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      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. As you might have noticed, this story is called The Case of the Kidnapped Collie. Pretty spooky, huh? You bet it is.

      In fact, it’s so spooky that I can’t reveal the collie’s name. It might give the kids too much of a scare. See, I happen to know that this certain unnamed collie is popular with the kids, and if they knew she was going to get captured by a ferocious cannibal . . .

      Oops, I didn’t want to mention that either, the cannibal part. Forget I said it. Let’s just say that I was misquoted. I was discussing camels and you thought I said “cannibals,” but I didn’t.

      I said nothing, almost nothing at all, about collies or cannibals, and now we can get on with the story.

      Have we discussed bird dogs lately? Maybe not, and maybe we should. I don’t like ’em, never have, and the main reason I don’t like ’em is that I’ve known a few . . . well, one anyway . . . and I didn’t like him, not even a little bit.

      Remember Plato, the stupid, spotted, sticktailed, dumb-bunny bird dog? You might recall that Plato was . . . I don’t know what.

      How can you describe a guy who shows up at the very exact moment when your fondesh wist is never to see him again? Fondest wish, I should say. At the very exact moment when it appears that you will finally get to spend a few precious moments with the woman of your dreams, there he is—the bird dog.

      He shows up like flies at a picnic—unwanted, uncalled for, totally irrelevant to the situation.

      Always grinning. Always the perfect gentleman. So kind and friendly it makes you ill, but what really makes you ill is that you want so badly to beat him up.

      But who can beat up a guy who’s always nice? That’s the problem with Plato. He’s too dumb to know how much everybody hates him, and he’s too nice to be told in the usual manner—a thrashing.

      So he ends up winning the heart of my girlfriend, and I end up wondering how dumb he can be when he wins all the time. And the more I think about it, the madder I get, and excuse me for a moment while I bang my head against this tree over here.

      BONK! BONK! BONK!

      That’s better. Where were we? Oh yes, trees.

      Trees are large plants. Their roots grow down­ward while their branches grow upward toward the sky. Nobody knows why they do it that way, but the important thing about trees is that you should never bang your head against one.

      Their bark is worse than their bite, you might say.

      A little humor there. Trees don’t actually bark, see, but they have this hard layer of . . . maybe you got it.

      Okay. All trees should be equipped with a sign that says, “Don’t bang your head on this thing, no matter how much you hate bird dogs, because it will mess you up and the tree will never feel a thing.”

      But the point is that I had no use for bird dogs and had no reason for ever wanting to see one again. But I did.

      It all began . . . hmmm, when did it begin? Was it in the summer? No. Winter? No. Spring? Don’t think so. Then that leaves . . .

      . . . the leaves were turning yellow. Okay, here we go. It was in the fall of the year, of course it was, you ninny, because that’s when bird season starts, and it follows from simple logic that you begin seeing bird dogs around the start of bird season.

      Sorry, I shouldn’t have called you a ninny. That was uncalled for. You did your best and you can’t help it that your memory moves quite a bit slower than . . . well, mine, you might say. Mine operates at fifty megahurts and it hurts pretty mega right now after banging my head against the stupid . . .

      I’ve got a headache and I shouldn’t have called you a ninny.

      Anyways, it all began in the spring of the year, toward the end of November, as I recall. Yes, it’s all coming back now. We’d had several cold fronts and the mornings were cool and crisp. The china­berries had shed most of their leaves and the days were getting shorter.

      And on one of those lovely autumn afternoons, I happened to overhear a conversation between Slim and Loper, the two cowboys on this outfit.

      Or let’s put it this way. They think of themselves as cowboys and they take pride in their cowboy skills, but on this particular afternoon they found themselves involved in some serious noncowboy work.

      They were doing some reconstruction work on the feed barn, see, and they had reported to the job site in their carpenter costumes. Instead