Читать книгу The Phantom in the Mirror - John R. Erickson - Страница 6

Chapter One: Who’s Freddie?

It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. It was early December as I recall, sometime between Thanks­­giving and Christmas. It appeared to be a normal, ordinary day. At 7:05 I began my Barking Up the Sun procedure, and by 7:27 I had that job pretty well under . . .

Have we discussed the vicious rumors that have been circulating around the ranch lately? Maybe not. It seems that J. T. Cluck, the head rooster, has been whispering it around that HE is the one who causes the sun to rise.

The way he tells it, the sun wouldn’t come up if it weren’t for all the noise he makes in the morning—crowing, I suppose you’d call it—but there’s absolutely no truth to his story.

Any sun that paid attention to a noisy rooster would be pretty silly, wouldn’t it? No, it takes more than a few squawks from a rooster to get the sun over the horizon. It takes the kind of deep and serious barking that comes from a Head of Ranch Security.

Anyway, it appeared that we had a normal day started . . . well, not really, come to think of it, because that was the morning I checked out a stray dog report.

Yes, that turned out to be a pretty exciting little episode but I don’t think we have time for it here. I mean, we’ve got the whole Skunk Mystery before us, and then there’s the part about the Phantom in the Mirror.

You ever run into the Phantom Dog? One of the scariest characters I ever encountered in my whole career.

Anyways, I was out there on Life’s front lines, trying to bark up the sun, when all at once I noticed an echo. My barks were coming back to me, and that was odd. It had never happened before.

After a few minutes of this, it occurred to me that what I was hearing might not be an echo at all, but rather the sound of another dog barking.

Well, you know me. If there’s a stray dog on my ranch, I want to know: A) who he is; B) exactly what he thinks he’s doing on my outfit; C) who gave him permission to be there; and D) how soon he can leave.

Hence, once I had the sun pretty well barked up, I went swaggering out into the semidarkness to lay down the law to this trespasser.

“Hey, you! Who are you, and what do you think you’re doing on my ranch? And by the way, I’m Head of Ranch Security, just in case you didn’t know.”

I stopped and listened. That’s when I heard his reply: “Uh! Name Freddie and want make talk with ranch dog.”

Hmmm. There was something familiar about the voice, yet when I ran “Freddie” through my data banks, I came up with nothing. According to my records, we had never had a “Freddie” on the ranch at any time.

I decided to probe the matter a little deeper. “Freddie, you’re not in our files, which means you’re not authorized to be on this outfit. If you’re lost, maybe I can give you directions off the ranch, but for your own safety, I must warn you not to proceed any closer to the house.”

“How come not closer to house?”

“Because, Freddie, this ranch is protected by one of the most sophisticated defense systems in the entire world. Get too close and the system kicks into Defend-the-House Mode, and once that happens, pal, I can’t be responsible for your safety.”

“Uh! Sound pretty stupid to me.”

“Oh yeah? Hey, Freddie, take my advice and leave while you can still walk. The last mutt who trespassed on my place had to be scraped off two acres of sagebrush and carried away in a sardine can. I mean, that was all that was left of him. We’re talking about serious consequences.”

“Uh! Take ‘cereal consequences’ and stuff in left ear! Freddie not scared even a little bit.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Who was this guy, anyway? Whoever he was, he couldn’t be very smart, and it appeared that I would have to contribute a little bit to his education, so to speak.

I mean, I don’t go around looking for fights, but when stray dogs start mouthing off to me on MY ranch . . . hey, that’s all it takes to start a riot.

“Listen, pal, it’s clear to me you don’t realize to who or whom you’re speaking, so I’m going to give you one last chance. Get off the ranch and we’ll drop all charges, write it off as a mistake, and forget that it ever happened. That’s as good a deal as you’re going to get out of me.”

“Ha! Ranch dog full of baloney!”

HUH?

The hair on my back shot up. My ears shot up. My lips shot up, revealing deadly white fangs. A growl began rumbling in my throat.

“Hey Freddie, did you just say what I thought you said?”

“Freddie say ranch dog full of baloney! And salami and prunes and brussels sprouts, ho ho!”

That did it. I might have overlooked the baloney but not the prunes and brussels sprouts. I lumbered out to teach this Freddie a lesson he wouldn’t forget.

“Hey Freddie, I’m feeling generous this morning. Do you want to learn your lessons through normal pasture fighting or would you rather get an exhibition of dog-karate? I’m a black belt in both, by the way.”

“Ha! Freddie feed ranch dog karate for breakfast!”

“Keep talking, guy. You’re digging your own tombstone, and the more you talk, the deeper it gets.”

You know what the mutt did then? He belched, real loud.

“Yeah? Well, some dogs learn easy, some dogs learn hard, and some dogs don’t live long enough to learn much of anything.”

“Yuck yuck! Momma of ranch dog big, fat, and ugly. Have wart on nose, wear gunnysack underpants.”

I rolled my eyes on that one. This guy was really desperate for something to say. He must have been scared stiff.

Piecing together the bits of information at my disposal, I pulled up a profile of the little fraud. He had to be one of the pipsqueak breeds—poodle, terrier, Chihuahua. It’s common knowledge that your pipsqueak breeds tend to be short of stature and long on mouth.

It’s called The Little Dog Complex, if you want to get into the technical side. We’ve worked up per­sonality profiles of all the different breeds, see, and we run into Little Dog Complex quite often.

In a classic case of LDC, you have a shriveled up, quivering, lickspittle runt of a dog who tries to do with his mouth what he can’t do with the rest of his body. You can spot ’em right away and you don’t even have to see ’em.

They all talk trash, and the trashier the talk, the smaller the dog.

This Freddie fit the LDC profile. I mean, he was a classic case right down the line. I was positive that, when I crossed the last little hill between us and looked down the other side, I would see . . .

HUH?

You know, one of the things that makes coyotes particularly dangerous characters—I mean, aside from the fact that they are cannibals and have been known to eat ranch dogs—one of the things that makes coyotes particularly dangerous enemies is that they can BARK just like a normal dog.

You wouldn’t expect a cannibal to bark, would you? I mean, they’re best known for their howling, right? That’s what coyotes are supposed to do, howl.

But they’re also famous for cheating, and one of their favorite cheating tricks is to bark like a dog. They do this to lure an unsuspecting ranch dog away from the house, don’t you see, and it happens all the time, thousands of times each day in all parts of the country, and even the best and smartest of ranch dogs fall for it once in a while.

So it was no disgrace, no big deal that I . . . that our equipment came up with faulty profiles and so forth and . . . hey, they were CHEATING, don’t forget that.

Okay. You’ll never guess who I found waiting on the other side of that little hill. It wasn’t a loudmouthed little poodle, as you might have suspected, but Rip and Snort, the cannibal brothers.

They had lured me into an ambush, see, by cheating and lying and using cheap tricks, and by the time I figgered it out, they had already . . .

We needn’t go into every detail. I, uh, gave them the whipping they deserved and hurried back to headquarters to, uh, finish up my morning chores.

I still had a lot of work to do.

There just wasn’t time in my busy schedule for fighting and brawling and such childish things.

Hey, I’m a very busy dog and . . . never mind.

Let’s just say that too many cannibals in the morning can ruin your day.