The Frozen Rodeo. John R. Erickson

      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. The mystery began in the spring, as I recall, a few weeks after Christmas. Wait. Christmas comes in the month of December, and the last time I checked, December falls in the winter, not the spring.

      Hencely, the mystery couldn’t have begun in the spring, so disregard the previous message. The mystery began in the wintertime, January, yes of course, when Slim and I found ourselves roping cattle in downtown Twitchell during an ice storm.

      Oops, you’re not supposed to know about that because it comes later in the story. See, what comes later can’t come sooner, so let’s be very quiet about this and not blab it around, okay? We won’t tell anyone that Miss Viola was there and so were the police. Oh, and the dogcatcher. Shhhh.

      Now let’s get to the business of the fire. It was in the winter, the very worst time for your house to burn down. I was the one who first saw the flames and turned in the alarm, so I know what I’m talking about. I mean, I was inside the house.

      It was a very tense and scary situation, and already I’m wondering if we should go on with the story. You know how I am about the little children: give ‘em a few thrills and let ‘em have fun, but don’t load ‘em down with the scariest parts of my work.

      Hey, a dog in my position is trained to cope with the scary stuff—the crinimal investigations, the constant battle with the Charlies, the Red Alert emergencies, and fires of all kinds—but the kids don’t have that kind of preparation.

      What do you think? Should we plunge into the story or call it quits and go do something else?

      I figured that’s what you’d say. Okay, you’d better grab hold of something stout and hang on. Here we go.

      We’ve already decided that it happened in the wintertime. Drover and I had pretty muchly moved our base of operations from the gas tanks down to Slim Chance’s shack, two miles east of ranch headquarters.

      Why? Because Slim was a bachelor cowboy who allowed the Elite Troops of the Security Division to stay inside the house on cold winter nights, and that was a big deal. He had a nice wood-burning stove in the living room and we made our camp on the floor, near the stove. His carpet was as thin as the seat of his pants, but all in all, it was a great place to be on a cold winter night.

      We had made it through the deep dark of the night with no emergency calls to interrupt our sleep. We were safe, warm, and comfortable on the floor. I don’t recall what woke me up…wait, yes I do, a yellow jacket wasp dropped from the ceiling and landed on my head.

      We don’t expect wasps to fall on our heads in January. In a normal year, we don’t even see a wasp in January. Why? I’m not sure. Most usually they show up in the spring, hang around all summer, and make a nuisance of themselves in the fall, and they’re gone by the time snow arrives.

      Maybe they fly south with the birds. Maybe they buzz themselves to death in the fall, and that’s why you find all those crunchy dead ones around window sills. But the point is that we never see them in January, but that particular January, we were seeing plenty of them. They were still lurking around, and nobody on my ranch was glad about it, especially me.

      Do we have time for this? I mean, talking about yellow jacket wasps seems a waste of time, especially when we have classified information that our house was fixing to burn down around our heads. On the other hand, wasps are a pretty serious threat to public safety, so maybe we should say a few more words about them.

      The main point here is that your average wasp is armed and dangerous. He carries a loaded stinger on the end of his tail and has no respect for the rights of people or dogs. One day a wasp crawled into Slim’s boot and guess what happened when he