Sadie on a break during a fly fishing trip to the Metolius River in Oregon. She was always willing to see what was around the next bend in the river.

Travels with Sadie, aka Sadie Mae, aka Sadie Mayhem

Upholding my end of the human-dog interspecies compact

Sadie led the way. She crisscrossed in front of me at nearly full speed with her nose to the ground and black tail wagging. In the skiff of snow she left a tangle of tracks amid sagebrush, bunchgrass and wheatgrass. It was late fall, and we were angling up and across a slope on the north side of Dry River Canyon east of Bend, Oregon. I could see the Dry River Canyon Trail below entering the bottom of the canyon that once flowed with a torrent of water from the Pleistocene-era Lake Millican that, now, is an enormous and shallow depression geographers classify as high desert sagebrush steppe.

But in the narrow canyon you can see proof of the lake’s ghostly existence. The smooth-sculptured rock contains circular holes a foot or more across and more than a foot deep. If you walk through the quiet canyon, you can reach into those holes and pick up the rounded and once waterborne swirling stones that over eons carved the holes with drill-like precision. You can hold the stones in your hand and sense the power of the rushing whitewater that flowed above your head and that cut through ancient lava flows that dammed the lake to create the 300-foot-deep canyon.