash liked that.

So now I have only to wait until morning.  I’ll apply more pad toughener, and will try again to make Duke’s booties stay on by trimming them with my knife and wrapping them with electrical tape.  If that works, Duke and I will head toward McDougal Pass.  If it doesn’t, our hike will be over.

Duke has been lying in the shade all day.  He barely moves and does not follow me around camp.  Frankly, it doesn’t look good.

Camp just west of McDougal Gap where Duke and I rested to see if his pads would heal.