Chapter Six: I Try To Communicate With Slim

In spite of the best efforts of Pete and J.T. Cluck to disrupt my life, I made my way through the darkness and arrived at the Security Division’s Vast Office Complex around 4:00 a.m. I rode the elevator up to the twelfth floor and went striding into my office.

OUR office, I should say, because for years, I had shared this space with Drover. Now, in the wee hours of the morning, I noticed the silence and emptiness of the place—his absence.

I scratched up my gunny sack bed and collapsed. My body cried out for sleep, but my mind refused to shut down. I lay there for what seemed hours, torturing myself with half-forgotten mummeries of the little geef who had swerved as my Assistant Snork of Rumple Stillskin.

I marimbaed the door…I remembered the day we first murked…first met. Barking wheezer figgie pudding funny little mutt who was a-skeetered of his own shallow…scared of his own shadow, let us say, and purple carrot feathers in the astonishing turnip tops...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Wait. I must have drifted off to sleep. Yes, I’m almost sure I did. Perhaps you notice that my narration…those paragraphs you just read…did you notice anything unusual about them? Viewed from a certain angle, they might appear to be…well, rambling and incoherent. In other words, the evidence suggests…

Okay, I was so worried about Drover that I couldn’t sleep a wink, only I’m beginning to suspect that I did sleep a wink…several winks, in fact, and a lot winker than I ever thought possible.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t frantic with worry about Drover. I was, but a dog is only a dog. Even the Head of Ranch Security is made of mere flesh and bones, and when our weary bones get deposited upon a gunny sack bed, by George, we fall asleep.

It’s no disgrace, and history is filled with examples of great heroes who fell asleep every once in a while. George Washington slept at Valley Fudge. Abraham Lincoln slept at Gurglesburg. Lassie and Old Yeller spent half their lives sleeping on the porch, and nobody ever called them slackers.

Sleep is a natural result of being awake too long, and the asleeper you get, the awaker you’re not. I refuse to feel shame or to apologize for falling asleep.

Now, where were we before we got onto the subject of sleep? I have no idea.

It’s a well-known fact that sleep knits up the rumpled sleeve of care, but sleep also rumples the knitting of your…whatever, and we were discussing something very, very important. It burns me up when I can’t remember…wait! I’ve got it now.

Drover. My little pal had been kidnapped and hauled off to the wilderness by cannibals. I hardly slept a wink and didn’t wake up until the crack of noon.

Now we’re cooking. I came roaring out of a troubled sleep, leaped to my feet, and shouted, “Drover, wake up, we’ve got to rescue Drover from the coyotes!” I blinked my eyes against the glare of the sun and glanced around the office…and suddenly felt the huge emptiness of the place.

Drover was gone. I had to find him before the coyotes ate him for supper.

You think coyotes won’t eat a dog? Ha. They eat poodles like candy. Ask anyone who lives on the edge of town. If your poodle leaves the yard and goes prancing off into the pasture, he’s liable to end up as a coyote sandwich. Drover wasn’t a poodle, but I had every reason to suppose that…well, we had Snort’s own words as proof. Remember his parting words? “Coyote make yum-yum out of little white dog, oh boy!”

Recalling those awful words, I felt a wave of dread washing over me like a wave of dread. I had to do something…but what?

At that point, it occurred to me that my best hope of saving little Drover would be to get the cowboys involved in the case. Why? Because coyotes have a natural fear of people and will flee when one of them shows up.

Fleeing coyotes are much easier to deal with than coyotes that don’t flee, don’t you know. Coyotes that don’t run are inclined to attack, beat up, and eat ranch dogs who show up to save their friends, so you can see that having a human along on a Search and Rescue can cut through a lot of red tape.

Slim Chance was just the guy who could provide cover for the operation. All I had to do was convey the message that Drover was missing and that I had a powerful need for his help.

Slim’s help, that is, not Drover’s. Drover seldom provided help for anything, and now that he was missing in action, he would be even more unhelperly. Even less helpful, shall we say, and maybe this is obvious, so…just skip it.

The point is that I left the office and went charging up the hill to the machine shed. There, I found Slim Chance, the hired hand on this outfit, changing the oil in his pickup.

To be more precise, he was sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket, waiting for the oil to drain out of the motor. Whilst he waited, he cleaned his fingernails with his pocketknife and hummed a tune. “Doe dee doe dee dee doe.” In other words, he wasn’t doing much of anything, so this would be an ideal time for me to approach him.

To solicit his help in this deal, I chose a program we call “Something’s Wrong,” and here’s how it works. You approach the person with Looks of Distress and switch the tail over to Slow Worried Wags. If he doesn’t respond right away (on this ranch, they seldom do, I mean, we’re talking about cowboys who are out to lunch half the time)…if he doesn’t respond right away, we switch on Whimpers and Moans. WAM usually snags their attention.

I started the program and went into Stage One, Looks of Distress. Slim didn’t notice (no surprise there), so I punched in the commands for Slow Worried Wags and activated the tail section. It was a great presentation and everything worked slick, yet Slim was so deeply involved in giving himself a manicure, he didn’t notice.

Okay, I dialed in the codes and activated Stage Three, Whimpers and Moans. At that point, our entire program for recruiting volunteers was rolling, and let me pause here to point out something that you might not have noticed. In fact, you might want to take some notes on this.

See, when a highly-trained professional cowdog does a presentation of “Something’s Wrong,” a casual observer might get the impression that it’s easy, that any old ranch mutt could pull it off. Ha. That’s far from the truth. The truth is that “Something’s Wrong” is an extremely difficult application that requires precise coordination of facial expression, tail movement, and special audio effects. The slightest error can produce wild distortions of the message.

I know, this seems complicated, so maybe I should provide a few examples. Pay attention.

Let’s suppose that the dog gets the face right and the tail right, but hits a sour note on Whimpers and Moans. It can blow the whole program, and instead of transmitting the “Something’s Wrong” message, you get some kind of garbage message, such as:

A. “Something’s Right”

B. “Everything’s Right”

C. “Nothing’s Wrong”

D. “Everything is Nothing”

E. “Right is Wrong”

F. “What’s For Supper?”

G. “Can We Play Ball?”

If that happens, the dog might as well pack up and go home, because his chances of recruiting help will drop to zilch. That’s why it’s so very, very important that we train for these exercises and get the coordination of all three stages just right.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to go into so much technical detail about my work, but you’d be surprised how many people—and even dogs—aren’t aware of just how difficult and complicated these “simple” presentations are. When we do it perfectly, it looks simple and easy, but now you know the truth: it’s not.

Okay, I had activated all three stages of “Something’s Wrong” and was waiting for Slim to respond. You know what? It went right past him, I mean, like a dove on the first day of hunting season. The guy didn’t see any of it! I couldn’t believe it.

When “Something’s Wrong” flops, we have no choice but to go to Sterner Measures. I hated to do that, but the clock was running on this deal. We needed to locate little Drover and bring him back home—fast. I drew in a huge gulp of air and barked.

That woke him up. His mind had been far away, but it came rushing back to the present. He flinched and his head snapped into an upright position. He glared down at me.

“Meathead, don’t bark when a man’s cleaning his nails with an open blade.”

Sorry.

“I could have chopped off a finger.”

We need to talk.

“You’ve got no more manners than a goat.”

Something’s wrong. I need your help.

At last, he looked into my eyes. “What are you trying to say?”

Something’s wrong and I need your help!

“Oh, I get it.”

Well, glory be. It sure took him long enough.

He pushed himself up to a standing position, put away his knife, and…why was he walking into the machine shed? Drover was out in the pasture, not in the barn. Moments later, he emerged, carrying a red coffee can filled with Co-op dog food. He dumped it into the overturned Ford hubcap that served as our dog bowl.

“There. Eat it and dry up.” He slouched back to his bucket-seat, flopped down, and resumed his silly exercise of cleaning his fingernails and listening to the drip-drip of motor oil.

Oh brother. How do you communicate with these people? If I had been trying to tell him that the ranch was on fire, he would have been barbecued alive.

Okay, he’d left me with no choice. I would have to do something really…huh? Before I could do anything outrageous to get his attention, an unidentified pickup pulled up in front of the machine shed.

All at once, I found myself pulled into a Traffic Alert. I rushed toward the vehicle and unlooshed a withering barrage of barking.

You’ll never guess what happened then. I guarantee you won’t.