The Case of the Car-Barkaholic Bog. John R. Erickson

      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. It was in the fall of the year, seems to me. Yes, it was.

      October. Warm days, cool nights, the china­berries and elms showing the first colors of fall. And we’d just gotten in two truckloads of steers the week before.

      Busy time on the ranch, getting all those steers straightened out and ready to go out on wheat pasture. I’d been up day and night with those steers, and it had just about worn me down.

      I mean, overwork comes with the territory when you’re Head of Ranch Security. You expect it. Still, a guy needs a rest once in a while, a break from all the cares and responsibilities of running the ranch.

      I needed the rest, yes, but the rest of what followed the rest I didn’t need at all. Little did I know that I would find myself stranded in town, or that I would be drawn into a dangerous situation involving my sister Maggie and a terrible bully named Rambo.

      But that’s getting the kettle before the pot. We had received all these fresh cattle and we had a bunch of scrubs in the sick pen. I kind of like that sick-pen work. Some of us are born to take care of the sick and unfirmed, the crippled, and the lame. Not me. I was born to give ’em orders.

      What we do, see, is drive the steers into the crowding pen and shut the gate on them. Then we run, oh, seven or eight of them into the alley that leads to the doctoring chute.

      You ever see a top-of-the-line, blue-ribbon cowdog handle cattle in an alley? Very impressive. While the cowboys have a steer in the chute, I march up and down the alley, growling at the cattle and letting them know who’s running the show.

      Usually that’s all it takes to make the deal run smooth. Course, every now and then we get one that’s new to the sick pen and doesn’t know how to follow orders, and that’s when I earn my pay. I have thirty-seven different ways of biting reluctant steers to make ’em move.

      Yes, every once in a while I get kicked on the nose, but success is never free.

      We made a pretty good team, me and the cowboys, and it didn’t take us long to run twelve head through the chute. I might point out, though, that while we were working, Little Drover sat over by the water tank. Goofing off.

      That little mutt can find more ways to kill time and lollygag around than any dog I ever knew. For a while he watched the action, and now and then he would add his “yip-yip-yip.” Then he chewed on an old horn he’d found in the lot, and after he’d chewed on it for a while, he dug a hole and buried it—shoveled the dirt over it with his nose.