LITMIR.BIZ

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don’t think so. Seems like you woke me up.”

      “Hmm, that’s odd. Why would I have awakened you in the middle of the night? It must have been something important, but I can’t . . . Drover, I’m almost sure that you woke me up. What was the reason? Concentrate. Try to remember.”

      “Well, okay, let’s see here.”

      There was a long moment of silence. “Drover, did you go back to sleep?”

      “No, I’m thinking. I don’t think too fast in the dark.”

      “I see. What does darkness have to do with your thought processes?”

      “Well, when I can’t see anything, it’s hard to think. I guess. Does that make sense?”

      “No. Your brain lives in the dark all the time. It’s inside your head, don’t you see, and the inside portion of your head is dark.”

      “I’ll be derned. How did you know that?”

      “Because you have no windows.”

      “What about my eyes?”

      “They’re brown.”

      “Thanks.”

      There was another long moment of silence. “Drover, I’m beginning to feel that our conversation lacks meaning and purpose. Why are we awake at this hour of the night, and why are we talking at all? We should both be asleep.”

      “Yeah, I think we were, but then we woke up.”

      “Right, and that brings us to the nut of the fruit. What woke us up?”

      “I was trying to remember that, but then it was too dark. Let’s see here.”

      “Wait, hold everything. I remember now. You woke me up and said something about . . . picking up an enemy submarine, I think.”

      “That sounds pretty crazy. With my teeth?”

      “What?”

      “I said, did I pick it up with my teeth?”

      “Pick what up with your teeth?”

      “The enemy submarine.”

      “What are you talking about?”

      “Well, I don’t know. You said I said I picked up an enemy submarine in my jaws and . . . did something with it.”

      “I did not say that. In the first place, submarines are very heavy. Number two, there isn’t enough water on this ranch to support a submarine. And number three, none of our enemies own a submarine. Therefore, the weight of the evidence suggests that you are talking nonsense.”

      “Can I go back to bed?”

      “Not just yet.” I stood up and walked a few steps away. “Drover, I think I’m beginning to understand this deal.”

      “Oh good.”

      “You see, we were both in a deep sleep, then something woke us up. I think this bizarre conversation can be traced back to the fact that—” Suddenly, I whirled around and faced him. “Drover, up until this very moment, we’ve been half-asleep. That would account for your claim that you ate a submarine.”

      “Yeah, and maybe it was a submarine sandwich, not a real submarine.”

      “Now we’re getting somewhere. That makes sense, doesn’t it? You were dreaming about food.”

      “Yeah, I love food. I’d rather eat food than anything. And I am kind of hungry.”

      “See? There you are. Your sleeping mind transformed your hunger into a dream about a submarine sandwich. It all fits together. We were merely talking in our respective sleeps, Drover. It could have happened to any two dogs on the globe.”

      “If we live on a globe, how come we don’t fall off?”

      “Good question, son. Ask it again some time.” I hurried back to my gunnysack. “Good night. Hold my calls and don’t wake me up again.”

      “Nightie-night.”

      “Nightie . . . snork murgle muff womp.”

      “Hank? I just heard something down at the corrals.”

      “Murf snirk puffing triangles.”

      “Hank, I think you’d better wake up. Someone’s down there, no fooling. I see a light in the saddle shed.”

      I sat up, pried open my eyes, and rushed to the radar screen of my mind. There, before my very eyes, as plain as day, I saw . . .

      I leaped to my feet. “Holy smokes, Drivel, there’s an enemy submarine down by the saddle shed!”

      “My name’s Drover.”

      “Never mind your name. Battle stations! Red Alert!”

      “It was only a sandwich.”

      “This is no sandwich, Drover, and it’s no drill. This is the real stuff. Come on, son, we’d better go in for a closer look.”

      And with that, we went streaking down to the saddle shed to find out exactly what that submarine was doing on my ranch.

      Chapter Two: Okay, Maybe It Wasn’t a Submarine

      We need to get something straight right here. You remember that report of an enemy submarine on the ranch? It turned out to be incorrect. There was no submarine, just as I had suspected.

      See, when we make rapid shifts from asleepness to awakeness, it sometimes causes interference patterns to develop in our, uh, instruments. We get false images on our Earatory Radar and sometimes . . .

      It’s too complicated to explain. It was an instrumentation problem, and once I had made the sprint down to the corrals, everything had cleared up and I began to realize that the business about the “enemy submarine” was bogus.

      It wasn’t an enemy submarine. It was Slim Chance, the hired hand on this outfit. But what the heck was he doing down at the corrals in the middle of the night? At first I thought he might have been walking in his sleep. Then I remembered that his shack . . . house . . . the place where he stayed and slept at night was two miles down the creek, which made the Sleepwalking Hypo­tenuse highly unlikely.

      Nobody walks two miles in his sleep. So I probed the matter deeper and in more detail until I came up with a solid explanation.

      You know what he was doing? He’d gotten out of bed and had driven up to headquarters to check on a first-calf heifer that was about to deliver her first calf.

      Have we discussed heifers and the process of calving them out? Maybe not. It’s an important job and I happen to know quite a bit about it. Here’s the deal. Every year the ranch has to replace old cows with young cows. Young cows are called “heifers,” and if you want to know why, ask a heifer. I don’t know.

      What would be wrong with calling them “young cows”? That would be much simpler and then you wouldn’t have to remember whether “heifer” is spelled “heifer” or “hiefer” or “heffer,” but nobody asked my opinion.

      Every year our ranch saves 20 or 30 heifers, and when the time comes for them to deliver their calves, Slim has to watch them closely, because sometimes heifers have trouble. If they don’t get help from the local cowboy-vet, the calf might die, and sometimes the heffer . . . heifffer . . . sometimes the young cow will die too.

      Slim has to check them in the middle of the night and sometimes he just sleeps down at the barn with them. If they have trouble shelling out the calf, he assists them.

      He calls himself “Dr. Slim,” but I think that’s

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