Читать книгу The Case of the Car-Barkaholic Bog - John R. Erickson - Страница 6

Chapter One: On the Dilemmas of a Horn

It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. It was in the fall of the year, seems to me. Yes, it was.

October. Warm days, cool nights, the china­berries and elms showing the first colors of fall. And we’d just gotten in two truckloads of steers the week before.

Busy time on the ranch, getting all those steers straightened out and ready to go out on wheat pasture. I’d been up day and night with those steers, and it had just about worn me down.

I mean, overwork comes with the territory when you’re Head of Ranch Security. You expect it. Still, a guy needs a rest once in a while, a break from all the cares and responsibilities of running the ranch.

I needed the rest, yes, but the rest of what followed the rest I didn’t need at all. Little did I know that I would find myself stranded in town, or that I would be drawn into a dangerous situation involving my sister Maggie and a terrible bully named Rambo.

But that’s getting the kettle before the pot. We had received all these fresh cattle and we had a bunch of scrubs in the sick pen. I kind of like that sick-pen work. Some of us are born to take care of the sick and unfirmed, the crippled, and the lame. Not me. I was born to give ’em orders.

What we do, see, is drive the steers into the crowding pen and shut the gate on them. Then we run, oh, seven or eight of them into the alley that leads to the doctoring chute.

You ever see a top-of-the-line, blue-ribbon cowdog handle cattle in an alley? Very impressive. While the cowboys have a steer in the chute, I march up and down the alley, growling at the cattle and letting them know who’s running the show.

Usually that’s all it takes to make the deal run smooth. Course, every now and then we get one that’s new to the sick pen and doesn’t know how to follow orders, and that’s when I earn my pay. I have thirty-seven different ways of biting reluctant steers to make ’em move.

Yes, every once in a while I get kicked on the nose, but success is never free.

We made a pretty good team, me and the cowboys, and it didn’t take us long to run twelve head through the chute. I might point out, though, that while we were working, Little Drover sat over by the water tank. Goofing off.

That little mutt can find more ways to kill time and lollygag around than any dog I ever knew. For a while he watched the action, and now and then he would add his “yip-yip-yip.” Then he chewed on an old horn he’d found in the lot, and after he’d chewed on it for a while, he dug a hole and buried it—shoveled the dirt over it with his nose.

Why did he want to bury a horn? Beats me.

Well, when I’d finished my work and while the cowboys were putting up the medicine, I swaggered over to the water tank, where Mister Half-Stepper was licking on a piece of ice.

“Eating Popsicles on the job, huh?”

He grinned and wagged his stub tail. “Yeah. They’re pretty good. You want one?”

“No, I don’t want one. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, Drover, but somehow the idea of eating Popsicles on the job strikes me wrong. Where I come from, we do the work first and then we goof off.”

“I sure agree with that.”

“Then why don’t you show it with your actions?”

“I do. I always let you do the work first.”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Is there some reason why you don’t jump in and try to make a hand when we’re doctoring cattle?”

“Oh yeah. Last time I tried it, I got kicked.”

“You got kicked. Son, getting kicked is just part of the job. It happens all the time.”

“I know. And it always hurts.”

“Of course it hurts, but our ability to tolerate pain is one of the things that makes cowdogs just a little bit special.”

He rolled his eyes up at the clouds. “Seems to me that the best way to tolerate pain is not to get kicked.”

I moved closer and glared at him. “Are you saying that the best way to tolerate pain is to avoid it? What if I took that attitude? How long do you think this ranch would run without pain?”

“I don’t know.”

“About five minutes. Pain is our fuel, Drover. It’s the force that drives us. It’s pain that lets us know that we’re alive. To run from pain is to run from life.”

“Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.”

I could only shake my head. “All right, you leave me with no choice. Just for that, I’ll have to write you up. For making dumb remarks about pain, you get three Shame-on-You’s on your record.”

“Oh gosh. That hurts.”

“Exactly. Which just goes to prove my point that you can’t escape pain, no matter how hard you try. Now, why did you bury that horn?”

“Which horn?”

“The horn you just buried.”

“Oh, that horn. Well, I don’t know. I guess I wanted to save it. You never know when you might need a horn.”

“So far so good, Drover, but that brings us to the most important question of all. Now that you’ve buried it, can you find it?”

His eyes blanked out. “Well, I think I can.”

I sat down and gave him a wise smile. “Prove it. Find the horn.”

He went to several spots, pawed around in the dirt, and came up with exactly nothing. He came padding back, sat down, scratched his ear, and said, “I guess I’ve lost it.”

“Exactly!” I leaped to my feet and began pacing around him. This was a triumphal moment, don’t you see. “Now let me tie all this together into one Lesson for the Day, Drover. You ran from pain but found it. You found a horn but lost it. That which you tried to save you have no more, but that which you tried to lose you have. Do you see what this means?”

“Not really.”

Suddenly it occurred to me that I didn’t know what it meant either, except that it meant something very important. But even more important was that I overheard Slim and Loper talking. They had just stepped out of the medicine shed.

“We’re out of Pen-Strip and Furison,” said Loper, “and we’ll need both in the morning. While you’re at the feed store, pick up four hundred pounds of horse feed. And stop at the Waterhole and get me a pouch of Taylor’s Pride chew.”

Slim was writing all this down in the palm of his hand. “Okay, is that all?”

“Stay out of the pool hall and get back out here as soon as you can. We’ve got two weeks’ work to finish up before dark.”

Slim nodded. “Seems kind of a waste, making a trip into town and not stopping at the pool hall.”

“You can handle it.”

“Well, I don’t know.” Slim looked up at the sky and rubbed the whiskers on his cheek. “There’s something about that pool hall, Loper. I mean, a lot of times that old pickup just heads there on its own and I can’t hold it in the road.”

“Hold it in the road and get back out here.”

“Loper, has anyone ever told you that you ain’t any fun?”

“All the time. It comes from working poor help.”

Slim smiled and they drifted toward the flat­bed pickup. “Shoot! You’ve got the finest cowboy crew in the whole world.”

I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, which was okay because it was starting to get a little windy. The conversation, that is.

Also, I had gleaned enough information by that time to conclude A) that Slim was going into town; B) that I hadn’t been to town in quite a spell; C) that I needed a change in scenery; and D) that Slim probably wanted me and Drover to go along and ride shotgun.

I turned to my assistant. “Drover, a pickup is fixing to go into town, and we’re fixing to sneak our little selves into the back end and hitch a ride. Let’s go.”

Drover had stopped and put his nose to the ground. Then his head came up.

“I found the horn, Hank, it’s right here where I left it. Does that change your Lesson for the Day?”

I gave him a withering glare. “I deal in concepts, son. What actually happens just confuses the issue. Come on, we’ve got a ride to catch.”