Chapter Five: The Mailman Gets It

We left the murder scene and moved around to the front of the machine shed. Drover went straight to the upside-down Ford hubcap which serves as our food bowl and started crunching the latest offering of Co-op dog food.

Funny, I wasn’t at all hungry, even though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. Should have been hungry. I went over and sniffed the grub. It just didn’t excite me. Maybe I was getting tired of Co-op.

At that moment my ears shot up. I heard a vehicle coming down the county road and suddenly I had a terrible thought: we had gotten so bogged down in cases and investigations, we had let the mailman go four or five days without a good barking.

Now I’m well aware that in the world of murders and so forth, easing up on the mailman might not sound like a catastrophe. But let me tell you something about these post office people. If you let ’em go too long without a good stiff challenge, they start getting some funny ideas.

My Uncle Beanie, one of the all-time greats at mail truck barking, used to say that the first thing he did every morning was to ask himself the question, “Whose ranch is this?” He claimed that a cowdog’s first job is to clear up the matter of ownership.

Your cocker spaniels and your poodles and your other inferior breeds might not care whose ranch it is, but it’s priority number one for us cowdogs. It’s OUR ranch, period. We try to be big about it. We try not to rub it in. We try not to become overbearing. But there’s a limit to how nice you can be in saying, THIS IS MY RANCH.

I mean, as long as everyone respects our country, we get along fine. We don’t mind people looking, don’t you know, but if they drive or walk or fly across our country, we want to know the reason why.

And post office people are notorious for driv­ing up and down the roads without permission. They’ll sneak onto the ranch, slip up to the mailbox, make some suspicious movements which no one has ever bothered to explain to me, and then hurry away.

Why are they so sneaky? What are they actually doing in that mailbox? And why do they drive away in such a hurry? Until a dog gets a few answers to these questions, he can’t afford to take any chances with the mailman.

“Drover, I’m going up to intercept the mailman. Can you hold things down here until I get back?”

He was still crunching his Co-op. Sounded like he was eating rocks. He nodded his head and gave me a silly grin. “Sure, Hank. Don’t worry about a thing.”

“All right, and don’t talk with your mouth full. You just spit some crumbs on me. I should be back within half an hour.”

He nodded and waved good-bye. And with that, I swaggered out to intercept the mailman, singing the cowdog song for the occasion, “Bark at the Mailman Battle Hymn.” (The tune is the same as “God of our Fathers,” if you’d care to sing along.) To do the song properly, you need a full orchestra and chorus in the background, but that isn’t always possible under pasture conditions.

Bark at the Mailman Battle Hymn

Bark at the mailman, give him the full load.

He has no business driving on my road.

I am in charge of Ranch Security.

Trespassers must have permits cleared by me.

Postal employees just don’t understand

Dangers they risk when slipping on my land.

What are you doing at my mailbox, sire?

Get off my ranch or I shall bite your tires!

Pretty good song, huh? You won’t find too many songs that will inspire a cowdog more than “Bark at the Mailman Battle Hymn.” After a couple of verses, I’m ready to go out and by George do some damage.

I loped out into the pasture and watched the approach of the trespasser. He crossed the bridge there at Spook Canyon and rattled over the cattle guard between the horse pasture and the home pasture. He had entered Security Zone Alpha (that’s sort of a code name we use for the home pasture) and I couldn’t be held responsible for anything that followed.

I went into my combat configuration. First, I stretched out flat on the ground, giving myself such a low profile that I became almost invisible. Second, I pinned back my ears. Third, I stiffened my tail to its full-alert position. Fourth, I initiated my Growling Mode. Fifth and finally, I unsheathed my fangs, which is something I can do by tensing the monosodium pectorus muscles in my cheeks.

(Don’t bother to memorize these technical terms. Unless you’re involved in security work on a daily basis, you won’t have much call for them.)

As the pickup pulled off the road and bounced to a stop beside the mailbox, I began creeping forward. By the time the mailman had lowered the flag on the box and snapped the door shut, I was up on my feet, gliding across the pasture. The instant I saw the pickup pull away, I hit full throttle.

And fellers, the attack was on! First I barked the tailpipe and the right rear tire. Then I zoomed around and barked the left rear tire. Then I executed a very tricky maneuver which most dogs won’t even attempt. Running at full tilt, I swooped in and bit the left front tire!

And I should point out that I did this in full view of the mailman—a big, tall, ugly guy who had lost most of the hair on top of his head but wore a Farm Bureau cap to cover it. And did I mention the tumor on his left cheek? Had a big tumor on his left cheek, some kind of deformity that made him look extra mean.

Most dogs would have been scared. Me? No sir. The way I look at it, the bigger the mailman, the slower the truck. Glancing up as I dived at the tire, I could see lines of fear etched on his face. By then he must have known the extent of his peril.

I mean, let’s face the brutal fact. On a good run, when conditions are just right, I can tear the tread off a steel-belted radial tire, just bust it like a child’s balloon. And on a few rare occasions, I’ve been known to tear the wheel off the . . . whatever it is the wheel is bolted to, axle I guess, shearing off lug bolts as though they were toothpicks.

So who could blame the mailman for showing fear? Terror is the proper response to the terrible. He made the only sensible decision under the circumstances: he cobbed that pickup and went roaring away.

It was a nice move, made just in the nick of time. I had been unable to sink my teeth into his tire or get the kind of penetration I needed to cause a blowout, so he escaped pretty muchly unh­armed. Another thirty seconds and . . . well, he lucked out this time.

On your short sprints and your lightning dashes, I can equal or beat any breed of pickup, but on your longer hauls they can wear me down after, oh, two-three hundred yards. The mailman pulled away from me, but I barked him all the way to the next cattle guard. And just to be on the safe side, I stood in the middle of the road for another five minutes, waiting to see if he dared come back.

He didn’t. My guess is that he lit a shuck back to the post office, turned in his uniform, and went looking for a safer job.

By the way, I solved the Case of the Left Cheek Tumor. Turned out to be chewing tobacco. I know, because before he left he spit at me (he missed). Also yelled something about an “ignert sunny bridge.” Exactly what he meant by that I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t care for his tone of voice, and I made a mental note not to let him off so easy next time.

Well, that was a nice piece of ranch work, the kind of job-well-done that makes a dog feel a little glow of pride. I was making my way back to headquarters, walking down the center of the road (it was my road, after all, and I figgered I might as well use the whole son of a gun), when I heard the sound of a motor in the distance.

At first I thought it might be the mailman streaking back to town to turn in his mail sack, but at a glance I could see that it wasn’t. This was a different vehicle.

Hmmmm. I sat down in the road and studied on it. For the past six months I’d noticed an increase in oil field traffic on my road: pumpers, company men, trucks. These were all unauthorized vehicles. I’d been letting them cross without permission because, well, put a pencil to it.

How far can you spread a dog, even a good one? My case load had been so heavy over the past year that I’d hardly had time even to monitor the mail truck. Keeping up with oil field traffic was just more than I could handle. I couldn’t do a good job working murder cases and traffic too.

You’d think I might have gotten some help from Drover, but I’d never been satisfied with his performance. Several times I’d pulled him off traffic entirely after I’d caught him sitting in the ditch and watching trucks go by.

Anyway, I watched the vehicle approaching from the east and thought this might be a good opportunity for me to make an example of some oil field boys. As the pickup came into focus, through the cloud of caliche dust, I felt a wave of electricity surge out to the end of my tail and bounce back.

Holy smokes, that wasn’t oil field traffic, it was the pickup that belonged to Beulah’s ranch!

And she was riding in the back!