Bishop hasn’t accompanied me on many adventures lately. Despite six months of living with my dad, whom he LOVES!!!, and frequent interactions with my brother, he has become increasingly hostile toward strange men. I no longer take him out in public without his basket muzzle, which he hates and can nudge off his snout. He is no more manageable on the leashes than he’s ever been, either, so walking him is a challenge I rarely undertake, particularly because he has a decent-sized fenced yard for exercise.

Last week, however, my sister-in-law called with a proposal for Bishop and me. She, my brother, their kids, and their dog were returning from a camping trip in New Mexico and planned to spend the night at my uncle’s cabin in the San Juans. She wondered if Bishop and I would like to join them. Up there, Bishop would have an entire mountainside on which to run around off-leash with his BFF, their dog Chief, a creature so awesome he has his own Facebook fan club.

Yes, they are both big black dogs with white chests and toes. Bishop’s taller and Chief is stockier. Bishop can run faster, but Chief has more endurance. Neither of them is an extreme alpha; Chief will give Bishop the smackdown when it’s needed, and Bishop doesn’t care who’s in charge as long as he has someone to play with. Chief has a far more mellow personality, perfectly suited to life with a rambunctious toddler. Bishop, on the other hand, requires careful monitoring around the kids. (Once when I was seated on the couch, my nephew decided to “play djums” on my head, which was fine with me but not so much with my protective dog, who kept a wary eye on Zach the whole time.)

Last time I was at the cabin, well before the advent of Bishop on Planet Earth, I got locked in the outhouse for 20 minutes.

It was dark outside, and I had just finished reading Pet Sematary for the second time: not the book you want in your head when you’re trapped in the woods at night. Fortunately, this trip I had no such problems.

The other quirky thing about my uncle’s cabin is that the access road goes through a nudist campground. And apparently for awhile, nude or partially clothed people were wandering around the mountain, but this time the only bottom-less people I saw were actually in the campground.

Near the cabin and the campground is the caved-in Orient Mine, which once served as a source of lead (and also was a partial inspiration for my as-yet-unpublished short story “From Deep Within the Mines”).

A colony of approximately 250,000 Mexican or Brazilian (depending on the source) free-tailed bats lives in the old mine tunnels. When I was little, we used to take the path up to the mine and watch them leave at dusk. Back then, the mine was totally open–no fence, no guardrail, just a big gaping maw in the side of the mountain. In retrospect, it’s amazing no one was killed or seriously injured. Now, there’s a BLM trail up to the cave-in area, which is surrounded by a high wrought-iron fence and marked with signs warning trespassers to stay out. And there are several benches where visitors can sit and watch the bats on their nightly foray into the valley.

Even my awesome camera couldn’t capture the bats in flight as anything more than black smears against the darkening sky.

On our way up, we met a variety of people coming down the trail, all fully clad, fortunately for them (see aforementioned comments about Bishop’s hostility toward strange men and his propensity for knocking that darn muzzle askew). Most of them told us we’d missed the main event but might catch a few bat stragglers. My brother, who spent a significant chunk of his teenage years commuting to the cabin, assured us we’d still see plenty. Most people, he says, go so early that by the time they see a couple of bats, they’re tired of waiting and leave right away. Indeed, when we got to the mine, we were the only ones there, but wave after wave of bats continued to surge into the sky. I think we watched for at least a half hour, until it was so dark we couldn’t see anything. Getting back down the trail required the use of a flashlight.

In the morning, Bishop awoke with the sun and wanted to go outside. But he didn’t want to stay outside unless I was with him. Because I had an equally strong desire to remain in bed, we trekked in and out something like four times. Finally, as I lay in the loft trying to fall back asleep, I heard my nephew and brother get up and go into the kitchen. Almost immediately, Zach said, “Shall we find Mowique?”

(He’s a big fan of the “shall we…” construction lately. Once, he bumped his head while rough-housing on the couch. He turned to me, lowered his head, and said, “Shall we kiss it?” Another time, his friends were over and my sister-in-law put Pinocchio on for them to watch. One of the friends started pushing buttons on the TV and turned the movie off. Zach just sat on the couch, repeating, “Shall we turn the TV back on?” like a perplexed kindergarten teacher.)

I love my nephew. Normally I’m thrilled to death that he wants to spend time with me. But first thing in the morning? Sigggghhhhh….

My brother, never sympathetic to my desire for more sleep, said, “Auntie Monique’s up in the loft.” I burrowed into the pillow, trying to quickly fall back asleep. I’m not very rational when semi-awake, or I would have realized what an ineffective strategy that was. Zach is the master of waking me up by positioning his face about six inches from mine and staring intently at me. Which is, of course, exactly what he did. (“Shall we get up now, Mowique?”) So I surrendered to the inevitable, got dressed, and went outside to blow bubbles with him.

The dogs ran around, enjoying the sunshine and the many scents.

Chief trapped a chipmunk in the wood pile and went crazy trying to excavate it. Bishop couldn’t have cared less.

I took pictures of a butterfly

and columbine, the Colorado state flower,

and the partial remains of an old cabin in the woods

and a tractor wheel that Zach described as “cute wheel.”

Because the last part of the road to the cabin is 4-wheel-drive only, we’d left my car parked by the foundations of the mining town near the Orient.

When we left the cabin, we decided to let the dogs run with the pickup until we got to my car. Chief loved this, trotting out in front and once taking off faster than I’ve ever seen him run, plowing into the scrub oak on the scent of some game. Bishop, on the other hand, thought we were trying to leave him behind. He zig-zagged behind us, yelping and wailing piteously, and when the road was wide enough, he’d run up to the door on my side and whine at me. It was so heartbreaking that I finally asked my brother to stop so we could tie the dogs in the bed of the pickup. Yes, Bishop is a neurotic and codependent beastie. But other than his abandonment issues, he had a pretty darn good time at the cabin.

And so did I.