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      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. The mystery began on a warm day in the spring. That was the day Little Alfred and I set out in a covered wagon to explore the Wild West and I had to solve the Ominous Riddle of Fog. It was also the day that Pete the Barncat tried to eat a friend of mine.

      You probably don’t believe that Kitty tried to do such a thing, but he did. We’ll get to that in a minute, so be patient.

      Spring came hard that year. Which year? Great question. It’s important that we get the timing right on these things, because if you start off on the wrong foot, the footer you go, the wronger it gets.

      We dogs have two right feet, don’t you see (the front and the back), but also two wrong feet (the back and the front), so we have to be careful in making these calculations. Timing is crucial in the Security Business.

      Even so, I don’t remember which year it was. It came after the previous year but right before the next one, and that’s as close as we can get. Sometimes we have to use our best estimate. In the Security Business, timing isn’t everything.

      The important thing is that spring followed winter, but winter didn’t want to leave. We had a few pretty days and then got blasted by another cold front—warm day, cold day; pretty day, ugly day with sleet and cold wind, back and forth.

      A dog gets tired of that pattern after a while and wishes that winter would just go away and leave us alone, and you’ll be surprised to know that we have a Barking Routine that we used to hasten the approach of spring. We called it, “Winter, Take a Hike.”

      We used it quite a lot that year, but I’m sorry to report that…well, it didn’t seem to do much good. It appeared that the weather was doing pretty muchly what it wanted to do, never mind what those of us in the Security Division had to say about it.

      I don’t suppose you’d want to hear our Barking Routine, would you? You would? Well, let’s think about that for a second. See, it’s pretty heavily classified, which means that we don’t allow just anyone to hear it. If the Charlies ever got hold of it, there’s no telling how much damage they might cause.

      On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t hurt if we lifted the veil just enough to give you a peek. We’ll try it and see what happens, but you have to promise not to blab it around. Promise?

      Okay, here we go. Check this out.

      Winter Take a Hike

      Barking Routine #034-66-772

      CAUTION!!

      Pretty Heavily Classified Information!

      Winter, take a hike.

      Excuse us, but we’d like

      For you to leave, go fly a kite,

      Walk or run or ride a bike,

      Just go…away!

      We’re sick of wind and chill.

      It’s like a dentist’s drill.

      We’ve had enough, we’ve had our fill

      Of winter’s drab and bitter pill,

      So go…away!

      We hate to make a scene,

      But we must intervene.

      We’re tired of brown and shriveled things,

      So take a hike and bring the green.

      And go…AWAY!

      End of Pretty Heavily Classified Section

      PLEASE DESTROY!

      So there you are. What do you think? Pretty awesome, huh? You bet. A lot of people think that ranch dogs just lie around, taking naps and waiting for scraps, but that’s only a tiny part of what we do. There are levels to this job that the general public just doesn’t know about.

      They’re not supposed to know. We don’t want them to know. We’d much rather conduct our business under the cover of secrecy.

      Anyway…where were we? I don’t remember.

      Does anybody remember what we were discussing?

      Huh. I’m drawing a blank.

      Wait, hold everything. Springtime. Now we’re cooking.

      Okay, as usual, my day started before daylight and I had already barked up the sun by the time Loper and Slim showed up at the machine shed. They climbed into a pickup and drove off to a field east of headquarters. As I recall, they were plowing the ground and planting feed, and seemed to be in a hurry to get it done before a rain.

      The weather report on the radio was calling for a 50% chance of thunderstorms, don’t you see. Normal people see that as a 50% chance of nothing, but ranchers and cowboys get excited about it.

      I gave them an escort all the way to the mailbox, then returned to headquarters and put in a few hours doing Bird Patrol. See, the down-side of springtime is that we get an invasion of tweet-tweets. They come from everywhere and perch in my trees, without permission to perch in my trees, and we’re talking about thousands of little birdie

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