LITMIR.BIZ

      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. The adventure began in July, as I recall. Yes, it was the Fourth of July, and Drover and I were spending a few days at Slim’s bachelor shack on the banks of Wolf Creek.

      Normally, we work out of our bedroom/office under the gas tanks at Ranch Headquarters, but now and then we enjoy hanging out at Slim’s place. For one thing, he has no cats, so the Nuisance Factor drops to zero. That’s a big plus right there. It’s common knowledge that 87 percent of all the problems in this world are caused by cats. No cats, no problems.

      For another thing, Slim is a bachelor cowboy, a generous soul who doesn’t mind letting his dogs stay inside the house. In fact, I think he enjoys having us around. He’s the kind of man who talks to his dogs and sometimes he even shares his supper with us. Slim’s suppers aren’t always a great experience (he eats a lot of canned mackerel sandwiches), but show me a man who talks to his dogs, and I’ll show you a man with refined taste and deep intelligence.

      But the point is that Drover and I were spending the night at Slim’s place, stretched out on the living room floor. Or let’s put it this way. We started the night stretched out on the living room floor, but sometime in the early morning hours . . .

      His carpet was old and thin, don’t you see, and after several hours, I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep. I tried to scratch up a soft spot, but threadbare carpet doesn’t offer much in the scratching-up department.

      At that point, I did what any normal, healthy American dog would have done. I crept down the long hallway to Slim’s bedroom and . . . well, checked out the accommodations, let us say. See, Slim slept in a bed and beds are pretty nice places to, uh, spend a long night. Heh heh.

      Hovering beside the bed in the inky black ink of the darkness, I lifted my ears and took a reading on Earatory Scanners. I heard . . . you know, my first thought was that someone had driven a truck into the house, but that didn’t make sense. I took another reading and came up with a more reasonable answer.

      Slim was snoring. Yes, he was a champion snorer, and that’s what he was doing. Good. If he was snoring, he was asleep. Heh heh. This gave me the signal to begin a procedure we call Enter the Bed.

      It’s a pretty complicated procedure, and most of your ordinary mutts wouldn’t take the time to do it. They’ll just go blundering into the bed and hope for the best, but what usually happens is that the dog gets yelled at and sent out of the room.

      Not me, fellers. I take the time to do it right. By George, if you can’t do it right, with patience and loving care, you shouldn’t do it at all.

      Here’s the procedure. You might want to take some notes.

      Okay, you start by placing one paw on the bed. I prefer the right front paw, but the left front might work just as well. You place it on the bed, press down, and wait for a response. If you get no response, you move deeper into the program, placing the other front paw on the bed.

      This is where it gets complicated. You have to transfer all the weight of your body from your back legs, which are still on the floor, to your front legs, which are in position on the bed. This step in the procedure works better if you have a set of enormous muscular shoulders, and I do.

      In the Weight Transfer Sequence, you shift all your weight from back legs to front legs, lift the hind legs off the floor, and give them a soft landing on the surface of the bed. If the mission has to be scrubbed, it will usually come at this crucial point, when your full weight is balanced on the edge of the bed.

      It was a very tense moment. I activated Ear­atory Scanners and studied the monitor that showed Slim’s heartbeat, breathing patterns, and brain waves. All the signs appeared to be normal. But then . . .

      This came as a shock. Just as everything appeared to be normal, Slim hiccupped in his sleep! HICK! No kidding. It came as such a surprise, I almost canceled the mission. I mean, normal people don’t hiccup in their sleep, do they?

      Well, Slim did and you can put that one into the record books. It almost wrecked the mission, but I managed to keep control of things. I stood my ground and didn’t move a hair, and Slim went back to his normal snoring pattern.

      Whew! That was a close call.

      At that point, I went into Stealthy Creep and began inching my way . . . huh? Holy smokes, in the deep darkness at the foot of Slim’s bed, I encountered some kind of creature . . . a carbon-based life-form . . . something with hair and a doggish odor!

      I froze. Every hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. Who could it be? A stray dog from town? A prowling coyote that had somehow managed to break into Slim’s house and crawl into his bed? I did a quick search of our databases, looking for the names of anyone I might want to encounter on Slim’s bed in the middle of the night.