Читать книгу The Fling - John R. Erickson - Страница 6

Chapter One: Cows in My Office

It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Here’s a question: What would a dog do if he suddenly found himself in town, lost and abandoned and twenty-five miles from home?

A lot of your ordinary mutts would sit down and bawl. That’s what Drover would do, sit down and bawl and moan about his so-called bad leg. Not me. What I would do is what I did: go out on a wild fling in town, beat up all the local thugs, and then hike all the way back to the ranch—braving buzzards, howling winds, and bloodthirsty coyotes.

Pretty impressive, huh? Well, that’s what I did.

See, I’ve always had a taste for adventure. Some dogs don’t. They’re content to lie around on the porch and snap at flies. That can get pretty boring. Furthermore, we dogs aren’t allowed in Sally May’s yard, much less on her front porch, so you can see right away that sitting around on the porch and snapping at flies was never much of an option for me.

Anyways, it all began one morning in August, as I recall, yes it was, because it was still summer and . . .

Hmmm. At this very moment, even as we speak, a fly is crawling around on my nose. It tickles. I can’t go on until I do something about this. Hang on whilst I go into Fly Counter­measures.

Fly Countermeasures aren’t the same as Flea Countermeasures. Did you know that? Maybe not. With fleas, we go into a Digging and Hacking Routine with one of our powerful hind legs, which of course is very strenuous. With flies, we merely watch the hateful little things buzz around our face until one of ’em gets careless, and then . . .

Wait. Watch this.

SNAP!

Got him, blew him right out of the sky! Heh heh. Say good-bye to another tormenting fly.

Okay, back to work. Where were we? We were discussing . . . I don’t remember.

It’ll come to me in a second.

Be patient. I’ve contacted Data Control. They’re working on it.

We’ve had some nice sunsets lately, haven’t we? Oh, and did you hear . . .

Ralph! That’s what we were talking about. Okay, now we’re cooking.

You remember Dogpound Ralph? Basset hound, long ears, sad eyes, drooping face. He lived at the Twitchell dog pound and we’d been pals for a long time. Well, who’d have thought that old slow-talking, slow-walking Ralph would run away from the dogcatcher and . . .

We weren’t talking about Ralph. That comes later, but you’re not supposed to know, so forget that I said anything about Ralph. In fact, I didn’t. I said nothing, almost nothing at all, about Ralph.

It was August on the ranch. It was August everywhere in the world. I awoke around dawn, which means that I had caught a few winks of sleep on my gunnysack bed.

Have I mentioned that I’m Head of Ranch Security? I am, and it’s a grueling job—eighteen hours a day, sometimes twenty or even thirty. Hour after hour of patrolling headquarters, chasing monsters out of the bushes, barking at smart-aleck birds and passing airplanes, barking up the sun every morning, humbling the local cat, you name it.

On and on, the work never ends, and sometimes I have to go days, weeks, even months without sleep. Okay, I don’t suppose I’ve ever gone months without sleep . . . or even weeks, but days, yes. Sometimes I go days without . . . okay, except for naps. I grab a nap when I can, but you get the picture.

This is a very tough job. It’s a killer. No ordinary dog could take it. But I am no ordinary dog.

Anyways, I had managed to finish up the night’s patrol work around two a.m. Confident that my ranch would make it through another night, I returned, exhausted, to my office/bedroom beneath the gas tanks.

Drover was already there, of course. He’s always there, growing roots in his gunnysack bed and sleeping his life away. He was making his usual orchestra of odd sounds: grunting, wheezing, yipping, snoring. He does all that stuff in his sleep. Sometimes I just sit there and listen, and marvel at all the weird noises he makes.

I listened to him for a while, then tried to force my body to relax. Some dogs can do that, you know, impose stern mental discipline upon their bodily parts and force them to relax. That’s what I needed, to relax and rewind. Unwind.

I couldn’t do it. I tried, but my body was as tense as molten steel and my mind was racing along at a hundred miles an hour. I tried everything. I stared at the moon, listened to the night birds, took deep breaths, and even counted sheep, which is tricky on a cattle ranch. We have no sheep, don’t you see.

Nothing helped. I was wide awerp and there was no chunk that I would be able to snerp. No, I would just hack to sit there, bonking the honking . . . snork murk sizzle . . .

Okay, so maybe I drifted off at last. Who wouldn’t have drifted off? I was beat, bushed, exhausted, and the next thing I knew . . .

HUH?

I heard cattle, a whole herd of . . . I hearded cattle, a whole . . .

Let’s back off and try that again. Suddenly my ears picked up the sounds of approaching cattle. Hundreds of ’em, thousands of ’em. They were mooing and bawling, and I could hear the thunder of their hooves on the ground.

Perhaps this was a dream. Yes, surely it was. I was dreaming that I had just taken the job as U.S. Marshal in Dodge City, Kansas. The local citizenry had finally gotten fed up with lawlessness and insolent cats, and they had begged me to take the marshal’s job and clean up the town.

And now, what was this? Somebody was driv­ing a herd of cattle right down the middle of Main Street? Not only that, but some of the dingbat cows had just walked into my office!

I raised my head and cracked open both eyes. I found myself staring straight into the eyes of thirty-seven thousand cows.

I lifted my eyes and narrowed my lips. Wait. I narrowed my eyes and lifted my lips, there we go, and initiated a deep rumbling growl in the throat­a­lary region of my throat.

“Get out of my office, you brainless spuds, or I’ll hang the whole lot of you.”

One of them, a red baldface, had the nerve to extend his neck and stick his nose right in my face. He sniffed me. Was I going to sit there and take that? A sniffing? In my own office? I, the U.S. Marshal of . . .

Huh?

I blinked my eyes several times. My gaze swept the surrounding countryside, and suddenly it struck me that . . . uh . . . this wasn’t Dodge City. It was the ranch—my ranch. Perhaps I had dozed, yes, finally sleep had chased me down and captured me for a few moments of healing slumber. In other words, I was no longer marshal of Dodge City, and therefore my office was not being invaded by a herd of unruly cows. I blinked again, and waited for the cows to disappear. They didn’t. I poked myself to be sure I wasn’t still dreaming. I wasn’t, so what were all these cows doing . . .

“Drover, wake up, Code Three! We’ve got cows in the office!”

It was true. The cow herd that usually stayed in the home pasture now had our office surrounded, and some had even wandered inside.

Drover’s head shot up and his eyes popped open. They were crooked, and so were his ears. He stared into the faces of the invading multitudes. After taking one look, he just . . . vanished. I mean, one second he was there, and the next he was gone. ZOOM! I don’t know where he went. The machine shed, most likely. That was his usual hiding place when he felt the need to flee from Reality as It Really Is.

So there I was, alone, one against thirty-seven thousand trespassing cows. Was I scared? Maybe, a little. Okay, I was scared, sure I was scared, and who wouldn’t have been scared? If you woke up and found a hundred and thirty-seven thousand crazed bovines in your office, wouldn’t you be scared?

But I didn’t run, that’s the important point. No sir, I did what any true red-blooded, top-of-the-line American cowdog would have done. I started snapping at noses and went straight into a barking routine that we call Full Air Horns.

Heh, heh. That got their attention, the little dummies, only they weren’t so little. In fact, they were huge dummies, but it got their attention. They shrank back from the piercing blare of my Full Air Horns, formed a half-circle, and stared at me.

I pulled myself up to my full height of massiveness. I had ’em going now. “Okay, darlings, I’ll make this brief. You came into my office without knocking and you’ve disturbed my sleep. I don’t like that. Now, the next silly son of a gun who steps in here without permission will face the usual consequences. He’ll walk out with no ears and tooth tracks over ninety percent of his body. Who wants a piece of that, huh? Any takers?”

You won’t believe . . .

Never mind, just skip it.

Nothing happened. They all, uh, ran away. Fled in terror.

Okay, maybe they didn’t, but only because they were so DUMB. How dumb would you have to be to walk right into the office of the Head of Ranch . . . well, they did, five of ’em. Walked right back into my office, after I’d warned them and told them . . .

What was I supposed to do, stand there and get squashed under the hooves of a whole herd of wandering cows? Heck no. I, uh, left the office, shall we say, and okay, let’s go right to the bitter truth.

I ran. I’m not ashamed that I ran. I was glad that I ran, because if I hadn’t run, I would have been trampled and possibly eaten by these huge dog-eating cows, and you wouldn’t have any more story to read.

See, I did it for YOU. Sometimes a dog has to put aside his own selfish desires and think of somebody . . .

The trouble was that I had no place to run that wasn’t populated by wild crazed cows. They were everywhere! They had my office complex completely surrounded, so by George, I just lowered my head and bulled my way through the middle of ’em.

Oh, and I barked. I’ll admit that it wasn’t my best bark. It was one we call “Let Me Out of Here,” and it was more of a squeak than my usual deep manly tone of barking, but this was an emergency situation.

When those cows saw and heard me ripping through their ranks, they bolted and ran, and suddenly I realized . . . hey, they thought I was chasing them! And they were scared. In other words, I had somehow managed to turn this deal around!

Yes, they ran like the cowards they really were, and once I had ’em in blind retreat, I showed no mercy. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that chasing cattle was something of a No-No on our outfit, but . . .

“Hank!”

. . . I went after ’em anyway. The fools. The idiots. Did they think I was going to run from them? Ha. Little did they know . . .

“Hank! Get out of the way, you’re going to cause a stampede!”

HUH? Had somebody . . .

You probably don’t need to know what happened next. Besides, it’s classified information.

Sorry.