Chapter Eleven: Okay, Maybe I Exaggerated, but Not Much

I already told you that I was eaten alive by cannibals, so how come you kept on reading?

Maybe you just couldn’t bring yourself to accept the awful truth. Maybe you couldn’t bear the thought of facing life without a Head of Ranch Security.

Or maybe—this one is a very remote possibility but I’ll mention it anyway—maybe you had a sneaking suspicion that I might have stretched the truth just a tad, and that maybe the cannibals didn’t eat me after all. Or at least not all of me.

In other words, maybe they left just enough of me to continue the story.

Well, shame on you for having such thoughts, but that’s kind of what happened, actually. They didn’t get me entirely eaten, see, and left just exactly enough of me to keep the story going. But it was nip and tuck all the way, a very close call. Here’s what happened.

They had jumped me and had me pinned to the ground and things were looking just about as bleak as things can look, when all at once, who or whom do you suppose came blundering into the picture?

Not Slim. No, not Uncle Johnny. He was probably asleep in his pickup. No, not the cattle rustler.

Missy Coyote? Nope.

You’re not doing so well. Guess again. Not Loper.

Wallace and Junior? Not even close.

You give up? I knew you’d never guess. Okay, here’s the answer: Brewster. Yes, good old sleepy­eyed Brewster. You’d completely forgotten about him, hadn’t you?

Well, here he came, trotting up to the scene of the riot in that long bouncing stride of his, and with a big friendly grin all over his mouth.

“Oh, here you are. Gosh, I must have fallen asleep and when I woke up, you were gone, but here you are, I reckon.”

Yes, there I was—on my back on the ground, being mauled and slobbered on by starving cannibals. Old Brew lumbered up to us and the first thing that happened was that he stepped right in the middle of Snort’s face.

“Oops, ’scuse me.”

Then he shifted his position to avoid Snort, and mashed Rip’s nose three inches into the ground.

“Oops, sorry about that.”

You know, there’s one thing you never want to do to a cannibal: step on his face. Brew had just done it twice, and with the biggest feet of any dog I’d ever seen before, I mean they were huge feet, and suddenly we had us two inflamed coyote brothers snarling at Brewster.

Well, let’s put it this way. First they snarled, then their eyes bugged out of their heads when they began to realize how big he was.

He gave them his big sloppy grin. “How y’all tonight?”

He should have guessed that they weren’t so good. I mean, not only were their eyes blazing with yellow fire but Rip had a dirt pile on the end of his nose where it had been buried in the ground, and Snort’s left eye was beginning to swell shut.

“Not step on coyote face, big dummy!”

Brew seemed shocked. He turned to me (I was scraping myself off the ground), he turned to me and said, “Who are those boys talking to?”

In the process of turning, he also began to wag his tail. Have we discussed Brewster’s tail? That thing was as big around as a tree limb, and fellers when he turned and wagged at the same time, that tail caught both coyote brothers right on the point of the chin and DECKED ’EM. I mean, lifted ’em off the ground and flipped ’em over backward.

If I’d started a right uppercut over in the next pasture and swung it with everything I had, it wouldn’t have done half as much damage as what Brew had just done by accident.

That guy was dangerous, and the scary part was that he didn’t even know it! He was still looking around with that puzzled grin on his face when Rip and Snort climbed off the floor.

“Have you caught the rustlers yet?”

“Uh no, not yet, Brew. I ran into a little snag.”

“Aw heck. What happened?”

The brothers shook the stars and checkers out of their heads and prepared for action. I saw what was coming. “Brew, what snagged me is fixing to snag you. Check out your right flank.”

Brew swung his head around just as Rip made a dive for him. Their heads collided in midair—CLUNK!—and Rip was bedded down for the rest of the evening. He hit the ground and didn’t move a hair.

“Oops, ’scuse me there, sorry.”

That made it one down and one to go, and the one to go looked madder than a den of bumblebees. He opened his coyote jaws to the fully open position (a pretty scary sight, in case you’ve never seen it), sprang through the air, and lit right in the middle of Brewster’s back.

He delivered enough of a blow to cause Brewster to grunt and look around. “Hey, fella, take it easy, I’ve got a bad back.” And just as though he were shooing a fly away, he threw an elbow that landed under Snort’s chin and knocked him tail-over-teakettle out into the pasture.

Brew turned back to me and sniffed his nose. “Who are those guys? I never saw ’em before.”

I dragged myself off the ground. “Just a couple of junior thugs who thought they were pretty tough until they tangled with you. And me, of course. We make a pretty awesome team, Brew.”

“Thanks, Hank.”

“I could have whipped ’em but it would have taken me a lot longer if you hadn’t come along. You . . . that is, WE sure cleaned house on those guys.”

“You mean . . . that was a fight?”

“Oh, just a little altercation, nothing to write home about.”

“I don’t much go in for fightin’.”

“Yeah, well, the way you operate, you probably don’t get a whole lot of practice.”

“No sir, I don’t believe in violence. Heck, if you can’t work things out by talking, you ought to just walk away from it, is how I’ve always looked at it.”

“Right.”

I crept to the top of the hill and studied the situation down below. The rustler had finished closing in the corral with the portable panels and had made himself a little chute that led into the trailer. He was inside the pen with five or six cow-calf pairs, trying to get the calves to load.

It appeared that he wasn’t having much luck, which meant that we might have enough time to run back to camp and alert Slim to what was going on. That was kind of important to solving the case, don’t you see, because only Slim could write down the description of the vehicle and the license number.

I do many things well, but writing down license numbers isn’t one of them.

“Well, Brew, our next assignment is to highball it back to camp and get Slim out of bed.”

His ears jumped and his eyes grew wide. “Did you say ‘highball it back to camp?’”

“That’s correct, at top speed.”

He plunked his big bohunkus down on the ground. “You know, Hank, I’ve never been too keen on highballing it back to anywhere, and if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll stick around here and try to keep this hill from blowing away. And I might even,” he yawned, “take me a little nap.”

“What’ll you do when Rip and Snort wake up?”

“Who? Oh, them? Shucks, they seemed like pretty nice fellers to me, just a little clumsy, is all. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble.”

I glanced at the sleeping cannibals. Brewster would probably never realize that he had just thrashed two of the toughest coyotes in Ochiltree County, and I didn’t see any point in trying to explain it to him. But I couldn’t help wondering how much damage the guy could do if he ever tried.

“All right, you stay here and keep your eye on that rustler, and I’ll make a lightning dash back to camp.”

“Good deal. You handle the lightning dashes, and I’ll sure keep my eyes on the rustler—if I can keep ’em open that long, is where the problem’s going to come.” He yawned again. “Boy, you guard dogs don’t wrinkle the sheets much at night, do you?”

“Just part of the job, Brewster.”

“Yep, and I’m sure glad it’s your job and not mine.” He crossed his paws in front of him and laid his chin on the crossed paws. “Holler when you need me, otherwise I’ll zzzzzzzzzz.”

It sure didn’t take him long to fall asleep. He may very well have been the sleepingest dog I’d ever run across.

Well, maybe Brewster had time to take a nap but I sure didn’t. I pointed myself toward the north­east, hit Code Three, and went streaking up the canyon.

I won’t go into details about my emergency run back to camp—how I leaped over rocks and fallen trees, climbed mountains and swam swollen rivers, ran through brambles and sticker weeds and thissy thornals . . . thorny thistles, that is; whipped twenty-two head of hungry coyotes, two badgers, and three porcupines.

I won’t mention any of that, or how I arrived back at camp, exhausted, spent, completely used up, battered, on my last leg, near death, but triumphant through it all.

I’ll say only that I made it back to camp, staggered up to the tent flap, and began barking the alarm.

“Hank, shut up!”

He didn’t understand. This wasn’t just ordinary late-night barking, but rather a Code Three situation that demanded his immediate attention, so I turned up the volume and barked harder and louder than . . .

SPLAT!

Was he trying to be funny? Throwing pillows at the Head of Ranch Security in the middle of the night? What kind of outfit was this, anyway?

Hey, we didn’t have a minute to spare! That rustler was down there loading cattle, and if I didn’t get Slim out of bed pretty quick . . .

I had to do something to wake him up, and do it fast. I did.