Читать книгу The Disappearance of Drover - John R. Erickson - Страница 6

Chapter One: This Is the First Chapter

It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Slim was really steamed when he got to town and figured out that he had two dogs in the back of his pickup, but it wasn’t our fault. We had perfectly good reasons for being there, but it might take a while to explain it.

Do we have time to go through all the details that led up to our spending the night in the back of his pickup? Before you answer, let me warn you that it might get pretty scary. And sad. I mean, when Drover vanished without a trace . . .

What do you think? Should we go on with this story or put it in the vault where we keep stories that are too scary or too sad for human consumption? You probably didn’t know that we have such a vault, and there’s a reason why you don’t. Everything that goes into the vault has either been classified Top Secret, Top Sad, or Top Scary, and I’m one of the few dogs on earth that even know it exists.

I’m in on the secret because . . . well, I’m Head of Ranch Security.

It’s a huge vault, made of solid steel, and it occupies a whole wall on the twelfth floor of the Security Division’s Vast Office Complex. There’s only one way in and one way out, and guess whose gunnysack bed is parked right in front of the vault.

Mine. Nobody goes in or comes out without dealing with me. That’s how serious we are about the stuff that’s locked inside the vault, and that’s why I can’t tell you about it. As far as you’re concerned, it doesn’t exist.

Sorry I brought it up. Or, to come at it from another angle, I didn’t bring it up. Maybe you thought I did, but I was misquoted. It happens all the time. There is no vault in our Vast Office Complex, and if there were, I couldn’t tell you about it. If I did . . . well, we might all be fried for treason.

Tried for freezing.

Tried for treason, there we go. We might all get fried for freezing, and we don’t need any of that.

Hmmm. We seem to have gotten off the subject, and I’m not sure where we started. Somehow you coaxed me into talking about the secret vault and . . . wait, here we go.

The story. It’s going to get pretty scary and sad, that’s the point, so you have to decide whether we should mush on with it or find something else to do. What do you think? Keep going? Are you sure about that?

Well, I guess you’re old enough to be making decisions, but if things get out of hand, don’t blame me.

Okay, let’s set the stage. It was April, as I recall. We’d made it through the worst of the winter and had begun to notice the first signs of spring: buds on the elm trees, flights of cranes honking overhead as they made their way back to the north country, and a number of stopover birds that visit my ranch every fall and spring. They’re not invited, but they stop anyway. They occupy my trees, mooch birdseed out of Sally May’s feeder, and twitter all day long.

As you might know, I’m not fond of birds, but there’s not much I can do about them. If a dog spent all his time barking at birds, he’d have no energy left for the more important jobs, such as barking at the mailman and humbling the cats. Hencely, for a couple of weeks every fall and spring, I have to put up with all their tweeting and twittering.

Drover and I had spent the day at Ranch Headquarters, supervising a project that involved Slim and Loper. They had discovered a spring of water down at the corrals. I mean, all of a sudden and overnight, it had just popped out of the ground and had formed a nice little pool.

In a dry country like ours, you’d think that might be cause for celebration, but it wasn’t. Just the opposite, and here’s why. Around here, natural springs don’t just pop out of the ground, and the cowboys suspected that our bubbling spring had something to do with a leaky water pipe that was buried about three feet underground.

Fellers, you talk about something that will poison the atmosphere on a ranch! An underground water leak will do it, because it involves the use of shovels and manual labor. As you might know, cowboys are allergic to shovels. Bring one out in front of a cowpuncher, and he’ll break out in hives.

And mad? They were uncommonly mad. See, the ground in our corrals wasn’t what you would call easy digging. Over the years, it had been packed by the hooves of thousands of cattle and horses. If you were going to choose a spot on the ranch where you never wanted to dig a hole, it would be in the middle of the wire lot—exactly where the “spring” had popped out of the ground.

And that’s the job I was supervising. You never heard such whining and complaining. It started the moment the first shovel touched the ground and went on most of the afternoon. You want to listen in on some of their conversation? I don’t suppose it would hurt anything. Stand by to roll tape.

Transcript of Water Line Episode #205

Top Secret

Slim: You know, a guy spends the first half of his life investing in leather and horseflesh and dreaming of the day he can take a real cowboy job, and he spends the second half of his life digging holes in the ground.

Loper: I guess you should have gone to college.

Slim: No, I should have taken a job on a cow outfit where a man can use his horse and rope instead of a frazzling shovel.

Loper: Well, I’d say you’re lucky to have a job of any kind. As slow as you dig, we might still be here next Christmas.

Slim: As hard as this ground is, I might not live that long.

Loper: Good. I won’t have to send you a Christmas card. It’ll save me the cost of a stamp.

Slim: Who laid this stinking waterline anyway?

Loper: My granddaddy.

Slim: Well, I’m going to plant sandburs on his grave for using cheap pipe and covering it up with pavement.

Loper: It was during the Depression, when nobody had two nickels to rub together. They used whatever kind of pipe they could scrounge up. After fifty years, it starts to leak.

Slim: Well, me and your granddaddy have one thing in common: depression. I ain’t been so depressed since we had to bail out the septic tank.

Loper: Quit feeling sorry for yourself and dig.

Slim: I am digging, and if I die from heat stroke and overwork, you can push me in this hole and cover me up.

Loper: That would sure cut down on the noise.

Slim: And on my tombstone, you can say, “He always wanted to die ahorseback, but he perished from blisters with a shovel in his hands.”

Loper: Slim, just dig the hole.

End of Secret Transcription

Please Destroy at Once

And so forth. They went on like that for hours. In between all the snarling and snapping, they even managed to dig enough of a hole to uncover the rusted waterline that had caused the problem. You probably think they replaced the line with a section of brand-new galvanized pipe. Ha. They fixed it The Cowboy Way, with tar, a strip of inner tube, and a couple of hose clamps.

If they’d asked my opinion, I would have told ’em to fix it right, but they never want to hear any advice from their dogs. Mark my words, next year at this time, they’ll find a little spring of water bubbling up in the corrals and we’ll have to go through this all over again.

Oh well. I try to run this ranch in a professional manner, but you can only do so much with a couple of knuckleheaded cowboys.

At quitting time, Slim fed the horses and headed for his pickup. Drover and I didn’t have any urgent business at Ranch Headquarters, so we decided to hitch a ride and spend the night down at his place.

See, he’s a bachelor cowboy and has a very intelligent attitude about dogs. He lets us sleep inside the house. Sometimes he sings to us and shares his supper. Sometimes we have mouse hunts before bedtime, and that’s always a lot of fun. The point is that hanging out with Slim is more exciting than occupying a smelly gunnysack bed beneath the gas tanks.

We reached his shack on Wolf Creek around sundown and followed him up to the porch. When he reached for the door handle, Drover and I were poised to dart inside. It’s a little game we play, don’t you see. The challenge is to see which of us can squirt through the half-opened door and win the I-Got-Here-First Award.

I guess it’s kind of silly, but what else does a dog have to do when he lives twenty-five miles out in the country?

So there we were on the porch, poised and quivering with excitement, waiting for Slim to open the door just wide enough so that we could slither inside. But he didn’t open the door.

Instead, he looked down at us and gave us a scowl. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Well . . . inside the house, of course.

“Uh-uh. It’s a nice warm spring evening, and y’all can stay on the porch.”

What! Stay on the . . . Drover and I exchanged looks of shock and disappointment.

Slim bent down and looked me in the eye. “You spent half the day wallering around in that mud hole, pooch. You stink and you ain’t going to mess up my nice clean house.”

And with that, he went inside, leaving his loyal dogs to sort through the rubble of a shattered dream.

Okay, maybe I’d spent a few minutes in the mud hole . . . a few hours . . . all right, I’d spent most of the afternoon lounging in the water, but when people do that, they call it a bath. How’s a dog supposed to cleanse his body and wash his hair? When we bathe in the overflow of the septic tank, they complain about that too, so what’s a dog supposed to do?

We try so hard to please these people, but sometimes it seems . . . oh well. There’s no future in brooding over injustice in the world. It appeared that we would have to spend the night on the porch.

But just as Slim entered the house and closed the screen door behind him, I heard a mysterious ringing sound.