The Fling Read online

  The Fling

  John R. Erickson

  Illustrations by Gerald L. Holmes

  Maverick Books, Inc.

  Publication Information

  MAVERICK BOOKS

  Published by Maverick Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 549, Perryton, TX 79070

  Phone: 806.435.7611

  www.hankthecowdog.com

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Children’s Books and Puffin Books, members of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2001.

  Currently published by Maverick Books, Inc., 2013

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © John R. Erickson, 2001

  All rights reserved

  Maverick Books, Inc. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59188-138-4

  Hank the Cowdog® is a registered trademark of John R. Erickson.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to Larry Shire and Karen Gottlieb, valued friends of Hank.

  Contents

  Chapter One Cows in My Office

  Chapter Two Drover Wants to Be a Truck

  Chapter Three We Apply the Secret Chemical Agent

  Chapter Four Yipes! I Get Trapped in a Cattle Truck!

  Chapter Five I Am Arrested on False Charges

  Chapter Six Ralph and I Make a Bold Escape

  Chapter Seven The Fling Begins

  Chapter Eight Our Secret Mission into the Yard

  Chapter Nine Weenie Waves Cloud My Thinking

  Chapter Ten Ralph Stole My Weenie Feast, the Scrounge

  Chapter Eleven Ralph’s Tragic Story

  Chapter Twelve Buzzards and Another Happy Ending

  Chapter One: Cows in My Office

  It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Here’s a question: What would a dog do if he suddenly found himself in town, lost and abandoned and twenty-five miles from home?

  A lot of your ordinary mutts would sit down and bawl. That’s what Drover would do, sit down and bawl and moan about his so-called bad leg. Not me. What I would do is what I did: go out on a wild fling in town, beat up all the local thugs, and then hike all the way back to the ranch—braving buzzards, howling winds, and bloodthirsty coyotes.

  Pretty impressive, huh? Well, that’s what I did.

  See, I’ve always had a taste for adventure. Some dogs don’t. They’re content to lie around on the porch and snap at flies. That can get pretty boring. Furthermore, we dogs aren’t allowed in Sally May’s yard, much less on her front porch, so you can see right away that sitting around on the porch and snapping at flies was never much of an option for me.

  Anyways, it all began one morning in August, as I recall, yes it was, because it was still summer and . . .

  Hmmm. At this very moment, even as we speak, a fly is crawling around on my nose. It tickles. I can’t go on until I do something about this. Hang on whilst I go into Fly Counter­measures.

  Fly Countermeasures aren’t the same as Flea Countermeasures. Did you know that? Maybe not. With fleas, we go into a Digging and Hacking Routine with one of our powerful hind legs, which of course is very strenuous. With flies, we merely watch the hateful little things buzz around our face until one of ’em gets careless, and then . . .

  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 . . .

  Okay, so maybe I drifted off at last. Who wouldn’t have drifted off? I was beat, 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 ra
ised 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, I was outraged. I was furious. I had come within a gnat’s eyebrow of making a complete and utter fool of myself. I mean, they were trying to pen those steers in the corral, and I was chasing them back into the pasture, so naturally . . .

  They were pretty mad, the cowboys were. I can’t say as I blamed ’em for being mad, but by George, it was their own fault. And after Loper had chased me up to the machine shed—and I mean he was swinging his rope and yelling and everything—after he’d chased me away from the scene of their foolish follyrot, I stuck my head out of the machine shed doors and beamed Loper and Slim Glares of Righteous Anger.

  Next time, maybe they would go through the proper channels and do it right.

  Well, I was in the midst of beaming microwaves of Righteous Anger at our crew of rookie cowboys, when all at once I felt that I was being watched. I turned my head and saw . . . Drover.

  “Don’t stare at me. I’m transmitting a very important message to the careless and misguided people who caused this mess.”

  “Boy, it sure looks like a wreck. Did you do all that yourself?”

  “No, I did not. This is the result of poor planning and sloppy management. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “I’ll be derned. I thought you made ’em stampede.”

  “That conclusion is based on gossip and faulty information, Drover.”

  “Yeah, that was pretty brave. I couldn’
t have done it myself. I’m scared of cows.”

  “They were steers.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I can’t believe you went after ’em like that. What a hero.”

  Hero? I caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of my gaze. His eyes were shining with . . . well, adoration and admiration. “Well, Drover, if you must know, I had the choice of running away or making a stand.”

  “Yeah, and you stood up for what was right. What a guy!”

  “Well, I . . . how can I say this without seeming to brag?” I began pacing back and forth in front of him, as I often do when my mind is plunged into deepest thought. “It was a clear case, Drover. The steers had made a forced entry into the office. They were trespassing. They had no right to be there.”

  “So you did run ’em off?”

  I paused for a moment and turned my gaze skyward. “Yes, you’re right. I didn’t want to boast about it. You know how I feel about roasting and bagging . . . bagging and broasting . . . bragging and . . . it just isn’t, well, my nature to thump my own tub, as they say, but . . . yes. I had to do what was right. I gave them fair warning, and when they didn’t leave, I thrashed them.”

  “Gosh, I wish I could do things like that.”

  “It comes with practice, son.”

  He sighed. “I think it’ll take more than practice for me.”

  I studied the runt for a moment. “Yes, I see your point. Fear seems to be a problem for you.”

  “Yeah, and I’m especially scared of cows.”

  “Those were steers, Drover, not cows.”

  “Yeah, but they all look the same to me, and they all scare me.”

  “Drover, what you need . . .” At that very moment, my lecture was cut short by a loud roaring sound. My ears shot up. “Holy smokes, what’s that?”

  Drover dived back into the machine shed. “I don’t know, but it’s loud, and loud noises scare me.”