Читать книгу The Ghosts of Rabbits Past - John R. Erickson - Страница 8

Chapter Three: Yipes!

Are you feeling nervous about this? Good. I was scared out of my wits.

All the evidence in this case suggested that I had either bumped into a cannibal, a Charlie Monster, or a Hooligan Mole. If you were in that situation, which would you choose?

Those were the choices I faced, only I really didn’t have a choice, because whatever I’d bumped into was whatever it was, regardless of my opinions. That doesn’t make sense, so let’s move along.

The point is that I was out there alone in the darkness and had encountered some living thing that wasn’t supposed to be there, and fellers, I had a real bad feeling about it. I tried to calm myself and plot a response. Should I bark the alarm, run, fight, or try to establish communication with the creature? Or creatures. For all I knew, there might be hundreds of them lurking in the darkness.

I ran these options through Data Control and got a green light for Communication. That made sense. Communicating with alien beings is much better than any of the other things you can do with them.

Trying to hide the quiver in my voice, I sent out a message.

“Hello there. This is the voice of the ranch’s Security Division. You seem to be walking through a secured area without permission. If you’re here by mistake, this doesn’t have to be a big deal. Just turn around and leave the compound, and don’t come back.

“If you came with hostile intentions, you should understand that we have snipers on the walls and three divisions of heavy infantry standing by. Any hostile action on your part will be met with deadly force.”

I waited for a reply. Nothing, not a word, but I could hear raspy breathing, so I knew he was there. Suddenly it occurred to me that the creature might not speak Ranch English, so I tried another approach.

Have I mentioned that I’m effluent in many languages? I am. It’s one of those skills that a top-of-the-line cowdog must be prepared to use in the course of a normal day. See, we never know the cultural background or language system of the Bad Guys we encounter on the ranch, so we must be prepared to conduct our business in any one of five or six languages.

I addressed him in Universal Speaklish. “Ooo-hay are-yea oo-yea, eecher-cray? Eek-spay.”

This time I got a reply. “Oom-pah oom-pah.”

“Utt-whey? Eeek-spay owder-lay.”

“Oom-pah oom-pah, tic-tac-toe.”

Hmmm. I didn’t know if he could understand me, but I sure wasn’t understanding him. We both seemed to be speaking in a foreign tongue, but not necessarily the same one. Or…wait. Perhaps I had forgotten some of the vocabulary. I mean, it wasn’t every day that I carried on a conversation in Speaklish.

I would have to keep trying. “Eecher-cray: utt-whey iz-yeah oour-yeah aim-nay? Awk-tay.”

I waited for his reply, and this time, it came loud and clear. He said, “Oom-pah oom-pah Ort-snay.”

The “oom-pah oom-pah” meant nothing to me, but Ort-snay? The word had a familiar ring, but for a moment or two, I couldn’t get the cart before the hammer. I did a quick search of my memory banks and came up with a match.

Ort-snay was the Speaklish word for…SNORT!

At that same moment, I began to notice a heavy musky odor in the aerosphere. Gulp. In the darkness of night, I had just made contact with a notorious cannibal named Snort, who had a notorious cannibal brother named Rip. And they were both notorious cannibals.

Encantering countables in the dark of night might be better than encumbering vegetables…sorry, let me back up and start that sentence again. Encountering cannibals in the dark of night might be better than encountering vampires, but it’s not exactly something to celebrate.

See, I had done business with Rip and Snort, and knew them fairly well—as well as a dog can ever know the murky depths of a cannibal’s mind. If you caught them at the right moment, on the right day, they could be a barrel of laughs. You talk about a couple of goof-offs! They were worthless beyond all description and did things that normal dogs only dream about.

They were experts at scratching fleas. They composed trashy coyote songs and could howl all night long. Their belching skills were the stuff of legends. They knew everything there was to know about rolling on a dead skunk and impressing the ladies with their deep manly aroma. They got into fights, beat up badgers, and banged their heads against trees just for sport. And nobody could beat them when it came to poaching chickens. Slurp. Excuse me.

Please ignore that “slurp.” It meant almost nothing.

The point is that when Rip and Snort were in a friendly mood, they became role models and the envy of every ranch dog in Texas—because they were bums, totally worthless, no ambition, no jobs, no duties or responsibilities, just goofing off forever.

But there was the Other Side, where good old boys passed through a veil of darkness and became bad old boys, and their true coyote nature overpowered everything else. With Rip and Snort, it was a short step from one side to the other. One minute would find them full of fun and nonsense, and the next…yipes. Their eyes began to sparkle with unholy yellow light, and a ranch dog began to realize…these guys might eat a dog!

So there you are, a glance at our files on Rip and Snort. And there I was, all alone in the darkness with Snort, and probably not far from Rip, since they always ran together.

It was too late to escape. There was no place to hide. I didn’t know which mood they were in. I would have to try to get out of this with charm and diplomacy.

I tried to put a little jingle into my voice. “Hey Snort, is that you?”

“Ha! Me, you betcha, and brother too. Rip and Snort come to town and take over whole place.”

“Well, it isn’t actually a town, Snort. It’s only the headquarters compound of our ranch, but to you guys, it must seem like a huge and busy place.”

“Plenty huge and dizzy.”

“No, I said busy. Biz, biz, biz. Bizz-zee. Dizzy is something else.”

“Hunk quit talk like beetle-bum.”

“A what? Oh, you mean a bumblebee?”

“Rip and Snort not friend to beetle-bum, get stung on nose.”

“Right. Those beetle-bums are bad news.”

“Hunk get bad news if keeping talk like beetle-bum.”

“Sorry. I didn’t realize you were so sensitive. Let’s talk about something else. What brings you to ranch headquarters? I mean, you guys don’t come here very often.”

“Uh. ‘Cause guys not like house and boom-boom.”

“Right. Coyotes are scared of people and guns.”

“Coyotes not scared of nothing.”

“That’s what I meant. You’re not scared of anything, but you’d rather not get peppered with buckshot.”

“Rip and Snort not give a hoot for pepper.”

“I agree. It’ll burn your mouth and make you sneeze, and raise your temperature twenty degrees. Ha ha. A little humor there, a rhyme for the evening, so to speak. Ha ha.”

There was a long, deadly silence. “Hunk try to be funny?”

“Well, yes. I just thought…hey Snort, let’s be honest. Talking with you can be pretty depressing.”

“Ha! Coyote brothers not give a hoot for pretty dressing. Coyote brothers ugly and meaner than whole world.”

“That was my point. You guys are ugly and mean, and sometimes I find that depressing.”

“Hunk talk too much. Rip and Snort come on important mitchen.”

Mitchen? Hmmm. I wasn’t familiar with that word, but it must have been important, because…well, because he’d said so, right? “Important mitchen.” Wait, I had it! In the coyote dialect, mitchen translated into mission.

“Oh, I get it now. You’re here on an important mission?”

“Mitchen. Hunk not know how to talk.”

“Sorry, my fault. You’re here on an important mitchen. Would it be proper for me to ask the nature of your mitchen?”

“Brothers come to catnip kid.”

“You’re calling yourself the Catnip Kid? Gee, that’s nice, Snort, I like it. Every outlaw ought to have a nickname.”

Snort grumbled, “What means ‘nick-nock’?”

At that moment, the moon appeared from behind a layer of clouds and…yipes, I got my first glimpse of the cannibals. They towered over me and were beaming glares that seemed irritated and unfriendly, even hostile.

“I didn’t say nick-nock. I said nickname, and a nickname is…well, it’s a name we give ourselves in a spirit of fun or affection.”

“Snort not have fun with infection, too many germs.”

You know, under different circumstances, I would have been laughing. I mean, this was the craziest conversation I’d had since the last time I’d tried to communicate with these boneheads. But laughing in front of cannibals wasn’t something I wanted to try.

Let’s face it, being incredibly dumb isn’t always funny to those who are.

Hencely, laughing was out of the question, but somehow I had to keep the conversation moving. Don’t forget, when cannibals stop talking, they start thinking about food.

But what could I say?