Chapter One: The Mystery Begins

It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. The mystery began one evening toward the end of May, as I recall. Yes, it was May. I’m sure it was, because “May” is a three-letter word that if spelled backward comes out “yam.” A yam is a sweet potato, don’t you see, and is similar to a regular Irish potato.

What does all this have to do with the Case of the Raging Rottweiler? Be patient, I’m getting there.

See, in the Security Business, we often employ little memory tricks to help us recall the many facts and clues we encounter in our work. Example: “May” spelled backward comes out “yam.” A yam is a form of potato, right? You will be shocked to know that the night this adventure began, Slim cooked himself a baked potato for supper.

You see the connection now? It all fits together—May, yam, Irish potato, and baked potato—and that’s how I remember that this case began in May. Pretty clever, huh? You bet. In the Security Busi­ness, we often employ . . . I’ve already said that.

Where were we? We were at the beginning, and that happens to be the point at which most of these mysteries begin. It all began, as I recall, around the middle of June. We were in the grip of a heat wave, day after day of temperatures over a hundred degrees. Terrible heat, and also very dry.

No rain. Our spring grass had turned brown. The buffalo grass had stopped growing. Stock ponds were drying up and turning into mudholes. Slim was keeping a close watch on our windmills, checking them every other day instead of the usual twice a week.

Have we discussed the importance of windmills on a cattle ranch? Maybe not, but I guess we should. On a ranching operation such as this one, most of our water for the livestock is pumped out of the ground by windmills. Nothing is more important in the summertime than a supply of fresh water. If cattle run out of water, fellers, we have big problems. We either have to haul water to the cattle in a water trailer or move the cattle to another pasture.

What makes the water situation especially scary is that if the wind quits blowing, the windmills quit turning—all of them. And then we have water problems everywhere at once. Our situation wasn’t quite that serious. It was hot and dry, but the wind was still blowing and turning those wind­mills, and for that we were grateful.

It’s kind of impressive that a dog would know so much about ranch management, isn’t it? Most of your ordinary mutts (Drover comes to mind here) pay no attention to such matters. They eat, lie around in the shade, scratch a few fleas, and maybe bark at a cat every once in a while, but they pay no attention to the Larger Issues.

Me? I have to stay on top of things. Have I mentioned that I’m Head of Ranch Security? I am, which means I’m not only in charge of Surveillance and Investigations, but I have to keep a close eye on these other matters, too.

Anyways, it was July and hot. Drover and I had spent the day checking cattle and windmills with Slim Chance, the cowboy. It was around eight o’clock in the evening, just before sundown, when we returned to Slim’s shack, some two miles east of ranch headquarters. Slim got out of the pickup and stretched a kink out of his back. Whilst he was involved in that, Drover and I left our spots on the pickup seat and jumped out.

I noticed that a scowl moved across Slim’s face and that his eyes seemed to have locked on . . . something, something inside the pickup. The seat perhaps? It was hard to tell, but Slim was giving it a close inspection.

“Is there some reason why you mutts have to shed hair all over my pickup seat?”

Well, I . . . I didn’t know how to respond to that. Had we shed a few hairs?

He pointed toward the evidence. “Look at that. I let you bozos ride up front with the executives, and that’s the thanks I get.”

I looked closer. You know, he was right. Even at a distance, I could see that certain unnamed suspects had deposited ugly dog hairs on the back of his pickup seat.

I whirled around and stabbed Drover with a glare of steel. “You see what you’ve done?”

He blinked his eyes and grinned. “Oh, hi. Are we home already? Gosh, I must have dozed off.”

“Of course you dozed off. You always doze off, but that’s not the problem.”

“Oh good. I sure love sleep. What’s the problem?”

I pointed my nose toward the inside of the pickup. “Check that out, Drover. Study the evidence.”

He studied the evidence. “Well, let’s see here. I don’t see anything.”

“Dog hairs. Hundreds of ’em, thousands of ’em. They’re all over Slim’s pickup seat. Can you guess where they came from?”

He sat down and squinted one eye. “Well, let me think. Uh . . . a dog?”

“Very good. Cat hair comes from cats. Hog hair comes from hogs. Dog hair comes from dogs.”

“I’ll be derned. I didn’t know hogs had hair.”

“They do. All fur-boring animals have hair. Hogs are boring animals. Therefore, they have hair.”

“I thought they had bristles.”

“No. You’re thinking of brushes. Brushes have bristles. Hogs have hair.”

“I’ll be derned. What makes ’em so boring?”

“They’re boring, Drover, because they grunt all the time. If they had anything to say, maybe they wouldn’t be so boring, but their answer to everything is a grunt.”

“Yeah, and who cares what a hog thinks anyway?”

“Exactly my point. And let that be a lesson to you.”

Just then, Slim pointed down to the creek. “Lookie yonder. There’s our doe and fawn again.” He gave us the evil eye. “Don’t you dogs even think about chasing those deer.”

Who, me? Hey, he didn’t need to . . .

Sure enough, on the other side of the creek was a whitetail doe and her fawn. They’d been coming in for water the past several days, and Slim sure didn’t need to worry about me barking them away. No sir. The thought had never . . .

Okay, maybe I’d thought about it once or twice. I mean, barking at wild animals was second nature to a dog, but Slim had made his position clear on the matter and I had taken a solemn pledge not to bother his deer. Heck, I had even promised to protect them.

At that very moment, my ears picked up the sound of an approaching vehicle. That was odd, very odd. Who would be coming to Slim’s place at this hour of the day? I didn’t know, and it didn’t really matter. The vehicle had no business on our ranch, and it was time for us dogs to bark the alarm.

“Drover, we’ve got an unidentified vehicle coming in from the south. This could turn into a Code Three Situation. Let’s move out.”

We went streaking past Slim’s pitiful little yard. It was pitiful because it contained no grass, only weeds, and most of those weeds were withered and brown from the heat. We roared past the yard, past the house, and went ripping up the hill to the cattle guard.

There, sure enough, we met the Unauthorized Vehicle. Description: old Ford, faded blue, conventional box bed, a dent in the right fender. A driver appeared to be sitting . . . well, in the driver’s seat. I guess that wasn’t such a big clue, but I took note of it anyway.

When you’re Head of Ranch Security, you have to notice every tiny detail. I mean, if there had been no driver, that would have been . . . never mind.

But there was a driver. A man, age . . . I couldn’t tell his age. Maybe forty. He was wearing a straw cowboy hat and a T-shirt, an odd combination. See, cowboys—your real working cowboys—wear long-sleeved shirts, never T-shirts. There are reasons for that, but we’re in the middle of a Code Three and I don’t have time to go into them now.

Oh, maybe we can pause for just a minute. Cowboys wear long-sleeved shirts to protect them­selves from sun and biting insects. Men who wear T-shirts usually aren’t ranch cowboys.

Okay, back to the Unidentified Vehicle. We swooped in on it, Drover and I did, and within seconds we had it surrounded. I gave the order to initiate Warning Barks. When the pickup didn’t screech to a halt, we shifted into the next stage, which we call “You’d Better Stop That Thing Right Now.”

It’s a more serious kind of barking, don’t you see, and a lot of times the driver of the vehicle will slam on his brakes and step out of the cab with his hands in the air. No kidding.

But that’s not what this guy did. He kept driv­ing, I mean, just ignored us, kept going and left us in a cloud of dust. Caliche dust, very fine and powdery because of the dryness of the weather, and I didn’t appreciate having to breathe it.

Already I wasn’t liking this guy, and then I noticed a couple of clues that made me like him even less. First off, he had two fishing poles hanging out the window on the passenger side, an indication that he might be a poached fisherman.

A fishing poacherman.

A poaching fisherman.

A poacher. A trespasser. The kind of guy who slips onto a ranch and fishes without the permission of the owners. I don’t like ’em. They have no respect for private property. They come in without permission, catch fish, and leave their garbage behind—candy wrappers, beer cans, soda pop bottles—and we have to clean up the mess.

So, right away, I had three or four good reasons for disliking this guy, and after choking on his dust for a few seconds, I sprang back into action and chased him all the way to Slim’s little shack of a barn. Drover fell in behind me and added a few yips.

It must have worked. The trespasser pulled up beside Slim’s pickup and stopped. I quit barking and waited to see what would happen.

Slim slouched against the pickup and stuck out his hand. “Well I’ll be derned. Joe McCall. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

They shook hands. “It was at a team roping in Higgins, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right. Me and Loper were lookin’ at the prize money right up to the last go-round. Then you caught your steer in seven seconds flat. We went home broke, and I’ve been broke ever since. I always figured it was mostly your fault.”

Joe laughed. “We got lucky, is all. You guys were hot that night. You still rope?”

“In the pasture, is all. My banker sent a little note with my fifth overdraft and said I might want to explore other career opportunities. I guess he’d done figured out that I wasn’t going to make it to the National Finals.”

Joe nodded and smiled. “I hear you. Me too. Having to grow up is terrible, ain’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m still fightin’ it. Well, heck, get out and stretch your legs. What brings you out here to the wilderness?”

Joe got out and stretched. “Well, I had a day off and did a little fishing at the lake. I was on my way home and thought I’d stop by and say howdy.”

Slim’s gaze went to the bed of the pickup. “What’s that you’re hauling back there?”

Joe’s smile faded. “Oh, that’s Bruiser, my brother’s dog. He’s a rottweiler. I’m baby-sitting this week.”

I shot a glance at Drover. “Did you hear that? There’s an unauthorized dog in the back of that pickup. Come on, son, we need to check this out.”

We went streaking over to the pickup, and so the mystery began.