The Fling. John R. Erickson
bushed, exhausted, and the next thing I knew . . .
HUH?
I heard cattle, a whole herd of . . . I hearded cattle, a whole . . .
Let’s back off and try that again. Suddenly my ears picked up the sounds of approaching cattle. Hundreds of ’em, thousands of ’em. They were mooing and bawling, and I could hear the thunder of their hooves on the ground.
Perhaps this was a dream. Yes, surely it was. I was dreaming that I had just taken the job as U.S. Marshal in Dodge City, Kansas. The local citizenry had finally gotten fed up with lawlessness and insolent cats, and they had begged me to take the marshal’s job and clean up the town.
And now, what was this? Somebody was driving a herd of cattle right down the middle of Main Street? Not only that, but some of the dingbat cows had just walked into my office!
I raised my head and cracked open both eyes. I found myself staring straight into the eyes of thirty-seven thousand cows.
I lifted my eyes and narrowed my lips. Wait. I narrowed my eyes and lifted my lips, there we go, and initiated a deep rumbling growl in the throatalary region of my throat.
“Get out of my office, you brainless spuds, or I’ll hang the whole lot of you.”
One of them, a red baldface, had the nerve to extend his neck and stick his nose right in my face. He sniffed me. Was I going to sit there and take that? A sniffing? In my own office? I, the U.S. Marshal of . . .
Huh?
I blinked my eyes several times. My gaze swept the surrounding countryside, and suddenly it struck me that . . . uh . . . this wasn’t Dodge City. It was the ranch—my ranch. Perhaps I had dozed, yes, finally sleep had chased me down and captured me for a few moments of healing slumber. In other words, I was no longer marshal of Dodge City, and therefore my office was not being invaded by a herd of unruly cows. I blinked again, and waited for the cows to disappear. They didn’t. I poked myself to be sure I wasn’t still dreaming. I wasn’t, so what were all these cows doing . . .
“Drover, wake up, Code Three! We’ve got cows in the office!”
It was true. The cow herd that usually stayed in the home pasture now had our office surrounded, and some had even wandered inside.
Drover’s head shot up and his eyes popped open. They were crooked, and so were his ears. He stared into the faces of the invading multitudes. After taking one look, he just . . . vanished. I mean, one second he was there, and the next he was gone. ZOOM! I don’t know where he went. The machine shed, most likely. That was his usual hiding place when he felt the need to flee from Reality as It Really Is.
So there I was, alone, one against thirty-seven thousand trespassing cows. Was I scared? Maybe, a little. Okay, I was scared, sure I was scared, and who wouldn’t have been scared? If you woke up and found a hundred and thirty-seven thousand crazed bovines in your office, wouldn’t you be scared?
But I didn’t run, that’s the important point. No sir, I did what any true red-blooded, top-of-the-line American cowdog would have done. I started snapping at noses and went straight into a barking routine that we call Full Air Horns.
Heh, heh. That got their attention, the little dummies, only they weren’t so little. In fact, they were huge dummies, but it got their attention. They shrank back from the piercing blare of my Full Air Horns, formed a half-circle, and stared at me.
I pulled myself up to my full height of massiveness. I had ’em going now. “Okay, darlings, I’ll make this brief. You came into my office without knocking and you’ve disturbed my sleep. I don’t like that. Now, the next silly son of a gun who steps in here without permission will face the usual consequences. He’ll walk out with no ears and tooth tracks over ninety percent of his body. Who wants a piece of that, huh? Any takers?”
You won’t believe . . .
Never mind, just skip it.
Nothing happened. They all, uh, ran away. Fled in terror.
Okay, maybe they didn’t, but only because they were so DUMB. How dumb would you have to be to walk right into the office of the Head of Ranch . . . well, they did, five of ’em. Walked right back into my office, after I’d warned them and told them . . .
What was I supposed to do, stand there and get squashed under the hooves of a whole herd of wandering cows? Heck no. I, uh, left the office, shall we say, and okay, let’s go right to the bitter truth.
I ran. I’m not ashamed that I ran. I was glad that I ran, because if I hadn’t run, I would have been trampled and possibly eaten by these huge dog-eating cows, and you wouldn’t have any more story to read.
See, I did it for YOU. Sometimes a dog has to put aside his own selfish desires and think of somebody . . .
The trouble was that I had no place to run that wasn’t populated by wild crazed cows. They were everywhere! They had my office complex completely surrounded, so by George, I just lowered my head and bulled my way through the middle of ’em.
Oh, and I barked. I’ll admit that it wasn’t my best bark. It was one we call “Let Me Out of Here,” and it was more of a squeak than my usual deep manly tone of barking, but this was an emergency situation.
When those cows saw and heard me ripping through their ranks, they bolted and ran, and suddenly I realized . . . hey, they thought I was chasing them! And they were scared. In other words, I had somehow managed to turn this deal around!
Yes, they ran like the cowards they really were, and once I had ’em in blind retreat, I showed no mercy. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that chasing cattle was something of a No-No on our outfit, but . . .
“Hank!”
. . . I went after ’em anyway. The fools. The idiots. Did they think I was going to run from them? Ha. Little did they know . . .
“Hank! Get out of the way, you’re going to cause a stampede!”
HUH? Had somebody . . .
You probably don’t need to know what happened next. Besides, it’s classified information.
Sorry.
Chapter Two: Drover Wants to Be a Truck
Nothing happened. Honest.
You thought I heard a voice? Someone calling my name? It was just the, uh, call of a bird. A quail down along the creek. They chirp and twitter, you know, and make a whistling noise: “Bob-white! Bob-white!”
Who or whom is Bob White? We don’t know that, and since it involves birds, we really don’t care. The point is that your bobwhite quails make that sound, and it sounded a whole lot like “Hank.” No kidding. And so the voice we heard . . .
Okay, might as well admit it. It wasn’t a quail calling. It was Loper and Slim, the cowboys on this outfit, and the deal was . . .
Had anyone notified ME that they would be rounding up the home pasture first thing in the morning, or shipping steers or driving them right through my office? I mean, I’m Head of Ranch Security. It’s my job to schedule things and direct traffic and make sure . . .
How did they expect me to run the ranch when they planned these events without consulting me? One minute I’m catching a few moments of precious sleep, and the next thing I know, I’ve got a herd of cows running through my office.
Steers, actually. They were steers, not cows. Your cows are adult females who deliver baby calves, while your steers are grown calves who are ready to go to market. But the crucial detail here is that nobody bothered to inform me.
Well,