Meet GCR Smoke, our little gift from above. We never kept a puppy from our beloved Creekside Skye who passed away 4 years ago. She was bred to both Badger and MacDuff many times and their pups were always wonderful dogs. Every litter I’d plan to keep a female but never realized she would play a joke by having 5 males in her final litter. Smoke is sired by her son from Badger and this little guy will be our second stud muffin. Best yet, his mom is a Rhett x Jazzman daughter. That Nicole and I were connected is thanks once again to Joan Mason. She didn’t even know the connection when she told me about a litter with blue merle males who carried the red gene. Dream pup, thank you ABBA Father for bringing us together.

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Smoke is a blue (black) merle with a red gene. Red is recessive so if you have both a red and black the pup will be black. It takes two (homozygous) red gene for a pup to be red. Merle is an incomplete color gene (dilute) and so that pattern can be on top of any color. You have to have a merle parent to get a merle pup. It is dominant. Tricolor also is a pattern and can be on any color. It is dominant. Tricolor is just a lighter color of the red or black that shows up as a face mask or tan eyebrows, cheek patches, under tail and inside ears, and sometimes between the white and color on the legs. Basically there are only two colors. Black and Red (or Brown). All the other variations are patterns or incomplete (dilute) color.