LITMIR.BIZ

      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Do you believe in Bone Monsters? Neither did I, until one struck our ranch and made off with my fortune in buried bones, and then I had no choice but to believe in them.

      Bone Monsters, that is. I had always believed in bones. Who wouldn’t believe in bones? They’re one of the things that give meaning to a dog’s life. I love bones, always have. They’re wonderful.

      Bone Monsters, on the other hand, aren’t wonderful and I don’t love ’em. They’re very scary, as you will see if you should happen to work up the courage to read this story.

      And let me warn you right here: Don’t tackle this story unless you’ve completed a course in Monster Safety, because . . . well, I don’t know what might happen. Something bad.

      Bed-wetting. A runny nose. Heat rash. Pul­mo­n­ary Brouhaha.

      You’ve been warned. Proceed with caution.

      It all began, as I recall, around the middle of March. No, the middle of April, and I can pin it down to the very exact day. It was the fourteenth of April.

      I happened to be sitting near the front gate, facing east. I had barked up the sun at precisely seven o’clock. After performing that very important duty, I lingered near the front gate to do a Turkey Patrol. Whilst I was barking up the sun, don’t you see, my ears began picking up unusual signals from a chinaberry grove near the creek.

      I stopped—froze, actually—I stopped and froze, twisted my head from side to side, and initiated the Sound Detection Procedure. I went to Full Lift-Up on both Earatory Scanners and began monitoring the entire electromagical spectrum.

      I was listening for turkey sounds, see. At that hour of the morning, they often make sounds. They gobble. And they make another sound, too, which I can’t reproduce because I’m not a turkey. It’s kind of a squawk or a cluck.

      I picked up the sounds, just as clear as a bell. Those turkeys were down there in the chinaberry grove, squawking and gobbling, and little did they know that I was spying on them and picking up every word of their conversation.

      Would you like to peek at a transcript of this monitoring session? Ordinarily we don’t release this information to the general public because . . . well, because we don’t. It’s classified information, see, and we usually withhold these transcripts for twenty-five years because . . .

      Well, because we do, and that’s reason enough. We do it because we do it. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t.

      But if you want to peek at one of the Turkey Transcripts, I can’t see that it would hurt anything.

      Ready? Here we go.

      OFFICIAL SECRET TRANSCRIPT

      Turkey Monitoring Operations:

      Codename “Starfish Sandwich”

      East Yard Gate Station

      April 14

      Turkey 1: “Gobble, gobble, gobble.”

      Turkey 2: “Cluck, cluck.”

      Turkey 3: “Squawk, screek.”

      Turkey 1: “Gobble?”

      Turkey 3: “Cluck, squawk.”

      Turkey 2: “Cluck, cluck, screek.”

      Turkey 1: “Gobble, gobble, gobble.”

      Turkey 2: “Cluck.”

      END OF SECRET TRANSCRIPT

      So there you are. Pretty impressive, huh? Those birds might as well have been in the movies, the way we had ’em covered. We knew all their secrets, their plans, everything. We knew what they were thinking before they even thought it.

      Of course, the problem with turkeys is that they don’t do much thinking about anything, which makes their conversations a little on the dull side.

      Pretty boring, actually.

      I wouldn’t want to spend too much of my time monitoring turkeys.

      Anyways, I was at the Turkey Wire, doing my job, when all at once I heard a vehicle approaching from the north. Unidentified Vehicles get an automatic override in our defense system, which means that at the first sound of a UV, all Turkey Traffic is blacked out so that we can sound the alarm.

      I left my post at the gate . . . not the gatepost but my position near the gatepost . . . I left my post at the gatepost . . .

      Phooey. I left the gate and never mind the post and went ripping out to intercept the . . .

      Okay, relax. It was Slim’s pickup, which

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