The Case of the Prowling Bear - John R. Erickson Hank the Cowdog

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because he actually cooked something. Yes sir, he made a big pot of boiled chicken gizzards, added two bullion cubes to give them some flavor, and even dumped some rice into the pot.

      Why chicken gizzards? Very few people will eat gizzards, so they’re cheap, and that makes them perfect food for bachelor cowboys. Most folks grocery-shop for nutrition and taste. Bachelors shop for cheap.

      Hey, and get this. After supper, he even spent some time cleaning up the kitchen. He swept all the crumbs off the dinner table and onto the floor, which is a smart thing to do. It keeps the mice from crawling around on your eating surface. Then he placed his dirty dishes into the freezer compartment of the refrigerator.

      Smart move. Several rounds of food poisoning had taught him a valuable lesson about sanitation: if you don’t freeze those dirty dishes, they’ll come back to bite you.

      Then we all moved into the living room and began an evening of fun and excitement. That’s a joke. Long winter evenings at Slim’s place weren’t exactly electric experiences. We didn’t do much. Drover stretched out on the floor, while I found a more comfortable spot on…

      “Get out of my chair.”

      …on the floor beside Drover. Gee, what a grouch. Slim took the only comfortable chair in the house and settled into reading the latest issue of Western Horseman magazine. That lasted for about thirty minutes, then he got restless, went back into the kitchen, and made a batch of popcorn.

      Somehow he managed to scorch the first batch, and we’re talking about a cloud of smoke that filled the entire house. He had to open all the doors and windows to let the place air out, and by the time the smoke had cleared, the temperature in the house was about right for hanging a side of beef. Cold.

      But he made another batch and ended up with a bowl of fluffy popcorn. He returned to his chair and crunched away on his evening treat, while Drover and I...well, we had some interest in this, you might say, and we took up positions at Slim’s feet. There, we watched him eat. We moved our front paws up and down, licked our chops, thumped our tails on the floor (I did; Drover’s tail was too short), and uttered Groans of Desire.

      I don’t often resort to Groans of Desire because, well, they sound a lot like begging, and I’m no beggar. But sometimes our people don’t take hints and we have to dig into our bag of tricks.

      We set up shop at his feet and launched ourselves into Groans of Desire. At first, they had no effect. He kept stuffing his face. Oh, he knew we wanted to share his popcorn, but he just grinned and kept eating.

      We cranked up the Groans and at last he said, “Would y’all like to have some popcorn?”

      You see what we have to put up with? OF COURSE WE WANTED SOME POPCORN! Any rock, tree, or fence post on the ranch would have known that we wanted some popcorn.

      He grinned. “Okay, I’ll make a deal. If you can catch it out of the air, I’ll let you have some.”

      I turned to Drover. “What do you think, can we handle this?”

      “Oh yeah, let’s do it.”

      And that’s what we did. For the next hour, we played Slow Pitch Popcorn. Slim did the pitching and we dogs did the catching, and you know what? We were pretty good at it. We muffed a few shots at the beginning (sometimes that popcorn will bounce off your nose, don’t you see), but we got better with practice. By the end of the game, Slim was giving us long fly balls that went looping all the way up to the ceiling, and we snagged every one of them. Most of them.

      Wow. It’s pretty amazing what dogs can do, but around nine-thirty, we ran out of popcorn, and that ended our evening of fun and entertainment. Slim got up out of his chair and took a big stretch.

      “Come on, dogs, it’s time for y’all to answer the Call of the Wild.” We followed him out on the porch. He pointed up at the moon. “Moon’s got a ring around it, a sign the weather’s fixing to change. Which reminds me. My pot’s got a water ring and I need to soak it with Babbo.”

      Water ring? Babbo? It made no sense to me. One minute he was talking about the moon and the weather, and the next minute…I don’t know, he’d switched to water and cooking pots and Babbo, whatever that might have been. You know, we dogs are doing well if we understand half of what our people say, and guess who always gets blamed for the communication failures. The dogs.

      The truth is, our people mutter and mumble, talk to themselves, and never bother to explain anything. And with Slim, the lines of communication are even more snarled, because he spends half his time pulling pranks. He would rather play pathetic tricks on his dogs than…I don’t know, eat popcorn, I suppose.

      Do you remember the time he unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it up over his head, and buttoned it again? I remember it very well. It made him look like a man without a head, and you can imagine what he did with that. Naturally, I started growling, I mean, that’s what a dog is supposed to do when he sees a headless man on his ranch, right? I growled and barked, so he made claws with his hands and came after me, and…

      We don’t need to go into all the details. The point is that we dogs never know what to believe or what’s coming next, so it wasn’t my fault that I didn’t pay any attention to his statement about pots, rings, and Babbo. As you will see, it almost cost me my life, but that’s getting the cart in front of the wagon.

      Drover and I answered The Call of the Wild, and Slim let us back into the house.

      He said good night, and went off to his bedroom. We curled up in front of the stove, and the next thing we knew…

      You probably thought I was going to say, “The next thing I knew, it was daylight.” Not quite. The next thing I knew, it was about four o’clock in the morning. The stove had burned down to embers, and the house had gotten cold.

      This problem can be corrected if a certain member of the household will get out of his warm bed, collect an arm-load of wood from the wood pile on the porch, and chunk up the stove. Dogs don’t do wood, and sometimes Slim doesn’t either. He lets the fire die down and covers up his head with a wool blanket, and the house gets cold.

      In other words, this was not a Dog Problem. It was a Human Problem, but we dogs were left to cope with the aftermaths of the consequences. We shivered on a cold floor, and tried to sleep.

      Drover was making his usual orchestra of weird sounds: chirps, hicks, snorts, grunts, and whistles. Who can sleep through such noise? Well, I tried. That’s where we were—me trying to sleep and Drover making more noise than a room full of monkeys.

      But then he did something unusual. He sat up and said, “Hank, I’m thirsty.”

      I had put my calls on hold, but somehow this one got through, and I replied, “Rubbish. If you were thirty, the sandwiches would be growing sideways.”

      The voice came again. “No, I said I’m thirsty.”

      “That’s impossible. We haven’t had Wednesday yet and Thursday doesn’t grow on trees.”

      “Hank, wake up. You’re babbling.”

      I lifted my head and saw…something, maybe a dog. Yes, it was a dog. “If Babylon is such a great place, why don’t you move there and leave me alone?” I blinked my eyes. “Where are we?”

      “We’re in Slim’s living room. I’m Drover, remember me?”

      I narrowed my eyes and studied him. “We’ve met before?”

      “About ten thousand times.”

      “No wonder I’m so tired.” I struggled to my feet and took a few steps. “Something’s wrong with my legs. I’m walking crooked.”

      “You’re still asleep.”

      “I am not asleep. I’ve been awake for hours.” I stopped and turned to face him.

      “Don’t

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