Hank the Cowdog and Monkey Business - John R. Erickson Hank the Cowdog

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times to get the knot out of my tongue. Some­times, when you repeat certain sounds over and over, the muscle fibers in the tongualary region begin to cramp up, don’t you see, causing the speaker to fixate on certain ridiculous sounds.

      It’s a humiliating affliction, and although we haven’t found the exact cause, we know that it most often occurs when the victim is trying to com­municate with morons. In the security business, we refer to it as Tongue Runamuckus, but there’s no need for you to remember all the scientific terminography.

      After a few moments, my tongue returned to its normal state and I marched back over to Drover.

      “Point One: We know from our intelligence reports that a certain cottontail rabbit lives in the pipes of this cattle guard. Point Two: We also know that at this hour of the morning he leaves the pipes and ventures out into the pasture to feed on green grass. Point Three: It’s our job to locate this rabbit while he’s in a feeding mode. And, Point Four: Our mission is to cut off his attempts to scamper back into the safety of the pipes of the cattle guard. Is that clear?”

      “Well . . . not really.”

      “Then never mind. We’ve got a job to do and you’ll just have to play it by ear.”

      “What?”

      “I said, you’ll just have to play it by ear.”

      “What?”

      “I said, you’ll just have to . . . something must be wrong with your ear, Drover.”

      He pounded on the side of his head with a front paw. “Something’s wrong with my ear.”

      “It’s probably full of wax.”

      “No, I haven’t seen any tacks.”

      I felt exhausted, dragged down into the dust by the forces of ignorance and anarchy. “Drover, look at me. Read my lips. Sometimes I think you’re trying to make a mockery of my life.”

      “I must have some wax in this ear.”

      “And, Drover, sometimes I think I hate you.”

      “Hank, there’s something I ought to tell you.”

      At last we were getting somewhere! The terrible truth had cut through the many layers of trash and had penetrated to the innermost garbage of his mind.

      “Yes, Drover? Go ahead and make your confession. It’ll hurt at first but in the long run, it’ll hurt even worse. Just blurt it out in your own words.”

      “Hank, that little cottontail rabbit just crawled into the pipes of the cattle guard.”

      HUH?

      My eyes darted from side to side, and slowly the pieces of the puzzle began falling into place. We had just been outfoxed by a rabbit, which was nothing to crow about.

      Chapter Two: The Mysterious Red Box Appears

      I turned my eyes back to Drover. “Well, are you happy now?”

      “Oh, about the usual, I guess.”

      “You’ve ruined the exercise and made a shambles of our entire morning’s work. The rabbit has entered the pipes of the cattle guard and now there’s no chance that we’ll get to chase him around.”

      “Well, I guess we can go back down to the gas tanks and catch up on our . . .”

      “Not so fast. Just because he gave us the slip doesn’t mean we’re going to quit and go home in disgrace. We’ll just have to bark him out. Battle stations, Drover, and commence barking!”

      We rushed to the north end of the cattle guard. I began the procedure by peering into one of the pipes and sniffing it out.

      “This is going to be easier than I thought. He’s in this middle pipe. We’ve got him trapped, and now all we have to do is surround him.”

      “How do we do that?”

      I removed my nose from the pipe and glared at him. “How do you think we do it, silly? A pipe has two openings, right? I have this opening covered and that leaves only one, right? Can you follow the logic to its conclusion or do I have to lead you to it?”

      “Well, let’s see. If you’ve got this end . . . maybe if I . . . I think I’ve got it. If I go down to the other end, we’ll have him surrounded.”

      “Very good, Drover, only you forgot the most important part of the whole procedure: Drop your front end to the ground, elevate your little hiney, wag your tail and bark!”

      “I don’t have much of a tail to wag.”

      “That’s correct. You may need to wag your hiney instead of your tail, since you have a stub tail.”

      “Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

      “Exactly. Now let’s go for it!”

      Drover scampered across the road, dropped down into the correct barking stance, stuck his nose into the pipe, and began barking. I did the same on my end and the excitement began.

      Let me pause here to point out that barking into a cattle guard pipe isn’t as easy as you might suppose. The problem is that a five-inch mouth won’t fit inside a four-inch pipe, so we have to narrow our barking arc down to something in the range of two-and-a-half to three inches.

      And still come out with a ferocious sound.

      Pretty tough, huh? You bet it was, but we did it.

      Five minutes into the procedure it occurred to me that something had gone wrong. Even though we had done some really spectacular barking, the rabbit was still inside the pipe.

      I raised up and went through my check list and discovered . . . “Drover, you’re barking in the wrong pipe! Move one pipe to the left.”

      “Oh, okay.”

      He did and we began the whole procedure over again from Step One. It took me another fifteen minutes to realize that we still had a flaw in the ointment.

      “Drover, I said to move over one pipe to the left.”

      “I did.”

      “No, you moved over one pipe to the right. Right is wrong.”

      “I’ll be derned. What’s left in this old world if right is wrong?”

      “Never mind the questions. Just move one pipe to the left and we’ll get on with it.”

      He shrugged and moved one pipe . . .

      “Drover, I told you to move to the left.”

      “I did.”

      “No, you moved to the right.”

      “No, I went left. See, here’s my left paw.”

      He held it up. It appeared to be a left paw, all right, but how could that be? Something strange was going on here, and I went into deep concentration to find a solution.

      “All right, Drover, I think I’ve found the missing piece of the puzzle. We’re standing on opposite sides, you see. All we have to do is swap ends and your left will become right.”

      We swapped ends and both moved one pipe to the left and . . . hmmm, that was odd. This time we both ended up on the wrong . . .

      “Drover, I’m beginning to suspect that there’s a mysterious magnetism in this cattle guard. It distorts the points of the compass and confuses our sense of direction.”

      “Yeah, but we don’t have a compass.”

      “But

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