LITMIR.BIZ

      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Where should we start? Well, let’s start at the beginning and see where that leads. I already know where it’s going, but must be careful not to make scary statements about CENSORED or CENSORED.

      See, I’m not allowed to mention the buried deer, not yet. We didn’t find it until later, after I had almost been destroyed by something that was hiding in Slim’s ice box, but I’m not allowed to talk about that one either. Classified.

      For now, don’t worry about it. There’s no sense in watching the pot boil if you can’t spill the milk.

      The point is, the entire Security Division was covered up with work. Sleep? Forget it. Naps in the afternoon? Ha. We’re talking about double-shifts, no weekend passes, working days, nights, and holidays. We were being pushed to the limit.

      It was late spring, as I recall, yes, the middle of May, and it had been a bad spring on my ranch. We had missed our early grass-growing rains and were in the second or third year of an awful drought.

      Instead of getting April showers and May flowers, we’d gotten nonstop wind: hot wind, cold wind, north wind, south wind, west wind, wind from every direction except the one we wanted: east.

      What’s the big deal about an east wind? It brings moisture from somewhere, and it makes clouds that make rain. We weren’t sure exactly how that process worked, but we knew one thing for certain: boy, we needed a rain!

      In times of drought, our people get as cranky as badgers and can’t talk about anything else. When they go to the feed store, they talk about bare pastures and dying trees. When they go to church, they complain about our dusty roads. When they go to a wedding, they say such things as, “Congratulations, and I hope it brings a rain.”

      The drought had put everybody in a bad mood, but there wasn’t one thing we dogs could do about it. I mean, Drover and I had spent entire days barking at clouds, trying to shame them into forming up into decent thunderheads, but nothing had worked. We had tried every technique in the Cowdog Manual: Stern Barks, Coaxing Barks, Pleading Barks, and even Cloud-Rattling Barks. All our efforts amounted to zilch.

      So it came as a huge shock when, at 0600 in the morning of the morning of which we speak of which, I was awakened by a voice that boomed the message, “Holy cow, it’s raining!”

      I was bent over a desk piled high with papers and reports, time cards and spreadsheets, when the voice jolted me back to the Ordinary World. I leaped to my feet and opened my…that is, tried to focus my bleary eyes. They were very bleary from all the paperwork, don’t you see.