The Fling. John R. Erickson

      Wait. Watch this.

      SNAP!

      Got him, blew him right out of the sky! Heh heh. Say good-bye to another tormenting fly.

      Okay, back to work. Where were we? We were discussing . . . I don’t remember.

      It’ll come to me in a second.

      Be patient. I’ve contacted Data Control. They’re working on it.

      We’ve had some nice sunsets lately, haven’t we? Oh, and did you hear . . .

      Ralph! That’s what we were talking about. Okay, now we’re cooking.

      You remember Dogpound Ralph? Basset hound, long ears, sad eyes, drooping face. He lived at the Twitchell dog pound and we’d been pals for a long time. Well, who’d have thought that old slow-talking, slow-walking Ralph would run away from the dogcatcher and . . .

      We weren’t talking about Ralph. That comes later, but you’re not supposed to know, so forget that I said anything about Ralph. In fact, I didn’t. I said nothing, almost nothing at all, about Ralph.

      It was August on the ranch. It was August everywhere in the world. I awoke around dawn, which means that I had caught a few winks of sleep on my gunnysack bed.

      Have I mentioned that I’m Head of Ranch Security? I am, and it’s a grueling job—eighteen hours a day, sometimes twenty or even thirty. Hour after hour of patrolling headquarters, chasing monsters out of the bushes, barking at smart-aleck birds and passing airplanes, barking up the sun every morning, humbling the local cat, you name it.

      On and on, the work never ends, and sometimes I have to go days, weeks, even months without sleep. Okay, I don’t suppose I’ve ever gone months without sleep . . . or even weeks, but days, yes. Sometimes I go days without . . . okay, except for naps. I grab a nap when I can, but you get the picture.

      This is a very tough job. It’s a killer. No ordinary dog could take it. But I am no ordinary dog.

      Anyways, I had managed to finish up the night’s patrol work around two a.m. Confident that my ranch would make it through another night, I returned, exhausted, to my office/bedroom beneath the gas tanks.

      Drover was already there, of course. He’s always there, growing roots in his gunnysack bed and sleeping his life away. He was making his usual orchestra of odd sounds: grunting, wheezing, yipping, snoring. He does all that stuff in his sleep. Sometimes I just sit there and listen, and marvel at all the weird noises he makes.

      I listened to him for a while, then tried to force my body to relax. Some dogs can do that, you know, impose stern mental discipline upon their bodily parts and force them to relax. That’s what I needed, to relax and rewind. Unwind.

      I couldn’t do it. I tried, but my body was as tense as molten steel and my mind was racing along at a hundred miles an hour. I tried everything. I stared at the moon, listened to the night birds, took deep breaths, and even counted sheep, which is tricky on a cattle ranch. We have no sheep, don’t you see.

      Nothing helped. I was wide awerp and there was no chunk that I would be able to snerp. No, I would just hack to sit there, bonking the honking . . . snork murk sizzle .