The Case of the Dinosaur Birds Page 2

  Right. Forget the birds.

  Alfred came back to the gate. He lifted his right arm. “Ready?” Yes, yes, we’d been ready for hours. “Okay!” His arm swooped downward, giving us the long-awaited signal to dive in and . . .

  Huh?

  MY BACON WAS GONE!

  I whirled around to the right and faced Drover, who was gobbling his scrambled eggs. “Drover, only seconds ago I had seven fatty ends of bacon right here in front of me. If you stole my bacon . . .”

  “It wasn’t me. I’ve got eggs.” In saying this, he splattered my face with several fragments of half-chewed egg.

  “Yes, and you just spewed egg bits into my face!”

  “Well, you made me talk with my mouth full.”

  “And you just did it again!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Greedy pig! Stop spitting egg on me!”

  “Well, leave me alone and let me eat.”

  “This will go into my report!”

  I wiped the egg off my face, whirled around to my left, and beamed a murderous glare at the cat. He was trying to chew his biscuit and seemed to be having some trouble. On another occasion, I would have paused to enjoy the spectacle of him wrestling with a hard biscuit, but not now.

  “Pete, someone has stolen my bacon, and I’m putting the entire ranch under Lockdown. Drop the biscuit and take three steps back. Move!”

  To my astonishment, the cat did as he was told. I mean, this might have been the first time in history that a cat had ever followed an order. Obviously, the little creep had seen the fury in my eyes and had decided to keep his mouth shut. Good idea. I mean, the cat had become a prime suspect in this case.

  When he backed away from the fence, I moved in and began sweeping the entire area with Snifforadar. If Pete had pulled the job, surely Snifforadar would pick up traces of bacon scent. I did a thorough sweep of the ground but came up with nothing but readings of cat and biscuit.

  I entered all the information into Data Control and waited for it to come up with a solution. A moment later, a message flashed across the screen of my mind. “You’ve got a flea biting your left ear.”

  Ouch! It was true. I’d been so busy with other things, I hadn’t even noticed. Right then and there, I put the investigation on hold, dropped my bottom side to the ground, and began hacking my left ear with powerful sweeps of my left hind foot.

  The good news was that I vaporized the flea. The bad news was that I still had no idea who had robbed my bacon. And that was bad news.

  Chapter Three: My Bacon Is Burgled

  I leaped to my feet and gave myself a vigorous shake. The Anti-Flea Procedure had worked to perfection, and now it was time to solve the Case of the Burgled Bacon. Unfortunately, I had no leads in the case and would have to depend on luck to pull me through.

  Kitty was staring at me. I had his full attention. I marched over to the biscuit, which was still lying on the ground near the fence. “What’s this?”

  “My pitiful little breakfast, Hankie.”

  “Then why haven’t you eaten it? Is it possible that you were stealing my bacon?”

  “No, Hankie, cats are delicate eaters. Unlike certain dogs I could name, we don’t gorge and gobble our food.”

  “Stick with the facts, Pete. I don’t care about your opinions. It makes me suspicious that you’ve hardly made a dent in the biscuit. Explain.”

  “Well, Hankie, it was stale and crusty and hard to chew.”

  “Ha. You expect me to believe that?” I lowered my nose and gave the biscuit a sniffing. “Hey, this smells pretty good. I’ll have to take it in for evidence.” I swept it up in my mouth and began chewing. “Okay, go on with your . . .”

  CRUNCH. CRACK.

  By George, it was kind of hard to chew . . . very hard to chew . . . Good grief, it was as hard as a rock, and even my powerful jaws had trouble . . .

  You know, when you crush a stale biscuit, what you end up with is a mouthful of sharp little crumbs; and when you pull the Flush Lever and try to sweep the crumbs down your guzzle, they can . . .

  COUGH, HARK, WHEEZE.

  . . . Sometimes they get caught in your . . . HARK, HACK . . . breathing pipe. And that’s exactly what happened here. A hateful little biscuit crumb lodged in my . . . HONK, HARK . . . breathing apparatus and caused me to choke. It took me a whole minute to work myself through this episode, and by then my eyes were watering and my voice had been reduced to a croak.

  I turned to the cat. “Okay, maybe you were right about the biscuit.”

  “I always tell the truth, Hankie.”

  “You rarely tell the truth, Pete, yet you just told the truth. That worries me. Why, all of a sudden, did you give me an honest answer?”

  “Well, Hankie, I want to help you solve your case.”

  I stared into his big moon eyes. “You want to help me catch the Bacon Burglar? Pete, forgive me if I seem suspicious, but why would you do that?”

  He drummed his claws on the ground. “Well, Hankie, I want to get on with my life, and I know you won’t give me a minute’s peace until you catch the thief.”

  My first impulse was to laugh out loud, but something told me to follow up on this. “Keep talking. Are you saying that you have some information?”

  “I do, Hankie. While you were looking at the birds, I saw what happened to your bacon.”

  I moved closer. “You did? By any chance, was it Drover?”

  “Not Drover. He was busy with his eggs.”

  “That checks out. We’re down to one suspect. You.”

  “Not me, Hankie. I was trying to chew my biscuit, remember?”

  I cut my eyes from side to side. “Okay, but that means we’re out of suspects.”

  His eyes drifted around, and a little smile twitched at his mouth. “It’s so obvious, you don’t see it. What drew your attention away from the bacon?”

  “Birds. I was looking at a couple of odd-looking birds in the sky.”

  “They were more than odd-looking birds, Hankie.” He dropped his voice to a spooky whisper and widened his eyes. “They were dinosaur birds from another dimension of time and space! I guess you know about dinosaur birds.”

  His voice and manner sent a chill down my spine. I took a step backward. “Of course I do. What’s your point?”

  Pete glanced over each shoulder and moved closer. “Surely you know that they’re equipped with an Ultra Guzzonic Bacon Beacon.”

  “What? Ultra Guzzonic . . . is this some kind of joke?”

  He shrugged. “If you think so, Hankie. I was just trying to help.”

  “Yeah? Well, the day I need help from a cat is the day I’ll eat turnips for breakfast. Run along and chase your tail.”

  I whirled around and stormed away. What a pathetic little creep! Ultra Guzzonic Bacon Beacon! Ha. It was pure garbage, exactly what you’d expect to hear from . . . I stopped and, uh, found myself easing back toward the cat.

  “Hey Pete, let’s put the cards on the table. My knowledge of dinosaurs is a little rusty. To be honest, I don’t know beans about them. Could you . . . Pete, it’s very hard for me to say this.”

  “I know it is, Hankie. You can’t bring yourself to ask me for help.”

  “Right. I mean, a guy in my position has to guard his reputation, know what I mean?”

  “I understand, Hankie. What do you want to know?”

  I shot a glance at Drover, just to be sure he wasn’t listening. “Tell me more about the Bacon Beacon.”

  Pete rolled over on his back and began playing with his tail. “Well, Hankie, dinosaur birds are able to generate a powerful Guzzonic Beacon. It can locate every piece of bacon in a wide area and even pull it up into the sky.”

  “So, you’re saying . . . you actually think those birds stole my bacon?”

  He nodded. “I saw it rising off th
e ground, and then . . . poof . . . it zoomed off inside the Guzzonic Beam, straight to those birds. You didn’t notice?”

  “I didn’t say that. I, uh, saw something, but it was just a blur.”

  “That was your bacon, Hankie, going bye-bye.”

  I gave this some heavy thought. “Okay, but why dinosaurs, Pete? Where did they come from? Why are they here?”

  He slapped at his tail. “It’s very mysterious, Hankie. Scientists thought they went extinct, but it appears that at least two of them survived.”

  “Wait! Hold it right there.” I began pacing, as I often do when my mind shifts into a higher gear. “This is beginning to add up. Egg-stinct, Pete. Don’t you get it? Bacon, eggs? There’s our missing piece of the puzzle. Dinosaur birds live on bacon and eggs, and when they can’t find them in the wild, they steal them from dogs!”

  Pete made a peculiar snorting sound. “Pffft. My, my, Hankie, I never would have thought of that.”

  I whirled around and faced him with a triumphant smile. “Just follow the clues, Pete. Those birds have been flying around for years, using their Bacon Beacons to search for food, and today they found it.”

  “Pfftt! Yes, they did, Hankie, hee hee.”

  “And it was my bad luck that they came on the very day that I won the breakfast lottery.”

  “Hankie, I think you must be, hee hee, a genius!”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but . . . Hey, they didn’t make me Head of Ranch Security just for my good looks.” I noticed that the cat was wheezing and crawling on his belly. “Are you sick?”

  “Oh no, it’s nothing.” Suddenly he cut loose with a squeaky little burp. “Oops, sorry. I guess I ate too fast. The biscuit.”

  “Right. That was a bad biscuit.” My nose shot up in the air and began drawing in air samples. “Hmm, that’s odd. All at once I’m picking up the scent of bacon. Do you smell it?”

  The poor cat let out a screech of . . . something . . . pain, I guess. I mean, it sounded a lot like a screech of laughter, but surely not, and he began crawling away. “It’s a residual cloud of bacon vapor . . . hee hee . . . from the Bacon Beacon . . . hee haw, HARK, HACK . . . Excuse me, I have to be going!”

  He crawled away, moaning and groaning. Gee, this was kind of sad. I mean, nobody would be inclined to stop the world over a sick cat, but still . . . I kind of hated to see the little creep . . . Pete, that is . . . I kind of hated to see Pete feeling so poorly. I had to admit that he’d given me some pretty important information on the Dinosaur Case.

  Oh well. One cat in, one cat out, life goes on. I marched over to Drover, who had gorged himself on scrambled eggs and was now licking the dirt. “That’s enough, Drover. Stop making a spectacle of yourself. Someone might be watching.”

  “Well, there’s still a taste left on the ground. Boy, those were some great eggs.”

  “Yes, and while you were making a pig of yourself, two dinosaur birds flew over and stole my bacon.”

  He stared at me. “That’s a joke, right?”

  I showed him some fangs. “Does it look like I’m joking?”

  “No, but I saw who stole . . .”

  “You saw nothing. Your head was down, your eyes were down, your brain was down, and you were eating like a greedy pig. Furthermore, you spat particles of egg in my face, not once but twice.”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “It will go into my report. Now, I’m going down to the office to catch up on some paperwork. Be on the alert for two strange-looking birds. If you see them, I want to be informed at once.”

  “Yeah, but I can tell you . . .”

  I marched away and left him to enjoy his own boring company. Actually, I didn’t care if he wanted to lick dirt as long as I wasn’t around. If we’d been seen together, someone might have thought we were friends.

  Chapter Four: Everything You Want to Know About Dinosaurs

  Leaving Drover to lick dirt and do other things too silly to contemplate, I made my way down to the Security Division’s Vast Office Complex and rode the elevator up to my office on the twelfth floor.

  There, I opened the drapes and gazed out the huge windows at the scene that stretched before me: skyscrapers, tugboats on the river, hundreds of taxi cabs moving up Broadway like little yellow bugs. Down there, it was a normal day. Up where I worked, the day was anything but normal.

  I had gotten myself involved in a case concerning the appearance of a couple of Terradogtail Dino­­saur Birds, a type of rare creature that had never been observed on my ranch until today. So far we could link them to only one crime, the Bacon Theft; but I had an uneasy feeling that if they hung around the ranch, it could lead to a whole spree of crinimal activity.

  In Security Work, it’s very important to know the other guy: where he came from, where he sleeps at night, what he eats, what he thinks about in quiet moments. I knew almost nothing about Terradogtail Dinosaur Birds other than the few shreds of information I had managed to pry out of the cat. Shall we go over the Clue List? Might as well.

  Clue Number One: Dinosaur birds can fly. Maybe that seems obvious because, well, most birds can fly, so let’s move along to the next clue.

  Clue Number Two: Through our network of undercover agents, we had learned that dinosaur birds are equipped with some very high-tech equipment that can locate tiny fragments of bacon, and do it from hundreds of feet in the air. We had no systems that could knock out their Bacon Radar.

  Clue Number Three: The fact that these dino birds were running Bacon Radar was worrisome enough. Even more frightening was that they also had Laser Tongs that could snatch precious scraps off the ground, which meant that our entire inventory of morning scraps was now in danger of being compromised.

  Clue Number Four: We had an eyewitness report of their first hit on our Scrap Inventory, and we knew that they could strike without warning, making no sound and leaving no tracks behind. That was scary.

  Clue Number Five: We didn’t actually have a Clue Number Five, so we’ll move along.

  As you can see, we were going into this case without much hard information on the bad guys. It was time to bring in Data Control and learn everything we could possibly learn about dinosaurs, and that’s what I did. For the next two or three hours, I called up one classified document after another and educated myself on the subject of dinosaurs.

  It’s too bad we don’t have time to look at some of those reports. I mean, you talk about inter­esting! That stuff was fascinating and I really wish . . . Do we have time to take a peek at the Dinosaur Files? No, but by George, we’re going to make time. You’ll want to hear this, but don’t forget that it’s Highly Classified. Not a word to anyone.

  Here we go—everything everyone has ever wanted to know about dinosaurs. But I must warn you that we’ll be using a bunch of heavy-duty scientific words. Don’t let the big words scare you. Take ’em one at a time and remember that most dinosaur words end with “-saurus.”

  Okay, let’s start with the fact that there’s more than one kind of dinosaur. There were a whole bunch of them. Some were big, some were little, and some were in between. Some walked upright on two legs; others walked downright on four legs or five legs or seven legs. The famous seven-legged dinosaur was called the Sevenosaurus.

  Some of these creatures ate only vegetables (the Carrotosaurus and the Spinachosaurus). Some ate nothing but meat (the Beefiosaurus and the Porkiosaurus), and there was even one that ate nothing but sweets, the Cookieosaurus.

  Other dinosaurs got their names from their appearance. Lumposaurus had knots on its back. Jumposaurus could leap over trees and mountains. Rumposaurus had a big tail. Bumposaurus was clumsy and ran into things. Stumposaurus was short and squatty. Gumposaurus was kind of dumb. Trunkosaurus had a long nose, like an elephant, and Junkosaurus collected bones and cans, like a pack rat.

  The very largest of the dinosaurs (you’ve
probably seen pictures of this one: long neck and long tail) was called Jumbo Eekosaurus. Once again, the name tells us about the appearance of the beast: “Jumbo” (huge), “Eek” (scary), and “Saurus” (dinosaur). Put ’em all together and you get “huge scary dinosaur.”

  Heh heh. Pretty impressive, huh? You bet. Most of your ordinary mutts would get lost in this kind of heavy-duty discussion of words and scientific so-forth. I mean, let’s face it. Most dogs know about three words: “eat,” “sleep,” and “duh.”

  Me? I get a kick out of messing with the big, dangerous words and helping the children learn about the world we live in.

  Anyway, that pretty muchly covers the whole subject of . . . no, wait, there’s one more thing we need to say about dinosaurs. If all dinosaurs have “-saurus” in their names, why are dinosaur birds called TERRADOGTAILS?

  They should be called Birdosaurus or Chirpo­saurus or something that would make you think “dinosaur bird.” But that’s not the way it turned out. Why? Great question, and you know what?

  I have no idea, so let’s skip it.

  It’s kind of amazing that a dog would know so much about this stuff, isn’t it? I’ve already said that, but it’s worth repeating repeating. Any dog who goes into this line of work must be a jackhammer of all trades. Some days we jack more than we hammer, and some days we hammer more than we jack; but the education never stops. When you spend your days and nights matching wits with crinimals and spies and exotic dinosaur birds, you have to stay on top of your business.

  Anyway, there I was at my desk, studying all the so-forth, when a total stranger burst out of the elevator and came sprinting into the office. “Hank, you’d better wake up! I just saw those birds, and you need to come take a look.”

  When a total stranger bursts into your office and calls you by name, it makes you wonder how much of a total stranger he could be. I mean, that’s pretty strange. Stranger still was the fact that the stranger had told me to wake up. Put those two clues together and you get an interesting profile: The guy thought he knew me, and he thought I was asleep.