Читать книгу The Frozen Rodeo - John R. Erickson - Страница 6

Chapter One: A Wasp Crisis

It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. The mystery began in the spring, as I recall, a few weeks after Christmas. Wait. Christmas comes in the month of December, and the last time I checked, December falls in the winter, not the spring.

Hencely, the mystery couldn’t have begun in the spring, so disregard the previous message. The mystery began in the wintertime, January, yes of course, when Slim and I found ourselves roping cattle in downtown Twitchell during an ice storm.

Oops, you’re not supposed to know about that because it comes later in the story. See, what comes later can’t come sooner, so let’s be very quiet about this and not blab it around, okay? We won’t tell anyone that Miss Viola was there and so were the police. Oh, and the dogcatcher. Shhhh.

Now let’s get to the business of the fire. It was in the winter, the very worst time for your house to burn down. I was the one who first saw the flames and turned in the alarm, so I know what I’m talking about. I mean, I was inside the house.

It was a very tense and scary situation, and already I’m wondering if we should go on with the story. You know how I am about the little children: give ‘em a few thrills and let ‘em have fun, but don’t load ‘em down with the scariest parts of my work.

Hey, a dog in my position is trained to cope with the scary stuff—the crinimal investigations, the constant battle with the Charlies, the Red Alert emergencies, and fires of all kinds—but the kids don’t have that kind of preparation.

What do you think? Should we plunge into the story or call it quits and go do something else?

I figured that’s what you’d say. Okay, you’d better grab hold of something stout and hang on. Here we go.

We’ve already decided that it happened in the wintertime. Drover and I had pretty muchly moved our base of operations from the gas tanks down to Slim Chance’s shack, two miles east of ranch headquarters.

Why? Because Slim was a bachelor cowboy who allowed the Elite Troops of the Security Division to stay inside the house on cold winter nights, and that was a big deal. He had a nice wood-burning stove in the living room and we made our camp on the floor, near the stove. His carpet was as thin as the seat of his pants, but all in all, it was a great place to be on a cold winter night.

We had made it through the deep dark of the night with no emergency calls to interrupt our sleep. We were safe, warm, and comfortable on the floor. I don’t recall what woke me up…wait, yes I do, a yellow jacket wasp dropped from the ceiling and landed on my head.

We don’t expect wasps to fall on our heads in January. In a normal year, we don’t even see a wasp in January. Why? I’m not sure. Most usually they show up in the spring, hang around all summer, and make a nuisance of themselves in the fall, and they’re gone by the time snow arrives.

Maybe they fly south with the birds. Maybe they buzz themselves to death in the fall, and that’s why you find all those crunchy dead ones around window sills. But the point is that we never see them in January, but that particular January, we were seeing plenty of them. They were still lurking around, and nobody on my ranch was glad about it, especially me.

Do we have time for this? I mean, talking about yellow jacket wasps seems a waste of time, especially when we have classified information that our house was fixing to burn down around our heads. On the other hand, wasps are a pretty serious threat to public safety, so maybe we should say a few more words about them.

The main point here is that your average wasp is armed and dangerous. He carries a loaded stinger on the end of his tail and has no respect for the rights of people or dogs. One day a wasp crawled into Slim’s boot and guess what happened when he stuck his foot inside.

Wow, it sounded like the blast of a bull moose, scared me and Drover out of three months’ growth. He got over it, Slim did, but it sure darkened his mood for the rest of the morning, and he started checking his boots for booby-traps.

Oh, and he stopped walking around the house in his bare feet. Can you guess why? Because one night, right before supper, he stepped on a wasp and got knifed, so he dug out his old pair of sheepskin house slippers. He started wearing them around the house, don’t you see, and when he spotted a yellow jacket creeping around on the floor, he made a special effort to smash it.

Those slippers were patched with duct tape because…well, some unknown villain had chewed them up, but we don’t need to probe any deeper into that chapter of our lives. See, we never caught the Slipper Shredder, but guess who got blamed. Not Drover, a prime suspect in the case, and not Sally May’s rotten little cat, not the coyote brothers or Eddy the Rac.

Me. I got blamed! No kidding, and I was the Lead Investigator on the case. Outrageous!

Anyway, how did we get on the subject of slipskin sheepers? I don’t know, but before we leave that subject, let me whisper a Deep Dark Secret: Dogs who have dabbled in the sheepskin business will tell you…

Maybe we’d better skip the rest of this. I don’t think it would do either of us any good.

The main point here is that I know almost nothing about the sleepskin shippers, and to this very day, the case remains unsolved.

Now, where were we? Oh yes, the Wasp Crisis. I was in the midst of a peaceful sleep, on the floor of Slim’s bachelor shack, only moments before the place went up in flames, when something landed on my right ear and tripped an alarm in Data Control.

Naturally I tried to ignore it. Who wants to be disturbed in the middle of a peaceful sleep? Not me, but our sensors were picking up tiny signals suggesting that something was walking around up there. In other words, this wasn’t a piece of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling. Plaster fragments don’t have legs.

I punched in the commands for Ear Flick—twice, three times. No luck there. The motion sensors were still picking up creepy little signals on one of my ears and DC (that’s our code for Data Control) kicked on the General Alarm.

Gongs gonged and lights flashed, and I found myself standing on the bridge, shouting into a microphone. “All hands on deck! Bring sidearms and sandwiches, we’ve got pork chops creeping through the catnip! Approach and capture! Repeat: capture the roaches, this is not a drill!”

Things were a little foggy at that point, I mean we had sailors shouting and gongs blaring, very confusing, but someone must have activated the circuit for Hind Leg Scratch. My right hind leg swung into action and began a Hacking Procedure on the starboard ear, which resulted in…well, a sharp stinging sensation.

OWWWWW!

It stung like crazy. We had taken a direct hit from a missile or a torpedo, right in the…

HUH?

Okay, the stupid wasp had dropped from the ceiling and landed on my ear, and when that happens, the last thing you want to do is rough him up with a burst of scratching. Do you know why? Because you probably won’t kill the little heathen, and he will drill you with his poison stinger.

That’s obvious when you’re wide awake, but when you explode out of a deep sleep, it’s not so obvious, and yes, I followed the wrong procedure and got drilled, and the saddest part was that I didn’t even bag the wasp. I heard the buzz of his wings as he flew off to torment someone else.

Trembling with righteous anger, I blinked my eyes and glanced around. Okay, it appeared that I was in Slim’s living room, and there was a corpse on the floor beside me. Wait, that might have been Drover and he might have been merely conked out asleep. That was good news and I was about to shut everything down, when I noticed…

Good grief, the inside of the house was RED, and we’re not talking about slightly red. This was a bright, fiery red, and that’s when I was smoten by the awful reality.

OUR HOUSE WAS BURNING DOWN!!