LITMIR.BIZ

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Before I knew it, I was growling back at him.

      And Drover, who was safely behind me and out of the range of Pete’s claws, began jumping up and down. “Git ’im, Hankie, git ’im!”

      I might very well have got him, I mean just by George cleaned house right there while it was fresh on my mind, but Sally May reached across the fence and whacked me on the head with her spoon, sort of surprised me since I’d forgot she was there.

      “You dogs get back and leave Pete alone! I’m going to feed you over here so you won’t fight.”

      Pete rolled his eyes in my direction and gave me a grin. I backed off, but not until I had sniffed out his scraps: two steak bones and several nice long strips of steak fat, which happens to be a favorite of mine.

      I love steak fat.

      Sally May moved down the fence a ways and scraped our portion off the plate. When it hit the ground, I made a dive for it, scooped up a nice big bone, and began putting the old mandibles to work, so to speak.

      That first taste of steak juice and steak fat sent waves of sheer joy rushing through my mouth, across my tongue, into my salvanilla glands, and on out to the end of my tail. I rolled the morsel around in my mouth for a moment and then sank my teeth into it and . . .

      HUH?

      Suddenly my mouth fell open and went blank, and the so-called steak scrap dropped out like a dead bird falling out of a tree. It hit the ground with a plop. I stared at it, sniffed it, checked it out.

      I looked up at Sally May and wagged my tail. There had been some mistake. She had given me a baked potato hull. I gave her my most sincere, most hurtful look and wagged my tail extra hard.

      I mean, I’m a very forgiving dog. I understand about mistakes. It would be no exaggeration to say that I’ve made several of them myself, in the course of a long and glorious career in security work.

      Sure, I understood, and to help Sally May make a fair division of the scraps, I was willing to take a little extra time out of my busy schedule, walk down the fence, and redistribute some of the steak fat that Pete was growling and yowling over.

      And I had every intention of sharing my baked potato hull with him too.

      I started down the fence.

      “HANK! You leave Pete alone. I won’t have you beating up on the cat.”

      What ever gave her the idea that I was going to . . . “Now, you dogs have plenty to eat, and I’m going to stand right here until you eat it all up.”

      I went back to the spot. Okay, if a baked potato hull was the best I could get . . . It was gone. My baked potato hull was gone! Someone or something had . . .

      I looked at Drover. He swallowed something rather large and grinned.

      “You just ate my baked potato hull, you idiot! I turn my back on you for just a minute and bingo! You’re stealing my food. What next, Drover? Where do you go from being a common food thief?”

      “Well . . . I thought you didn’t want it.”

      “Of course I didn’t want it, but it was still mine.”

      “I’m sorry, Hank, but I was hungry and . . . gosh, I feel so bad, I’ll let you have all the rest of it.”

      “Well . . .” I thought it over. “At least you’ve got enough decency to make a gesture, and even though a gesture is only a gesture, it’s no small potatoes either.”

      “No, I got the potatoes. You can have all the rest.”

      “That’s exactly what I intend to do, Drover.”

      I moved into eating position above the scraps. Drover sat down a few feet away and watched me with a cock-eyed smile, while Sally May towered above me and watched with her arms crossed.

      I took a large something into my mouth and began chewing. It was soft on the outside, hard on the inside, and tasted a bit like . . . well, corn. As a matter of fact, it tasted a lot like corn, and the more I chewed it, the cornier it tasted.

      I rolled it around in my mouth and let it fall back to the ground. I stared at it. It was a corncob.

      I lifted my head and searched Sally May’s face for some answers. Had this been an accident? Was it some kind of joke? What did we have here? I wagged my tail and waited for an answer.

      “Well,” she said, “go on and eat it. If you can chew bones, you can chew corncobs. There’s nothing wrong with them.”

      Let me break in here to point out that while Sally May was a wonderful lady in many respects, there were things she didn’t understand about dogs. DOGS DON’T EAT CORNCOBS. I sniffed out the scraps one last time, drew my tail up between my legs, and, shall we say, vanished into the evening shadows. I hid in some tall weeds just above the gas tanks and watched to see what would happen next.

      Sally May shook her head and said something about Hank being too fussy for his own good, and then she looked at Drover. “But you’ll eat them, won’t you, Drover? You’re not a fussy eater, are you? Come here, puppy.”

      You know what the little dope did? He wagged and grinned his way over to the fence, collected his pat on the head, and then made a big show of eating a derned corncob. I could have wrung his neck.

      He gummed the cob and rolled it around in his mouth and grinned up at Sally May, just as though he’d got hold of the best steak on the ranch—until Sally May went back into the house and turned off the yard light.

      And then, why you’d have thought that cob was on fire, the way he spit it out! Once the audience goes home, the farce is over.

      I came out of hiding and walked over to Drover. “That was a pretty good show you put on, son.”

      “Oh thanks, Hank. I didn’t want Sally May to think we didn’t like her corncobs.”

      “Yes, I noticed. It was a brilliant stroke. Now, for the rest of our lives, she’s going to be feeding us corncobs and garbage, and thanks to you, she’ll expect us to eat it!”

      “Gee, I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

      “That’s too bad, son. You’ve made your bed and now the chickens will come home to roost in it.”

      “Oh my gosh, they’re awful messy.”

      “Exactly. Well,” I took a deep breath, “you’ve made a shambles of the evening. Let’s see if we can salvage something of the night. Come on, we’ve still got two days’ work to do between now and daylight.”

      We started down the hill. I had already begun sifting through details and organizing the night patrol, when all of a sudden I heard a sound that made me freeze in my tracks.

      I froze in my tracks. Drover, who was looking at the stars, ran into me. “Hold up, halt! Did you hear what I heard?”

      “Oops, ’scuse me, I don’t know. What did you hear?”

      “Shhh! Listen.”

      We cocked our heads and listened. There it was again, the sniveling, whining voice of a cat: “Ummm, they left all these nice corncobs, just for me!”

      “So, it’s all coming clear now,” I whispered. “We’ve been duped by the cat. He engineered this whole thing just so he could steal our corncobs!”

      “Huh. But I thought we didn’t want the corncobs.”

      “That’s precisely what he wanted you to think you wanted, Drover. You played right into his devilish scheme, and I came within a hair of playing the sucker myself. But I think we’ve caught it just in the nick of time.”

      “Oh good.”

      “Come on, son, and prepare for combat. We’re fixing to send Pete the Barncat to the School of Hard Knocks.”

      And with that, we made an about-face

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