The Case of the Vanishing Fishhook. John R. Erickson

      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. It all began one dark night in July, as I recall. Yes, it was July. We’d already had June, and July is the month that follows June, right? Anyhow, that’s the way it usually works, so, yes, we were in the month of July.

      I was sleeping on my gunnysack bed beneath the gas tanks, minding my own business and trying to recover from the grinding routine of running my ranch. If I’d had anything in particular on my mind, the last thing on my mind would have been fishing. Or swallowing a fishhook. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that I would ever swallow a fishhook or that I would have to be rushed to the . . .

      Oops. I’m getting ahead of myself. Forget I said anything about a fishhook. Just skip it.

      Where were we? Oh yes, exhausted and asleep under the gas tanks. Maybe you’ve heard the expression “dog-tired,” as in the statement, “He was dog-tired.”

      Well, there’s a reason why such an expression exists, and it has nothing to do with fishing or fishhooks. The reason is that a dog such as myself has to put in eighteen hours a day to keep the ranch going. At the end of one of those long days—and we’re talking about days when the temperature climbs up to a hundred degrees or even higher—at the end of one of those scorching summer days, a guy staggers home at ten o’clock at night, falls into his gunnysack bed, and tries to grab a few winks of sleep, so he’ll be ready to do it all over again come daylight.

      To use the old expression, he’s “dog-tired.”

      Yes, the work and worry, the cares and responsibilities of running my ranch had just about worn me down to a shadow of my former self, and there I was on the old gunnysack, trying to recover from all the exhaustion and so forth.

      That’s when I awoke and heard the sounds of someone or something creeping around in the darkness. It must have been around five o’clock in the morning, quite a bit too early for anyone on our outfit to be creeping around.

      Most of your ordinary ranch mutts would have ignored the sound and gone back to sleep. Not me. As you may know, I’m Head of Ranch Security. I’m also pretty serious about it. When someone is creeping around my ranch before daylight, I want to know who it is and who gave him permission to be out there in the dark.

      I lifted my head and tried to coordinate the position of my ears so as to maximize their ability to gather in sounds and vibrations. It’s pretty important that a dog get those ears pointed in the proper direction, see, otherwise he’ll end up listening to nonsense signals that can throw him off the track of the trail.

      Well, I went right to work—activated the Earatory Scanner Network and began “sweeping,” as we call it, the entire Western Quadrant of headquarters. And suddenly I found myself picking up signals that . . . well, just didn’t make much sense.

      See, my left ear was beaming data saying that someone, perhaps a human person, was out there in the darkness. But my right ear was sending a totally different report to Data Control. It said that we were picking up an enemy submarine on radar.

      Pretty shocking, huh? You bet it was. I mean, those two reports were very different, yet both had been gathered by my very own ears. Something was wrong here.

      A lot of your ordinary ranch mutts would have considered it a hopeless situation. They would have quit and gone back to sleep. Not me, fellers. One of those reports was phoney and I intended to run Diagnostics until I found the error.

      I mean, if we had an enemy submarine running loose on the ranch, someone needed to know about it and start barking an alarm, right? I decided to check with my Assistant of the Watch to see if he’d been picking up any strange signals on his equipment.

      “Drover, wake up. Report to the bridge at once.”

      “Bridge over troubled porkchops . . . lorkin murgle snork.”

      “We’ve got a problem. We’re getting garbage reports on the Earatory Scanners.”

      “No thanks, I just ate, and there’s too many potato peelings.”

      “Not potato peelings, Drover. We have reason to think it might be an enemy submarine.”

      His head came up. “Hank, is that you?”