The Case of the Haystack Kitties Page 3

  Her little voice reached my ears again. “I’m sorry to put it that way, but we mother cats have powerful reactions to dogs and loud noises. I don’t want to do anything crazy.”

  “Oh, well good. I’d hate for you to do anything crazy.”

  “See, I slugged a dog just a few minutes ago. I didn’t want to, but he stuck his nose in here and barked. He shouldn’t have been here. He shouldn’t have done that. I felt bad about it. Was he a friend of yours?”

  “Uh . . . we’re still debating that issue, ma’am. We’re not sure what he is, but I know the little mutt, yes.”

  “Please tell him I’m sorry, and please tell him not to do that again . . . or I’ll have to knock his block off.”

  It was kind of funny, hearing such tough language from such a timid little cat. I enjoyed a private chuckle and then returned to the unpleasant business of being Head of Ranch Security.

  I cleared my throat. “All right, ma’am, I’m here to inform you of your rights. You don’t have any. I’m sorry you chose to bring your litter of kittens to my haystack, but you did, and now you have to leave.”

  There was a moment of silence. “But how can I leave?”

  “I have no idea. No doubt it won’t be easy, but surely you’re not the first cat in history to face this challenge. You’ll think of something. And just remember: this is your problem, not mine. I’m just doing my job. I’ll be back in two or three hours. I sincerely hope that you’ll be gone.” Silence. “Hello? Did you hear me?”

  “Yes sir. I’ll do my best.”

  “Great. Doing our best is the best we can do. I wish you luck on your long journey away from here. Good-bye.”

  I marched away, feeling slightly . . . well, how would you feel, ordering a scrawny mother cat and her six children off your place? It didn’t make me real proud of myself, to be honest about it, but that’s the price you pay for being Head of Ranch Security. This job is more than cookies and milk . . . sugar and spice . . . whatever.

  Whatever it is, it’s not always pleasant. But that was my problem, and I would have to figure out how to live with it. And I would.

  I marched back to Drover. He had been watching, and he said, “What happened?”

  “I told her to clear out. I told her that she can’t keep her kittens on this ranch.”

  His eyes widened. “You told her that? That’s awful!”

  “What’s awful about it? We’re paid to enforce ranch law, Drover.”

  “Yeah, but she’s a mother.”

  “Right. Every mother on earth is a mother. Your mother was a mother.”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “If your mother had dumped a litter of kittens on this ranch, I would have thrown her off too.”

  “Yeah, but she never would have done that.”

  “Oh? What makes you so sure?”

  “Well, she was a dog, and dogs can’t have kittens.”

  I gave him a glare of purest steel. “Are you trying to make a mockery of this investigation? Do I need you to tell me that your mother couldn’t have had kittens?”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “You take a mole and make a mountain out of it, Drover.”

  “No, she was a dog, just a plain old dog.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My mother, dear old mom. She was just a dog.”

  “Of course she was a dog. What’s your point?”

  “You said she was a mole, but she wasn’t.” His lower lip began to tremble. “And I don’t think it’s very nice of you to say that she was a mole.”

  I took a deep breath of air, walked a few steps away, and tried to clear the sawdust and cobwebs out of my head. I looked up at the clouds. I studied the trees on the horizon. Only then did I return to Drover and his lunatic conversation.

  “Let’s start again, Drover. And just forget about your mother.”

  A tear slid down his cheek. “First you call her an ugly mole, then you tell me to forget about her. And now you’re going to throw that poor little mother cat off the ranch! Sometimes I think you’re just terrible!”

  “Will you dry up? What’s the big deal about the cat? Have you forgotten that she slapped you on the nose?”

  “Yeah, but I deserved it. If I’d been a mother cat and if I’d barked at my kittens, I would have slugged me too.”

  “Wait a second, hold it, halt. Say that again. I missed something.”

  “Well, let’s see here.” He sat down, hiked up his hind leg, and began scratching his left ear. I gave him a scowl.

  “Must you scratch while we’re talking?”

  “It helps me think. Now let’s see. If I were a cat with six little kittens . . . and then if I were a dog without any kittens . . .”

  “Stop right there. If you were a cat, you couldn’t be a dog.”

  “Yeah, but this is just plyke.”

  I stared into the vast emptiness of his eyes. “What is plyke?”

  “Play-like, only you can shorten it to ‘plyke’ and save some time.”

  “I have a better idea for saving some time. Why don’t you shut your trap and stop spreading chaos and confusion? You get me so messed up, I don’t know whether it’s raining or Tuesday.”

  “It’s Wednesday.”

  “Hush, Drover, and let’s get some work done. We have a ranch to run.”

  “Yeah, but my mother wasn’t an ugly mole.”

  I heaved a sigh. “Okay, Drover, she wasn’t a mole.”

  “Or ugly.”

  “She wasn’t an ugly mole, and I never said she was, but never mind. Let’s get back to work. And please hush.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I hurried away before he could say anything that might send me over the edge of the brink.

  You know, there are times when I think that Drover is really and truly . . . I don’t even have a word for it, so let’s just skip it.

  Slim had just finished topping out his load of hay. He’d stacked it six high on the flatbed. It appeared to be a pretty decent job of stacking, but of course he would need to tie it down with a couple of ropes. I mean, that was a standard precau­tion we followed on the ranch. Driving over rough ranch roads, a guy could plant bales of hay in spots where he didn’t want ’em to be.

  Slim jumped down, dusted off his hands, and studied the load. “What do you think, pooch? Is that the best job of stacking you ever saw?”

  It was a pretty good load, but it needed to be tied down.

  “You know, I don’t have any ropes with me. And you know what else?”

  Our eyes met. I gave my tail Slow Wags, as if to say, “Surely you’re not thinking . . .”

  He grinned. “That’s such a bodacious fine job of stacking, I think it’ll ride all the way to the pasture without ropes.”

  See? I knew it! Too lazy to go back to the saddle shed for ropes.

  “That’ll make up for some of the time we wasted on that fence. Come on, pup. Load up, and let’s get this show on the road.”

  Okay, fine. I’d tried to warn him, but had he listened? Oh no. Who was I, after all? Merely the Head of Ranch Security, just a dumb dog who happened to know quite a bit more about hauling hay than Mister Slim Chance did—and who could smell disaster in the wind.

  You just wait and see what happened.

  Chapter Five: Feeding Cattle with Slim Can Get Pretty Boring

  Okay, maybe we didn’t lose the load right away, but it was sheer good luck that kept it together, not Slim’s stacking job.

  And for the record, let me say that I watched it in the side mirrors as we drove along. You know that big pothole in the county road, just west of the . . . well, maybe you don’t know it, since you’ve never . . . there was a big pothole in the caliche road, just west of
the low-water crossing, and when we hit it with the right rear tire, I thought the load was going to quit us.

  I watched in the mirror and held my breath. So did Slim. When it didn’t fall, he winked at me and grinned. “Heh. Solid as a brick wall.”

  Yeah, right. And when you’re lucky, you don’t need skill or brains.

  We turned left onto the road, that led into the Dutcher Creek pasture and rumbled over the cattle­guard. I kept one eye on the mirror and one eye on Slim. The load held. Again, he gave me a wink and a grin.

  I don’t know why he had to make such a big deal out of it. Had we bet a large sum of money on it? No. I had merely expressed my opinion. And besides that, the day wasn’t over. We still had several miles of ranch roads to cover on our feed run, and that right rear corner looked pretty cushy to me.

  We passed Slim’s house. Actually, it was a shack, a little cowcamp shack that showed the effects of being lived in by a bachelor cowboy. Does that make sense? Maybe not, so let me put it another way. If you’d been driving along, and somebody had pointed to Slim’s place and said, “A bachelor cowboy lives there,” you wouldn’t have been surprised.

  Fact One: The outside of the shack was decorated with black tar paper. Why? Because Slim and Loper had never gotten around to finishing it out with shingles or siding. They had begun the project years ago, but it had gotten derailed. What had been their excuse? “We’ll finish it up when we get caught up on this ranch work,” they had said.

  Ha. They’d never caught up on the ranch work, and the outside of his shack had remained black and ugly. And you know what else? Slim couldn’t have cared less. Black was probably his favorite color, if he had a favorite color . . . if he could even see color, and I’m not sure he could.

  Fact Two: The curtains in the windows were the same curtains that had been there when he’d moved in, only now they were quite a bit dustier and fadeder . . . more faded, shall we say, than before. I doubt that he’d ever touched them. I know for a fact that he’d never cleaned them. As far as I could tell, they served only one purpose—to hide the flyspecks on his windows and the piles of dead miller moths on the sills.

  Fact Three: His yard showed all the love and care that a bachelor could give—none. There might have been five sprigs of buffalo grass in that yard, but mostly it was Russian thistles, soapweed, sun­flowers, cockleburs, and gourd vines. When strangers came to visit—about once every two years—they often pointed to the gourd vines and said, “My, your watermelons are doing great!” And Slim would say, “Yup, but I have to work at it.”

  Right. I happen to know that in five years, Slim had spaded up his yard three times. How do I know that? Because that’s the number of times his sewer had stopped up, and he’d had to turn some dirt to reach the cleanout.

  Oh, and have we mentioned his flowers? He had flowers in the yard. There was one little patch of iris on the south side of the house. They’d probably been there for fifty years and had somehow managed to survive. I don’t know if they ever bloomed. If they did, he’d probably rush out and spray them with poison to keep them from messing up his tar paper color scheme.

  Fact Four: He had a clothesline in the back yard. The posts were made of old four-by-four timbers, with two-by-four crossarms. They’d probably been put there by buffalo hunters in the 1870s, and they looked like two Old Rugged Crosses with one strand of galvanized wire strung between them.

  And as you may know, his clothesline was always loaded down with clothes. This might have fooled some people into thinking that Slim was neat and clean. That’s a laugh. We dogs knew the true story. He “warshed” his clothes maybe once a month, then left them flapping on the line so he wouldn’t have to fold them or put them in a drawer.

  Anyways, that was Slim’s shack, and we drove past it on the way to feed the Dutcher Creek cows. Slim guided the pickup down a little hill and parked in a grassy flat west of the creek. There, he honked the horn and called the cows in his usual manner—by cupping his right hand around his mouth and yelling, “Wooooooo! Wooooooo cow!” His cow calling always hurt my ears, and it always caused his Adam’s apple to jump around.

  Whilst we waited for the cows to come in, he picked through the litter on the floor of the pickup and came up with an old, yellow copy of the Twitchell Picayune. Does anybody know what a picayune is or why it became the name of a newspaper? Not me.

  Anyways, he found the paper and began reading it. I don’t know why he bothered. It was the same paper he’d been carrying around and reading for two months. Oh, and it had an oil stain on the front page where he’d used it to clean his dipstick. That was the one day he hadn’t used my ear.

  He scrunched down in the seat, tipped the brim of his hat down to his nose, propped the paper on the steering wheel, and began reading—to me, it seemed, as though I were interested, which I wasn’t.

  “Huh. Get this. Penny Scribner had triplets. That’ll keep old Johnny busy, trying to feed all them hungry babies.” He read some more. “I’ll be derned. The Baptist ladies are having a bake sale. I’ll bet it’s a good ’un. Them old gals can sure cook.” He rattled the paper and turned to an inside page. “Hey, get a load of this classified ad: ‘To the owner of the ugly black dog. Your dog killed three of my laying hens last Thursday. If you don’t tie him up, I will, and his feet won’t touch the ground. Signed, Bobby Barnett.’”

  He turned to the back page. I watched as he squinted his eyes, changed the angle of his head, and moved the paper around. “Either they smudged the ink on this thing or I’m going blind. I may be forced to go to the dime store and try on their bifocals, if they ever put ’em on sale. You reckon bifocals would spoil my good looks?”

  Suddenly I realized that he was staring at me. What was the question? My mind had, uh, wandered, it seemed.

  “Hank, if you don’t start paying closer attention to this conversation, I’m liable to get my feelings hurt and quit talking.” He went back to the paper. “A lot of dogs would give anything to feed cattle with me and listen to my sparklin’ conversation. Say, listen to this. Texas leads the nation in the production of bat manure. A guy never knows what he’ll learn, readin’ the Picayune.”

  He folded it up and laid it back on the floorboard. I blinked my eyes and yawned. I had spent more exciting times watching ants. I guess he noticed.

  “What’s the deal? You bored?”

  Yes, as a matter of fact.

  “You want me to sing you a song?”

  No. Thank you.

  “Okay, since you asked, since you begged and pleaded, since you love my singin’, and since you’ve got such great taste in music, I’ll sing you one song. But just one. Don’t ask for two.”

  Oh brother.

  Well, here’s what he did . . . sang . . . whatever.

  Slim’s Boring Song

  There was a handsome cowboy who lived all alone

  In a tar paper shack he’d made into a home.

  The ladies all loved him and banged on his door

  But he sent ’em away and made ’em all cry in their sorrow.

  It wasn’t because he didn’t like pretty wimmenin

  Or thought he didn’t need the touch of the feminine.

  He did and he knew it, ’cause his shack was a mess,

  But he was deeply devoted to his best pal named Hankie the Wonderdog.

  Yippy ti-yi-yo, stay awake, little doggy,

  I wish you could sing, but I know that you cain’t.

  Yippy ti-yi-yo, stay awake, little doggy,

  The sunshine is bright, but I know that you ain’t.

  Now, Hank and his master fed cattle all day,

  Hauled truckloads and truckloads of alfalfa hay.

  Come evening, they found theirselves back at the house.

  Slim cooked ’em a supper of steak and lobster and green beans.

  And then they sat down for an evening
of fun.

  Slim read him the Picayune ’til a quarter to one.

  Hank begged him to sing with his wonderful voice,

  So he sang many songs, and Hank really loved ’em a whole bunch.

  Yippy ti-yi-yo, stay awake, little doggy,

  I wish you could sing, but I know that you cain’t.

  Yippy ti-yi-yo, stay awake, little doggy,

  The sunshine is bright, but I know that you ain’t.

  The sunshine is bright, Hank, but I know that you ain’t.

  He finished his so-called song and gave me a big grin. “Well, what do you think of that one, Hankie boy?”

  I thought . . . I thought it was about the DUMBEST song I’d ever heard. Not only was it incorrect and full of baloney, but half of his lines didn’t even rhyme. Furthermore, it was clear to me that Slim needed to find a job that gave him less idle time.

  Oh, and I’d heard the part about “The sunshine is bright, but I know that you ain’t.” Not funny, not funny at all.

  But of course he got a big chuckle out of it. “Yep, you’re a very lucky dog, Hank. Not only do I read the paper to you, but I write songs for you and perform ’em, live and in person. Sometimes I wonder, though, if you really appreciate all the swell things I do for you.”

  Well, I could clear that up right away. I didn’t appreciate any of it. His paper-reading-aloud was totally boring, and his singing reminded me of a windmill that needed grease. And next time he wanted me to go feed with him, I would stay home.

  He yawned and looked out the window. “Well, looks like we’ve got the cows. Reckon they came up to hear my singin’?” He rolled up his window. “Better shut this winder or I’ll get alfalfa leaves in this pretty pickup.” He started the motor, put her in compound, let out on the clutch, opened the door, and stepped out. “Well, pooch, I’ll throw off the hay, and you can drive.”

  He slammed the door and left me alone in the moving pickup.

  Chapter Six: Beware: This Chapter Is Very Scary