The Big Question Read online

  The Big Question

  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 Maverick Books, Inc. 2012.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © John R. Erickson, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012931090

  978-1-59188-160-5 (paperback); 978-1-59188-260-2 (hardcover)

  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

  For Carlos Casso, in appreciation for his great work on 60 Hank audio books.

  Contents

  Chapter One A Very Bachelor Christmas

  Chapter Two Miss Viola Brings a Present

  Chapter Three A Creature Under Slim’s Bed!

  Chapter Four Drover Gets In Big Trouble, Hee Hee

  Chapter Five The Dreaded Phone Call

  Chapter Six Viola Comes To Help

  Chapter Seven Attacked By Snow Monsters!

  Chapter Eight Cold, Snow, and Misery

  Chapter Nine Cheap-Shotted By a Scheming Horse

  Chapter Ten Feeding Cattle in the Snow

  Chapter Eleven Slim Passes Out in the Pasture

  Chapter Twelve You’ll Never Guess How This Ends, Never.

  Chapter One: A Very Bachelor Christmas

  It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. At this point, you don’t know The Big Question and I’m not in a position to tell you, not yet. See, it’s classified information, very secret, and we can’t go public with it until later in the story.

  Can you wait? Good. Let’s get on with the story. It’s a dandy.

  Okay, Loper and Sally May had gone to Abilene to spend Christmas with Sally May’s kinfolks, so Slim Chance was holding down the ranch by himself. Actually, I was running the show, but you know how it is with these cowboys. We let ‘em take most of the credit, but everyone knows who’s really calling the shots.

  The Head of Ranch Security.

  It was a clear, warm day, kind of unusual for December, and we spent the afternoon hauling a hundred head of steers to a wheat field about five miles west of ranch headquarters.

  Have we discussed wheat pasture? Maybe not. Around here, our pasture grass stops growing and turns brown after first frost, which comes around the middle of October. After frost, we don’t have a sprig of anything green on the ranch until the middle of April when we get the first grass of the spring.

  Over those long dark months of winter, the only greenery you’ll find in the Texas Panhandle will be in wheat fields, because wheat grows and stays green over the winter. Why? I have no idea, but it does, and it makes excellent grazing for yearling cattle.

  That’s why, every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we haul yearlings from the main ranch and dump them out on wheat fields. They’ll stay on wheat pasture until the middle of March, when we have to bring them back to the ranch and put them out on grass again. In a good year, they’ll gain two or three pounds a day on green wheat.

  It’s pretty impressive that a dog would know so much about ranch management, isn’t it? You bet, but there’s even more. See, you probably don’t know that most wheat fields don’t have permanent fencing, so before we turn out the cattle, we have to put up a temporary fence made of small steel posts and a thin strand of wire.

  It’s called an electric fence. (You might want to take some notes on this). We call it an electric fence because it’s hooked up to a battery that…I’m not sure what it does, but somehow it puts a little jolt of electricity through the wire, and if a steer touches the wire, he gets a shock.

  That’s the whole point of an electric fence, don’t you see, it keeps the cattle inside the wheat field, where they belong. If an electric fence ever shorts out or quits working, that’s bad news, because cattle are so dumb, they’ll walk through the fence and then you’ve got stray cattle running loose.

  That was a special concern on this particular wheat field. It lay on the north side of a highway, and a guy never wants his cattle walking down the middle of a busy highway, because guess what you find on a busy highway. Cars and trucks. You know what happens when an eighteen-wheeler meets a five hundred pound steer in the middle of the road? It’s not pretty, and that’s the kind of thing that causes cowboys to worry in the middle of the night, cattle on the highway.

  You’ll want to remember this because later on in the story…actually, I’m not supposed to reveal this information, so forget that I mentioned it. In fact, I didn’t mention it. Thanks.

  Where were we? Oh yes, the day before Christmas, we delivered the last trailer-load of steers and kicked them out on a wheat field five miles west of ranch headquarters. And naturally, before we left, we had to make sure the fence was hot.

  Under ordinary circumstances, a cowboy checks the electric fence with a little device called a fence tester, a plastic thing with two wires attached. He sticks one wire on the fence and the other on a steel post. If the fence is hot, it makes a little light come on.

  But you might recall that on our ranch, we have these cowboy-jokers who love to pull pranks on their dogs. While all the normal people in the world are thinking about the weather or the stock market, our cowboys are scheming up new and exciting ways of playing childish tricks on their dogs.

  That’s what Slim Chance was doing. While Drover and I were busy checking out a gopher mound, Slim was messing with the electric fence. Vaguely, I heard him say, “Dern the luck, I forgot my fence tester.” I thought no more about it.

  I should have known that he’d do something crazy, and sure enough, he did. He disconnected the battery and wired a piece of beef jerky to the electric fence, then hooked up the battery again. Do you see where this is heading? I didn’t. I suspected nothing when he yelled, “Come here, dogs, we need to test the fence.”

  Well, you know me. Any time I can lend a hand, I’m glad to do it. Drover and I were pretty busy, doing a Gopher Probe, but we’d been called into action, so we trotted over to Slim.

  I should have been warned by that crooked grin on his mouth. Never trust a guy with a crooked grin. But, foolish me, I wasn’t paying attention. He pointed to the fence and said, “Which one of you yard birds wants a piece of beef jerky?”

  Beef jerky? Hey, that was the easiest question of the year. I pushed Drover aside, swaggered up to the fence, and proceeded to sniff the…POP!

  Ah-eeeeeee!

  Holy smokes, a spark of electricity bit me on the end of the nose, and you talk about a stampede! Fellers, I ran smooth over the top of little Drover and was heading toward Del Rio when it suddenly occurred to me that Slim was…well, laughing. I slowed to a walk, then stopped.

  I went to Puzzled Wags on the tail section. What was the meaning of this?

  Slim got control of his laughter and said, “Well, the fence is hot. Thanks, pooch. You saved me from having to test it wit
h my own flesh and blood.”

  Oh great. I saved him from…you see what we have to put up with around here? Oh well, it didn’t cause any permanent damage to the nose, and I ended up getting pats, rubs, and the piece of jerky, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad deal. But if you ask me, Slim enjoyed it a little more than he should have.

  Anyway, we got our work done and made it back to Slim’s shack before dark, and the next day, we had ourselves a bachelor Christmas. It didn’t amount to much. There are many things that bachelors don’t do for Christmas. They don’t put up decorations, send Christmas cards, buy presents, bake cookies, or invite a houseful of kinfolks to come for the holidays.

  I don’t know how many kinfolks he had, but they weren’t invited. Why? Because when you invite visitors, you have to clean the house, and as Slim often said, “What’s the point of cleaning the house? It just gets dirty again.”

  Yes, Christmas at Slim’s shack was a pretty quiet affair. He’d cut himself a little juniper tree up in the canyons and decorated it with a tin foil star and a few strings of popcorn, and that was about all. Oh, wait, I almost forgot. Before he went into the kitchen to cook Christmas dinner, he sang us a song, and get this: it was a song about Cowboy Cooking.

  Musically, it wasn’t so great, but I have to admit it was pretty funny. You want to hear it?

  ‘Maters and ‘Taters

  ‘Taters are friends of the cowboy.

  They’re honest and pretty near free.

  If you leave ‘em too long in the sack, though,

  You’ll think that you’ve sprouted a tree.

  ‘Taters don’t take any talent,

  Their cooking is easy to learn.

  Just slice ‘em and throw ‘em in your hot grease,

  And leave ‘em until they are burned.

  When they’re black, you can drain all the grease off.

  Old newspaper works like a charm.

  If you happen to eat the sports page,

  That’s okay, it don’t cause any harm.

  When you’re done, leave the pan on the stove top.

  That grease will turn solid and white.

  When it’s time to fry up some more ‘taters,

  Light the fire and pick out the flies

  ‘Maters and ‘taters for breakfast.

  ‘Taters and ‘maters for lunch.

  Yippy-ti-yi-yo, p-o-t-a-t-o-e-s…spells ‘taters.

  Yippy-ti-yi-yo, t-o-m-a-t-o-e-s…spells ‘maters.

  Your momma has told you that ‘maters

  Are healthful and better than pie.

  But when you bite down too hard on a ‘mater,

  It’ll ‘splode and squirt in your eye.

  Fresh ‘maters require too much effort

  To interest your average man.

  When a cowboy feels need for some veggies,

  His ‘maters will come from a can.

  Canned ‘maters are good in your gravy.

  Canned ‘maters are good by theirselfs.

  Canned ‘maters don’t rot in the ice box,

  They’ll sit twenty years on the shelf.

  A bachelor chef uses ‘maters

  As a sauce that is meant to disguise.

  If you dump a can into your cold grease,

  You won’t notice the taste of them flies.

  ‘Maters and ‘taters for breakfast.

  ‘Taters and ‘maters for lunch.

  Yippy-ti-yi-yo, p-o-t-a-t-o-e-s…spells ‘taters.

  Yippy-ti-yi-yo, t-o-m-a-t-o-e-s…spells ‘maters.

  ‘Maters and ‘taters are good.

  Well, for Slim Chance, that was a pretty good musical effort. It wasn’t as corny as most of his songs, and I can tell you that it was based on true life experience. I mean, the guy actually does those things. He didn’t get his ideas out of a book.

  But for that particular Christmas meal, he didn’t cook either ‘taters or ‘maters. He fixed a turkey...well, part of a turkey. Boiled turkey necks. He’d found them on sale at the grocery store in Twitchell, ten pounds of necks for three bucks. He cooked them all in a big pot, don’t you see. What he didn’t eat, he threw into a bread bag and placed it in the ice box, which left him enough pre-cooked meals to last several weeks. Then he deep-freezed the pot so he didn’t have to wash it. Pretty shrewd.

  Oh, and did I mention that he gave me and Drover a neck apiece? He did. It was our Christmas present, and he even let us eat them inside the house. That was pretty generous of him, and I can tell you that I spent a very pleasant afternoon, gnawing on all those funny-looking neck bones.

  Drover enjoyed his too, until tragedy struck. No, he didn’t choke on a bone. Toward the middle of the afternoon, after he’d chewed up about half of his turkey neck, he fell asleep and somebody stole the rest of it. It almost broke his little heart and I had to spend some time helping him through his grief.

  You’ll never guess who stole it. Hee hee. Or maybe you would. Well, why not? If you get careless with your dinner, it’s liable to sprout legs and walk away, and that’s probably what happened, come to think of it. That turkey neck just, well, grew legs and walked out the door.

  But the best part of our Christmas day, the very best and most wonderful part, came around sundown when a lady showed up at Slim’s front door, and she just happened to be the prettiest gal in all of Ochiltree County.

  Chapter Two: Miss Viola Brings Me A Present

  Maybe you’ve already guessed her name. Miss Viola. Around sundown, she paid us a visit and she was carrying a plate of baked goodies wrapped in red paper and tied with a green bow.

  When Slim threw open the door and saw her standing there, his jaw dropped and he stared at her with bug eyes. You know what? So did I. I mean, you talk about a beautiful sight! She wore a long denim dress that reached to the tops of her red roper boots, and she had her hair pulled back in a ponytail and tied with a red ribbon and . . .

  I don’t know how to put this, but there was something about her face—the clear blue eyes, the radiance of her smile. It was as though someone had turned on the lights in a dungeon. She just lit the place up, and all we could do was gawk at her. Even Drover gawked. He’d spent the past half-hour moaning about his stolen turkey neck, but when Viola appeared at the door, his mouth fell open, his eyes bugged out, and he stared right along with me and Slim.

  Fellers, just because you spend your time hanging out in a bachelor shack doesn’t mean you’re in love with Ugly. When something beautiful walks into the room, you know it, and it takes your breath away.

  So, with open mouths and wide eyes, we stared at her in unison, two dogs and a bachelor cowboy. The seconds passed and when no one spoke, she finally said, “Well, Merry Christmas. Did I come at a bad time?”

  Slim swallowed so hard, his Adam’s apple bounced around. He blinked his eyes and mumbled, “Bad time? Oh, no ma’am, it’s a good time. I was just…cleaning up the house.”

  Oh brother, that was a whopper of a lie! Him, cleaning the house? Ha.

  He pushed open the screen door and she stepped inside. At that point…well, what’s a dog supposed to do? I shot across the room and met her at the…whatever you call it, the “threshold,” I suppose, and there I went into a program we call “Exuberant Leaps and Groans.”

  It’s not an easy program to pull off, and a lot of your ordinary mutts won’t even attempt it. It consists of hops, leaps, dives, and groans of delight. The timing on those groans is pretty crucial. If you try to groan at the very moment you’re leaping, it’ll come out as a grunt and that kills the emotional so-forth of the presentation. You might get by with grunting over a cowboy, but grunting over a lady is exactly wrong. Never grunt over a lady.

  Whilst I was doing Leaps and Groans, Drover did his own little routine. He didn’t have the ambition to do good leaps, so he scrambled in circles and squeaked. It was
kind of pathetic, to tell you the truth, but I guess he was doing his best.

  But back to my Leaps and Groans, there was one part of the presentation that you probably didn’t notice. See, I didn’t throw myself into her embrace, and fellers, that took some iron discipline, because every cell and fiber of my body was telling me to dive right into the middle of her arms. I held back because…well, the last time I leaped into her embrace, she fell over backwards and landed on the floor, and Slim had harsh words to say about that.

  So, this time, I gave her an amazing display of leaping. And as you might expect, she was impressed. Delighted. Blown away. She laughed and said, “My goodness, Hank, you’re very athletic.”

  Athletic? Hey, I was just getting warmed up. Wait until she saw Part Two. I raced down the long dark hallway to Slim’s bedroom, did a one-eighty in front of his bed, sprinted back into the living room, did another one-eighty and two Joyous Leaps, raced into the kitchen, did a…

  Actually, I slipped on the linoleum floor and had a pretty bad collision with a chair, but I made an amazing recovery, streaked back into the living room, and did five Straight-up Hops and three groans, right there in front of her.

  Wow. I’m not one to honk my own wagon, but I must admit that it was one of the most awesome displays of dogly devotion ever seen in the whole world. Miss Viola was amazed, and we’re talking about speechless amazed. Even Drover was amazed. Slim was…well, he was so busy picking up magazines and dirty socks off the floor, he didn’t see much of it, but that was okay because it wasn’t meant for him.

  The important point is that She-For-Whom-It-Was-Meant saw every leap and heard every groan, and she was deeply moved. Perhaps for the first time, she understood that she’d been wasting her time with Slim, and I was the Dog of Her Dreams.

  I can’t think of a nicer way of putting it. The facts pretty muchly spoke for themselves. Slim was a dirty bachelor and a lazy slug, while I was…well, an Olympic sprinter and diver, an acrobat, a ballet dancer, a poet and a hero, and a world-class groaner who just happened to be madly in love with her.