Читать книгу Hank the Cowdog and Monkey Business - John R. Erickson - Страница 7

Chapter Two: The Mysterious Red Box Appears

I turned my eyes back to Drover. “Well, are you happy now?”

“Oh, about the usual, I guess.”

“You’ve ruined the exercise and made a shambles of our entire morning’s work. The rabbit has entered the pipes of the cattle guard and now there’s no chance that we’ll get to chase him around.”

“Well, I guess we can go back down to the gas tanks and catch up on our . . .”

“Not so fast. Just because he gave us the slip doesn’t mean we’re going to quit and go home in disgrace. We’ll just have to bark him out. Battle stations, Drover, and commence barking!”

We rushed to the north end of the cattle guard. I began the procedure by peering into one of the pipes and sniffing it out.

“This is going to be easier than I thought. He’s in this middle pipe. We’ve got him trapped, and now all we have to do is surround him.”

“How do we do that?”

I removed my nose from the pipe and glared at him. “How do you think we do it, silly? A pipe has two openings, right? I have this opening covered and that leaves only one, right? Can you follow the logic to its conclusion or do I have to lead you to it?”

“Well, let’s see. If you’ve got this end . . . maybe if I . . . I think I’ve got it. If I go down to the other end, we’ll have him surrounded.”

“Very good, Drover, only you forgot the most important part of the whole procedure: Drop your front end to the ground, elevate your little hiney, wag your tail and bark!”

“I don’t have much of a tail to wag.”

“That’s correct. You may need to wag your hiney instead of your tail, since you have a stub tail.”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

“Exactly. Now let’s go for it!”

Drover scampered across the road, dropped down into the correct barking stance, stuck his nose into the pipe, and began barking. I did the same on my end and the excitement began.

Let me pause here to point out that barking into a cattle guard pipe isn’t as easy as you might suppose. The problem is that a five-inch mouth won’t fit inside a four-inch pipe, so we have to narrow our barking arc down to something in the range of two-and-a-half to three inches.

And still come out with a ferocious sound.

Pretty tough, huh? You bet it was, but we did it.

Five minutes into the procedure it occurred to me that something had gone wrong. Even though we had done some really spectacular barking, the rabbit was still inside the pipe.

I raised up and went through my check list and discovered . . . “Drover, you’re barking in the wrong pipe! Move one pipe to the left.”

“Oh, okay.”

He did and we began the whole procedure over again from Step One. It took me another fifteen minutes to realize that we still had a flaw in the ointment.

“Drover, I said to move over one pipe to the left.”

“I did.”

“No, you moved over one pipe to the right. Right is wrong.”

“I’ll be derned. What’s left in this old world if right is wrong?”

“Never mind the questions. Just move one pipe to the left and we’ll get on with it.”

He shrugged and moved one pipe . . .

“Drover, I told you to move to the left.”

“I did.”

“No, you moved to the right.”

“No, I went left. See, here’s my left paw.”

He held it up. It appeared to be a left paw, all right, but how could that be? Something strange was going on here, and I went into deep concentration to find a solution.

“All right, Drover, I think I’ve found the missing piece of the puzzle. We’re standing on opposite sides, you see. All we have to do is swap ends and your left will become right.”

We swapped ends and both moved one pipe to the left and . . . hmmm, that was odd. This time we both ended up on the wrong . . .

“Drover, I’m beginning to suspect that there’s a mysterious magnetism in this cattle guard. It distorts the points of the compass and confuses our sense of direction.”

“Yeah, but we don’t have a compass.”

“But if we had one, it would be distorted. The point is, with this heavy magnetic field at work, we’ll have to change our tactics. This time, we’ll put our noses into the middle pipe.”

“Middle pipe. Okay, let’s see here. The middle pipe would be the one in the middle?”

“That’s correct. And once we direct both our barkings into the same pipe, you see, the con­centration of the sound will drive the rabbit out. Once he’s outside, we’ll catch him. Let’s get after it!”

We put our noses into the pipe, the same pipe this time, and began the barking procedure all over again. I expected the rabbit to come out and surrender after a few minutes of this. But he didn’t.

I withdrew my nose and sat down. “Drover, this isn’t working.”

“Yeah, I’m all discouraged now and ready to go back to bed.”

“But the important thing is that we have him trapped. He’ll have to come out of there sooner or later. He probably thinks that we’ll give up and leave, but he doesn’t realize with who or whom he’s dealing. We’ll just wait him out.”

So we waited.

I hate to wait. It bores me to death. Your active minds find it hard to adjust to the slow rhythms of a nincompoop rabbit who has nothing better to do with his life than to sit inside a pipe and wiggle his nose.

The minutes crawled by. At last I could stand it no longer. I pushed myself up. “All right, we’ve completed Phase Two. Now we move into Phase Three. We’ll change ends again and see if that helps.”

We swapped ends, went through the barking procedure once again, and . . . at that point I began to face the possibility that we would have to rip into the steel pipe and destroy the entire cattle guard. I hated to take such drastic action but this rabbit was testing my patience.

So I took three steps backward and peered into the pipes one more time to confirm my visual . . .

A truck was coming from the east. No, two trucks were coming from the east.

Three trucks.

Four.

Five.

A whole bunch of trucks. This was very strange. Seldom, if ever, had I seen so many trucks coming down our road at once. Someone on the creek must have been delivering a bunch of cattle that day, which meant that the approaching trucks were of the cattle truck variety.

“Drover, stand back and prepare to bark at these cattle trucks. As far as I know, they haven’t been cleared to cross this ranch.”

Each of us took a step or two backward, crouched down, and prepared to give them the barking they so richly deserved. Here they came, a long line of trucks . . . that was odd. Painted red, white, blue, and yellow? With pictures of clowns and elephants and monkeys and people swinging on trapezes painted on the sides?

Hmmm.

“Drover, I’ll want a complete description of every one of these trucks. I don’t know what the neighbors are up to, but it’s just possible that they’ve started raising elephants and clowns instead of cattle.”

“I’ll be derned.”

The first truck was roaring down on us. “Ready for Heavy Duty Barking? Just a few more feet . . . okay, Drover, let ’em have it!”

When the front wheels of the first truck crossed the pipes of the cattle guard, we leaped out of the shadows, so to speak, and barked it from both sides. Pretty slick maneuver, caught ’em completely by surprise, and as you might expect, they didn’t even dare to slow down.

The dust fogged around us but that didn’t stop us from challenging the second truck, or the third. It was from the window of the third truck that the paper cup filled with ice came flying, hit me dead-center on the back, kind of shocked me there for a second.

I yelped but soon regained my composture, and by the time the back wheels of the truck crossed the cattle guard, I had jumped back into the struggle and torn most of the tread off the outside tire.

I mean, when they make me mad, they have to live with the consequences. I don’t appreciate people throwing cups of ice at me when I’m on duty. They were just lucky I didn’t get a good bite on that tire or I might have disabled the entire truck.

The dust boiled up, the trucks roared past and rumbled over our cattle guard, and we gave them a barking they would never forget. I had my doubts that they would ever risk coming down MY road again.

It’s possible that the weight of the first five or six trucks mashed the cattle guard down, so that it was lower than the road. I say that because when the last truck came by, it bounced hard going over the cattle guard—so hard that a big red wooden box came loose from the top of the load and went flying off into the horse pasture.

I opened my mouth to alert Drover to this turn of events, but the swirling dust was so thick that it filled my eyes and mouth with . . . well, dust, of course. I coughed and spat and waited for it to clear.

“All right, Drover, they’re gone. Report in.”

He sneezed. “It’s dusty.”

“That checks out. We had the same conditions over here.”

“Yeah, ’cause it was the same bunch of trucks.”

“Exactly. Did we scare the liver out of those guys or what?”

“I didn’t see any livers, but I think they were scared.”

“You bet they were scared! They’ll think twice before they come down our road again. Oh, and did you notice that something fell off that last truck?”

He moved out into the middle of the road, sat down, and began scratching his ear. “Well, I couldn’t see because of the . . .”

“A big red box fell off that last truck and came to rest in our horse pasture. Stand by with search parties! We’re fixing to take possession of that box.”

And with that, we leaped over the cattle guard—well, most of it. I landed three pipes short of the opposite side and lost a couple of legs in the pipes, but that proved to be only a temporary setback.

Within seconds, we had located the Mysteri­ous Red Box and had surrounded it.