The Case of the Vanishing Fishhook Read online

  The Case of the Vanishing Fishhook

  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, 1999.

  Currently published by Maverick Books, Inc., 2013

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © John R. Erickson, 1999

  All rights reserved

  Maverick Books, Inc. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59188-131-5

  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

  Another one for my wife, Kristine.

  Contents

  Chapter One An Enemy Submarine Invades Our Ranch

  Chapter Two Okay, Maybe It Wasn’t a Submarine

  Chapter Three Caution: Scary Material!

  Chapter Four Attacked by a Huge One-Eyed Robot

  Chapter Five Little Alfred Schemes Up a Fishing Expedition

  Chapter Six Pete Gets Drenched, Tee-hee

  Chapter Seven Alfred Gets in Big Trouble

  Chapter Eight We Play Tom Sawyer

  Chapter Nine A Bait Thief Eats Our Liver

  Chapter Ten Disaster Strikes

  Chapter Eleven A Deadly Hook Lurks in My Stomach

  Chapter Twelve Major Surgery, a Deathbed Vigil, and . . .

  Chapter One: An Enemy Submarine Invades Our Ranch

  It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. It all began one dark night in July, as I recall. Yes, it was July. We’d already had June, and July is the month that follows June, right? Anyhow, that’s the way it usually works, so, yes, we were in the month of July.

  I was sleeping on my gunnysack bed beneath the gas tanks, minding my own business and trying to recover from the grinding routine of running my ranch. If I’d had anything in particular on my mind, the last thing on my mind would have been fishing. Or swallowing a fishhook. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that I would ever swallow a fishhook or that I would have to be rushed to the . . .

  Oops. I’m getting ahead of myself. Forget I said anything about a fishhook. Just skip it.

  Where were we? Oh yes, exhausted and asleep under the gas tanks. Maybe you’ve heard the expression “dog-tired,” as in the statement, “He was dog-tired.”

  Well, there’s a reason why such an expression exists, and it has nothing to do with fishing or fishhooks. The reason is that a dog such as myself has to put in eighteen hours a day to keep the ranch going. At the end of one of those long days—and we’re talking about days when the temperature climbs up to a hundred degrees or even higher—at the end of one of those scorching summer days, a guy staggers home at ten o’clock at night, falls into his gunnysack bed, and tries to grab a few winks of sleep, so he’ll be ready to do it all over again come daylight.

  To use the old expression, he’s “dog-tired.”

  Yes, the work and worry, the cares and responsibilities of running my ranch had just about worn me down to a shadow of my former self, and there I was on the old gunnysack, trying to recover from all the exhaustion and so forth.

  That’s when I awoke and heard the sounds of someone or something creeping around in the darkness. It must have been around five o’clock in the morning, quite a bit too early for anyone on our outfit to be creeping around.

  Most of your ordinary ranch mutts would have ignored the sound and gone back to sleep. Not me. As you may know, I’m Head of Ranch Security. I’m also pretty serious about it. When someone is creeping around my ranch before daylight, I want to know who it is and who gave him permission to be out there in the dark.

  I lifted my head and tried to coordinate the position of my ears so as to maximize their ability to gather in sounds and vibrations. It’s pretty important that a dog get those ears pointed in the proper direction, see, otherwise he’ll end up listening to nonsense signals that can throw him off the track of the trail.

  Well, I went right to work—activated the Earatory Scanner Network and began “sweeping,” as we call it, the entire Western Quadrant of headquarters. And suddenly I found myself picking up signals that . . . well, just didn’t make much sense.

  See, my left ear was beaming data saying that someone, perhaps a human person, was out there in the darkness. But my right ear was sending a totally different report to Data Control. It said that we were picking up an enemy submarine on radar.

  Pretty shocking, huh? You bet it was. I mean, those two reports were very different, yet both had been gathered by my very own ears. Something was wrong here.

  A lot of your ordinary ranch mutts would have considered it a hopeless situation. They would have quit and gone back to sleep. Not me, fellers. One of those reports was phoney and I intended to run Diagnostics until I found the error.

  I mean, if we had an enemy submarine running loose on the ranch, someone needed to know about it and start barking an alarm, right? I decided to check with my Assistant of the Watch to see if he’d been picking up any strange signals on his equipment.

  “Drover, wake up. Report to the bridge at once.”

  “Bridge over troubled porkchops . . . lorkin murgle snork.”

  “We’ve got a problem. We’re getting garbage reports on the Earatory Scanners.”

  “No thanks, I just ate, and there’s too many potato peelings.”

  “Not potato peelings, Drover. We have reason to think it might be an enemy submarine.”

  His head came up. “Hank, is that you?”

  I stared at the face in the darkness. “Affirmative. That is, I think so.”

  “Oh good. If you’re Hank, then I must be Drover. What are we doing here?”

  “I . . . I’m not sure. I was sound asleep when all at once we started getting reports about . . . an enemy submarine, I think.”

  “I’ll be derned.”

  “How about you?”

  “Oh, pretty good, thanks. I must have been asleep too.”

  “Hmm, yes. That makes both of us, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” He yawned. “I wonder what woke us up.”

  “I . . . I don’t remember. Did you wake me up?”

  “I don’t think so. Seems like you woke me up.”

  “Hmm, that’s odd. Why would I have awakened you in the middle of the night? It must have been something important, but I can’t . . . Drover, I’m almost sure that you woke me up. What was the reason? Concentrate. Try to remember.”

  “Well, okay, let’s see here.”

  There was a long moment of silence. “Drover, did you go back to sleep?”

  “No, I’m thinking. I don’t think too fast in the dark.”

  “I see. What does darkness have to do with your thought processes?”

  “Well, when I can’t see anything, it’s hard to think. I g
uess. Does that make sense?”

  “No. Your brain lives in the dark all the time. It’s inside your head, don’t you see, and the inside portion of your head is dark.”

  “I’ll be derned. How did you know that?”

  “Because you have no windows.”

  “What about my eyes?”

  “They’re brown.”

  “Thanks.”

  There was another long moment of silence. “Drover, I’m beginning to feel that our conversation lacks meaning and purpose. Why are we awake at this hour of the night, and why are we talking at all? We should both be asleep.”

  “Yeah, I think we were, but then we woke up.”

  “Right, and that brings us to the nut of the fruit. What woke us up?”

  “I was trying to remember that, but then it was too dark. Let’s see here.”

  “Wait, hold everything. I remember now. You woke me up and said something about . . . picking up an enemy submarine, I think.”

  “That sounds pretty crazy. With my teeth?”

  “What?”

  “I said, did I pick it up with my teeth?”

  “Pick what up with your teeth?”

  “The enemy submarine.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, I don’t know. You said I said I picked up an enemy submarine in my jaws and . . . did something with it.”

  “I did not say that. In the first place, submarines are very heavy. Number two, there isn’t enough water on this ranch to support a submarine. And number three, none of our enemies own a submarine. Therefore, the weight of the evidence suggests that you are talking nonsense.”

  “Can I go back to bed?”

  “Not just yet.” I stood up and walked a few steps away. “Drover, I think I’m beginning to understand this deal.”

  “Oh good.”

  “You see, we were both in a deep sleep, then something woke us up. I think this bizarre conversation can be traced back to the fact that—” Suddenly, I whirled around and faced him. “Drover, up until this very moment, we’ve been half-asleep. That would account for your claim that you ate a submarine.”

  “Yeah, and maybe it was a submarine sandwich, not a real submarine.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. That makes sense, doesn’t it? You were dreaming about food.”

  “Yeah, I love food. I’d rather eat food than anything. And I am kind of hungry.”

  “See? There you are. Your sleeping mind transformed your hunger into a dream about a submarine sandwich. It all fits together. We were merely talking in our respective sleeps, Drover. It could have happened to any two dogs on the globe.”

  “If we live on a globe, how come we don’t fall off?”

  “Good question, son. Ask it again some time.” I hurried back to my gunnysack. “Good night. Hold my calls and don’t wake me up again.”

  “Nightie-night.”

  “Nightie . . . snork murgle muff womp.”

  “Hank? I just heard something down at the corrals.”

  “Murf snirk puffing triangles.”

  “Hank, I think you’d better wake up. Someone’s down there, no fooling. I see a light in the saddle shed.”

  I sat up, pried open my eyes, and rushed to the radar screen of my mind. There, before my very eyes, as plain as day, I saw . . .

  I leaped to my feet. “Holy smokes, Drivel, there’s an enemy submarine down by the saddle shed!”

  “My name’s Drover.”

  “Never mind your name. Battle stations! Red Alert!”

  “It was only a sandwich.”

  “This is no sandwich, Drover, and it’s no drill. This is the real stuff. Come on, son, we’d better go in for a closer look.”

  And with that, we went streaking down to the saddle shed to find out exactly what that submarine was doing on my ranch.

  Chapter Two: Okay, Maybe It Wasn’t a Submarine

  We need to get something straight right here. You remember that report of an enemy submarine on the ranch? It turned out to be incorrect. There was no submarine, just as I had suspected.

  See, when we make rapid shifts from asleepness to awakeness, it sometimes causes interference patterns to develop in our, uh, instruments. We get false images on our Earatory Radar and sometimes . . .

  It’s too complicated to explain. It was an instrumentation problem, and once I had made the sprint down to the corrals, everything had cleared up and I began to realize that the business about the “enemy submarine” was bogus.

  It wasn’t an enemy submarine. It was Slim Chance, the hired hand on this outfit. But what the heck was he doing down at the corrals in the middle of the night? At first I thought he might have been walking in his sleep. Then I remembered that his shack . . . house . . . the place where he stayed and slept at night was two miles down the creek, which made the Sleepwalking Hypo­tenuse highly unlikely.

  Nobody walks two miles in his sleep. So I probed the matter deeper and in more detail until I came up with a solid explanation.

  You know what he was doing? He’d gotten out of bed and had driven up to headquarters to check on a first-calf heifer that was about to deliver her first calf.

  Have we discussed heifers and the process of calving them out? Maybe not. It’s an important job and I happen to know quite a bit about it. Here’s the deal. Every year the ranch has to replace old cows with young cows. Young cows are called “heifers,” and if you want to know why, ask a heifer. I don’t know.

  What would be wrong with calling them “young cows”? That would be much simpler and then you wouldn’t have to remember whether “heifer” is spelled “heifer” or “hiefer” or “heffer,” but nobody asked my opinion.

  Every year our ranch saves 20 or 30 heifers, and when the time comes for them to deliver their calves, Slim has to watch them closely, because sometimes heifers have trouble. If they don’t get help from the local cowboy-vet, the calf might die, and sometimes the heffer . . . heifffer . . . sometimes the young cow will die too.

  Slim has to check them in the middle of the night and sometimes he just sleeps down at the barn with them. If they have trouble shelling out the calf, he assists them.

  He calls himself “Dr. Slim,” but I think that’s some kind of joke. I don’t think he actually has a doctor’s degree.

  I’m sure he doesn’t.

  Anyways, I have watched him deliver calves on several occasions—I being his most trusted assistant and also the only one on the ranch who will stay up all night with him in a drafty shed—and I know the procedure fairly well.

  It’s called “pulling a calf” and it’s done with two pieces of equipment: a small-gauge chain with a loop on each end (it’s called an “O.B. chain”) and a device called a “calf-puller.” Shall we run through the procedure? Might as well.

  Okay, here’s the deal. When the heifer has been straining for several hours and hasn’t shelled out the calf, Dr. Slim throws his rope over the heifer’s horns and snubs her up to a post. The reason for this is that young cow mothers don’t always appreciate having a cowboy doctor in the pen with them and will sometimes try to run him out of the operating room.

  With the heifer tied to the snubbing post, Dr. Slim loops the ends of the chain around the baby calf’s front feet, then hooks the chain into the calf-puller, which has a cranking device that pulls the calf out. He ratchets the lever while the heifer strains, and after a minute or two the calf pops out and lands on the ground.

  Pretty slick, huh? And it’s pretty impressive that a dog would know so much about medical science, but knowing such things is just part of my job as Head of Ranch Security.

  I had watched Slim pull dozens of calves, but this time I noticed that something was different. For one thing, the heifer was already lying on the ground when we got there, and Dr. Slim decided he wouldn’t need to snub her
to the post. Bad idea.

  For another thing, Slim had left his calf-pullers up at the machine shed. Was that smart? No, it was unsmart and also very careless of him. If he had a pregnant heifer in the corrals, why had he left the calf-pullers in the machine shed? I have no idea, but I sure wouldn’t have done it that way.

  Anyways, the heifer was laid out on the ground and was trying to squeeze out her calf. Dr. Slim sized up the situation, chewed his lip for five seconds, and came up with a plan.

  Here’s what he said, word for word. He said, “Welp, she’s down so I don’t need to snub her, and I ain’t got time to go chuggin’ up to the machine shed for the calf-pullers, so we’ll pull this little feller the cowboy way.”

  And then he gave me a wink. Why did he wink at me? I already knew that he’d just made the dumbest decision of the week and that this was going to turn into a train wreck. He should have saved his wink or given it to someone else who didn’t know what was coming.

  I heaved a sigh, rolled my eyes towards heaven, and waited for the ineffible to happen.

  Uneffible.

  Interebbible.

  Do you have any idea what it means to pull a calf “the cowboy way?” It’s a special technique cowboys use when they are out in the pasture with no calf-pulling equipment at hand, or when they’re too lazy to gather up the proper equipment, or when their lives have gotten so dull that they need some excitement.

  You guess which one applied to Slim.

  Here’s what he did. He looped one end of his O.B. chain around the calf’s front feet and then he looped the other end of the chain around his right wrist.

  Do you see what’s coming? I did. I could have told him . . . in fact, I tried to tell him. I barked three times, hoping to bark some sense into his thick skull, but did he listen? Oh no. I was just a dumb dog and he was Mister Expert on Pulling Calves and Just About Everything Else, and so naturally he didn’t listen to the Voice of Reason.

  He sat down on the ground, braced his feet against the heifer’s hips, and began tugging on the chain. Oh, and he said, “This won’t take but a minute.”