The Case of the Prowling Bear. John R. Erickson

      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Let’s get right to this business of the bear. I can tell you exactly when and how the rumors got started.

      It was the first week in January, as I recall. Yes, it was the second week in January—long nights, cold gloomy days. Or was it February? On this ranch, there isn’t much difference between January and February, so it doesn’t matter.

      The mystery began when it began, in the cold of winter, only on that particular day, it wasn’t cold. In fact, it was warm and spring-like, almost sixty degrees. Slim shed his coat around nine o’clock that morning and shucked off his wool vest about an hour later.

      Slim, Drover, and I were out feeding cattle. In the dead of winter, it’s something we do every day. We drive to the same pastures and pour out feed to the same cattle, who always give the impression that they’ve never eaten a bite of store-bought feed in their whole lives, which makes us wonder why we bother.

      Let’s face it. Cows are greedy, dumb, and have no sense of gertrude. Gratitude. They have no gertrude of gratitude. It doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much feed you pour out for them, they’re never happy and they always want more. Hence, don’t stake your career on pleasing a cow. It won’t happen.

      We poured out feed in the first two pastures and were chugging along the county road, on our way to the next pasture. Drover stared off into the vapors of space. Slim hummed a tune and concentrated on his driving.

      If this had been the middle of summer, he would have been swerving from one side of the road to the other, trying to smash those jumbo grasshoppers that get almost as big as a lizard. But this was wintertime (no grasshoppers for entertainment), so he had nothing to do but drive.

      Me? I was in my usual position on the Shotgun Side of the pickup, and perhaps I had dozed off. Yes, I’m sure I had, because…well, active minds tend to doze when there isn’t much to keep them occupied. But that changed all at once, when I heard the screech of brakes and went flying into the dashboard. Next thing I knew, I was sprawled on the floor with something lying on top of me.

      It took me a moment to respond. “Battle stations! Code Three! We’ve been rammed! Flood tubes one and three! There’s a dead body on my face!”

      I pushed, shoved, and scrambled, and finally pried myself out from under the pile of corpses that had…huh? Okay, relax, false alarm. Ha ha. The pile of corpses turned out to be Drover, and he was still alive. Ha ha. Boy, sometimes the mind plays tricks.

      I blinked my eyes and tried to put on a professional face. “What’s the meaning of this, and why were you smashing my face?”

      “Well, he slammed on the brakes and we ended up on the floor.”

      “Who slammed on the brakes?” I studied the face in front of me. When we had begun this conversation, I had seen two faces, but now they had merged into one. “Okay, you’re Drover and Slim’s the driver, but why did he slam the brakes and sling us to the floor?”

      Drover shrugged and we both turned our gazes toward Slim Chance, the hired hand on this outfit. He was sitting behind the wheel, and looking a little…well, dazed, I guess you would say. After a moment, he said, “Dogs, you ain’t going to believe this. Would you like to guess what just ran across the road?”

      Oh brother. A rabbit? A coyote? Coon, fox, badger, reindeer, moose…what did we care?

      He shook his head and let out a breath of air. “I think I’m wide awake and not any crazier than I was yesterday, but unless my eyes were playing tricks, I saw a bear run across the road.”

      He saw a BEAR run across the road? We didn’t have bears in the Texas Panhandle. Bears lived in the mountains. We didn’t have mountains. No mountains, no bears. I had no idea what he’d seen, but it hadn’t been a bear.

      “You don’t believe me, do you?”

      Of course we didn’t believe him! I mean, the guy was famous for telling windy tales and pulling pranks on his dogs, right?

      “Hank, I saw a bear, honest.”

      Okay, you saw a bear. I saw an elephant. Could we get on with the business of feeding cattle?

      He put the pickup in gear and we drove on to the next pasture. Drover had been silent up to this point, and now he said, “Berries don’t grow in the wintertime.”

      “That’s true. Your strawberries and your blackberries make fruit in the summer. If you live on berries, that’s important information, but we don’t eat them, so what’s your point?”

      “Well, he saw he said a berry in the road.”