Lost in the Blinded Blizzard Page 3

  On the one hand, I could understand the powerful effect that Miss Beulah’s voice had on Drover. Even I felt a certain tingle of excitement. But on the other hand, a guy must resist the temptation to reveal all his cards, so to speak.

  In the game of love, if you reveal all your cards, you will soon reach a point where all your cards have been revealed.

  I stepped over the little mutt and let my eyes drift up to Miss Beulah’s face. “Oh my goodness, I believe we have company. And my goodness again, it turns out to be Miss Beulah!”

  Heh, heh. This was the opening shot of what would surely prove to be the final battle for the fortress of Miss Beulah’s heart.

  And best of all, her stick-tailed bird-dog friend was nowhere in sight.

  Chapter Five: Drilled by a Flea in Front of Miss Beulah

  “Hello, Hank,” she said in that honey-smooth voice of hers.

  “Hello, Beulah. I must say that I’m surprised to see you out at this time of night, and I’ll even admit that it’s a pleasant surprise. But I hope you understand that seeing you here tonight is just one of many surprises that I’ve experienced today.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yes. This has been a day full of surprises, Beulah, but that’s fairly routine. In my line of work, I see many ladies during the course of an average day.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Oh yes. I couldn’t possibly keep a count. Many of them come for advice. Many come for sympathy. And many more come for . . .” I arched my left eyebrow. “Well, it seems that I have a small reputation amongst the ladies. In spite of my best efforts to keep my exploits and adventures a secret, the word just seems to get around.”

  “How interesting!”

  “Yes, indeed.” Drover was still rolling around and I stepped on his nose. “Oops, sorry about that, son.”

  “Oh, my heart’s about to bust!” he squeaked.

  “That was your nose, Drover, and I would appreciate it if you would stop making a spectacle of yourself.”

  “I can’t help it! I saw her face and it struck me deaf and dumb!”

  “Her face might have stuck you deaf, Drover, but you were dumb long before she got here.” I stepped over him and let my eyes drift up to Beulah again. “You’ll have to excuse Drover, ma’am. Unlike me, he lives a sheltered life and rarely comes into contact with, shall we say, mem­bers of the female species.”

  “What a clever way of saying it!” said Beulah.

  “Thank you, thank you, but I really can’t take much credit for being clever. You won’t believe this, Beulah, but those clever remarks just pop into my head and roll off of my lips. I mean, they come without any effort at all—just like raindrops falling from the prairie or wildflowers springing up on the sky.”

  A small chirp of laughter came from her lovely mouth. “Oh Hank, sometimes I can’t tell whether you’re teasing or trying to be serious.”

  Heh heh. Good. Great. Perfect. You don’t ever want ’em to know all your tricks.

  I tossed my head to one side and chuckled. “Ha, ha, ha. Yes, all the ladies seem to wonder about that, Beulah: ‘Is Hank being serious or is he just a naughty teaser.’ Ha, ha, ha. Oh my, isn’t this life a wonderful mystery! But if I were to reveal the answer, the mystery would vanish, POOF! And . . .”

  At that very moment, just as I had the lovely Miss Beulah eating my hand—eating OUT of my hand, I should say—I was drilled by a flea.

  This was a cruel twist of fate. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. At first I tried to ignore it. I mean, ignoring pain was nothing new to me, but hey, this was pain of a new dimension and a higher order of majesty.

  Anyways, I tried to carry on. “If I were to reveal all my secrets, Miss Beulah, the flea would vanish in a poof of yikes!”

  The flea would not be ignored.

  Let me pause here to say a word about fleas. Yes, they are very small. If a flea is small and if a flea makes his living by drilling holes in innocent dogs, then it follows from simple logic that a small flea uses a small drill to inflict a small hole upon his victim—which, following the same line of simple logic, should cause only a small hurt.

  Under ordinary circumstances, simple logic is not only simple but also logical, and therefore true. In this case, simple logic is WRONG. Small fleas cause big hurts. Don’t ask me how or why, but they do, take my word for it.

  So there I was, poised beneath Beulah’s balcony, so to speak, and charming her with my words and charms, when all at once—WHAMO! This sniveling flea drilled me in the right dorsal hiney, and fellers, he got my attention.

  My head shot up, my tail shot up, and suddenly I found myself rolling around on the ground, withering in pain. Writhing in pain, I should say.

  Oh hurt! Oh pain! Oh humiliation!

  And of the three, the humiliation was the hardest to bear. Just think about it. You’re Head of Ranch Security. You run the place, you’re in charge, you’re the guy who barks up the sun in the morning and barks it down at night. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, happens on that ranch without your say-so.

  A very serious job and a heavy responsibility, in other words, which not only requires courage and intelligence, but also a certain amount of dignity.

  And something happens to a guy’s dignity when he’s brought to his knees by a BUG.

  And to have this happen in front of one’s True Love and Fondest Desire is a foolish crate.

  A cruelish fate.

  A cruel fate.

  If you’ve ever been drilled by a flea, you’ll understand. If you haven’t, you can take my word for it: a drilling flea can take a grown dog to the mat and leave his dignity in scrambles. Real quick.

  Okay. I hit the deck, so to speak, and launched my posse of teeth and went after that sneaking, overbearing little pipsqueak of a flea.

  It might surprise you to know that dogs—even your higher bred blue-ribbon top-of-line cowdogs—have places on their bodies that cannot be defended against drilling fleas. It’s true. A flea that strikes near the base of the tail cannot be stopped by ordinary means.

  I had to go to extraordinary measures to combat this dog-eating flea. “Excuse me just one moment, Beulah, I have this . . .”

  After running in circles and chasing my hiney for several seconds, I realized that I would have to change tactics. That microscopic flea was armed with a six-foot drill bit, fellers, and he was doing incredible damage to my body!

  You’re probably thinking that the cause was lost, that the alleged flea had succeeded in running his eight-foot tempered steel diamond-tipped gigantic drill bit through the entire length of my body, causing my precious fluids and liquids to leak out on the ground.

  Is that what you thought? Well, you’re in for a big surprise. As the old saying goes, “It’s always darkest before it gets any darker.”

  What that flea didn’t know about cowdogs was that when Emergency Defense System One fails, we don’t quit. We initiate Emergency Defense System Two and go right on fighting!

  We have our tricks, see. Many tricks. Tricks that no flea has ever thought of.

  Okay. You’ve got a flea drilling you from behind. You’ve launched several waves of tooth posses and they’ve been repealed. Repelled. And it appears that the situation is hopeless. You’ve been struck a deadly blow in a bodily zone that cannot be defended by conventional means.

  So here’s what you do. You sit down and lift both hind legs off the ground and raise them to a 45 degree angle. This concentrates all the weight of your body upon a small area near the base of your tail—which just happens to be the same small area where the pain, the terrible pain, is centered.

  With the weight of your body concentrated over the area of pain and misery, you are ready to begin the most difficult part of the procedure. Pay close attention because I’ll go over it only once.

  Back legs up, tail down,
weight on back end. Now, scoot forward, using front legs to pull rest of body around in a small circle, some 3–4 feet in diameter. Repeat the procedure two or three times, as necessary.

  I’ll admit that, to an outside observer, a dog going through this procedure might appear a little silly. And it might have looked even sillier because, while I was attacking the flea problem, Mister Spasms-of-the-Heart was still rolling around on the ground.

  But silly or not, my procedure worked, and nothing works better than something that works.

  Okay. At last I had conquered the flea problem and rubbed him off the face of the earth, the hateful little snot, and was ready to turn my full attention back to the Department of Love.

  I jumped to my feet, gave myself a good shake, and threw my gaze back to the pickup bed.

  “Excuse the little diversion, Miss Beulah, but I’m sure you can . . .”

  HUH?

  Bird dog? A spotted bird dog?

  That made no sense at all. Miss Beulah was a collie, not a . . . oh, it was HIM. Plato the Spotted Dumb-Bunny Bird Dog.

  And he was laughing.

  “By golly, Hank, that was one of the funniest routines I’ve seen in years!”

  “Is that so?”

  “Right. It was terrific! I don’t know where you keep coming up with your material.”

  “It’s pretty awesome, I guess.”

  “Right, it sure is, and Beulah loved it! I mean, she just loved it. I haven’t seen her laugh so hard in years. Why, she’s flat out on the floor right now.”

  “Isn’t that wonderful.”

  “By golly, yes! You have a tremendous sense of comedy, Hank, and I mean that sincerely.”

  “Yeah? Well, you’re fixing to see the second act.”

  I had already made up my mind to leap into the back of the pickup and show the bird dog the rest of my “routine,” which would consist of me doing incredible damage to his face.

  But just then Billy came out of the house. He waved good-bye to Slim, jumped into the pickup, and drove away.

  Just before they disappeared into the storm, Plato yelled, “Terrific job, Hank, really terrific! It’ll be a long time before Beulah and I forget this night!”

  “Same here, Bird Dog, and that should cause you to lose a lot of sleep!”

  And with that, they vanished into the night, leaving me alone with a huge crater in my heart.

  And tail.

  Chapter Six: A Sick Baby

  The world’s best cure for a broken heart has always been a nice juicy bone. The next-best cure is a good night’s sleep in front of a woodstove.

  I had no juicy bones to help me through this dark and difficult period, and so when Slim came to the door and called us dogs into the house, I rushed inside and took my spot in front of the stove.

  I still didn’t think that a ranch dog had any business . . . I did it for medical reasons. A guy has to take care of his heart.

  Did it work? Well, I managed to survive the night, even though I spent a large portion of my sleep time dreaming about a certain collie dog whose name I won’t mention.

  And listening to Drover’s wheezing and grunting.

  The next morning at daylight, I was awakened by the ringing of a bell. Not one to be fooled twice in a row, I suspicioned that it was the telephone and didn’t bother to bark at it.

  Okay, I barked at it a couple of times, but I was still asleep when I did it, so technically speaking, I wasn’t actually fooled.

  I heard Slim’s feet hit the floor in the back bedroom. I heard him running down the hall. Then . . . his scratchy voice.

  “Hello. No, I’ve been up for hours. Who is this? Oh, Loper. Morning. What time is it? I’ll be derned. It is?”

  Slim parted the curtains and looked out the window. “By gollies, it sure is. Looks like we might be in for a storm. The baby’s sick? Say, that’s no good. I guess the roads are too bad to . . . Cough medicine? Yeah, I’ve got a bottle of it somewhere. What? Speak up, Loper, I can’t hardly hear you!”

  “No, you stay put. I’ll try to make it in the flat­bed. Oh, it ain’t snowing that hard.” He peeked out the window again. “It is snowing pretty hard, ain’t it? But I’ll make it, don’t worry. See you in twenty minutes.”

  He hung up the phone and stretched his eyelids to get them open. “Little Molly’s got a bad cough, dogs, and we’ve got to take some medicine up to her. I’d better find the derned stuff right now, else I’ll run off and forget it, and wouldn’t that be cute?”

  He shuffled into the bathroom. Bottles clinked. He came out again, yawning and holding a bottle of something up close to his face. “Cough medicine, that’s what it says. Okay, so far, so good.”

  He came over to the front of the stove and opened it up. “Move, dog, unless you want to go into the firebox.”

  On this ranch, manners don’t get much exercise in the morning. The cowboys just grunt at you and threaten to throw you into the fire if you don’t . . . oh well.

  I moved.

  He pitched in some crumpled-up newspapers and sticks of kindling, blew on the coals until the paper popped into flames, and then he added some chunks of fence-post cedar.

  He’d slept in his one-piece red long-john under­wear and left his jeans and shirt draped over the back of a chair, so it didn’t take him long to get dressed.

  He went out into the kitchen and flipped on the light switch. Nothing happened. The electric was still out because of the storm. He grumbled about that and made himself a quick breakfast: a cup of cold day-old coffee and a peanut-butter sandwich.

  He dug his sheeplined coat and five-buckle galoshes out of the closet, put on his warmest gloves and his wool cap with the ear flappers, and headed for the door.

  He slipped the bottle of medicine into the pocket of his sheepline and turned to us. “Come on, dogs, we’ve got work to do.”

  If I’d had a couple of minutes, I probably could have thought of a few things I’d rather do than go out into that cold blowing snow. I mean, it was pretty nasty outside, and there was never any question about whether or not we dogs would ride in the back of the pickup.

  We rode in the cab with Slim.

  We hadn’t gone more than fifty yards down the road before we hit a deep drift. Slim had to get out and lock in the front hubs, and then we started out again in four-wheel drive. The county road up to Loper’s place had already begun to drift over. The wind was blowing hard, straight out of the north, and we couldn’t see much of anything.

  Slim had to hold his head at an angle to see out the windshield. “Boys, this storm is worse than I thought. I can’t find the road. If I’d a-known it was blowing this hard . . . boys, I’ve got a feeling that we ain’t going to make it.”

  All at once the pickup seemed to be sliding down­ward and tilting sideways, and Drover and I were sitting in Slim’s lap, so to speak.

  He shifted gears and gunned the motor, but we didn’t move.

  “Well, I’ve done it now,” he said. “We’re off in the ditch and this is the end of the line. And Hank, you stink!”

  He pushed me away and tried to open his door, but it was wedged against a snowdrift. He opened the door on the right side, pitched us out into the deep snow, and crawled out behind us.

  Say, being out in that storm was a little bit scary. I mean, you couldn’t see more than 25 feet in any direction and the wind was blowing so hard that it took your breath away.

  For the first time, I noticed lines of fear on Slim’s face. “Dogs, we have got ourselves in some trouble. If we can’t find our way back to the house, we could be crowbait.”

  That’s all it took to send Drover into a nervous breakthrough. “Oh Hank, I don’t want to be crowbait and I’m too young to be a widow, and I’m so cold I just don’t think I can make it and . . . oh, my leg!”

  “Come on, dogs,” Slim said, �
��stay close to me and don’t get lost. We’ll foller the barbed-wire fence as far as she goes, and then we’ll have to strike out and walk into the storm—and hope we can find the house.”

  He waded and stumbled through the snow that had drifted into the ditch, and climbed up the bank on the other side until he reached the fence. He turned the collar of his sheepline up against the wind and started walking east, holding the top wire in his left hand.

  Drover and I followed. I mean, Slim didn’t need to worry about ME sticking close to him. All of a sudden that storm had made me feel pretty small and insignificant, which ain’t exactly a normal feeling for your Heads of Ranch Security.

  The snow was so deep, I couldn’t walk in it, had to hop from one spot to the next. It was even harder for Mister Squeakbox, since his legs were only half as short as mine. Or half as long, I guess you could say.

  Anyways, he was sawed-off at the legs. He’d try to walk on the top crust of the snow, don’t you see, and that would work for a while, but then he’d break through and disappear.

  It was tough going for him, and since Drover has never been one to suffer in silence, I got to hear all about it: he was freezing, he was tired, his nose was cold, his ears were cold, he was going snowblind, he’d lost the feeling in his stub tail, and his leg hurt, of course.

  I got tired of hearing it. “Drover, dry up, will you?”

  “I want to go to the machine shed!”

  “Fine. Go to the machine shed, if you can find it.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to look.”

  “Then dry up and walk.”

  “My legs are too short to walk in this snow!”

  “Then fly.”

  “I can’t fly!”

  “Then shut your trap.”

  “Oh, my leg!”

  It seemed to take us an hour to slog our way to the cattle guard, where the road turned north and went to Slim’s place. Slim stopped and leaned against the corner post and fought for his breath.

  I knew he was tired. I was tired too. Wading through that deep snow was a killer.