Chapter One: An Enemy Submarine Invades Our Ranch

It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. It all began one dark night in July, as I recall. Yes, it was July. We’d already had June, and July is the month that follows June, right? Anyhow, that’s the way it usually works, so, yes, we were in the month of July.

I was sleeping on my gunnysack bed beneath the gas tanks, minding my own business and trying to recover from the grinding routine of running my ranch. If I’d had anything in particular on my mind, the last thing on my mind would have been fishing. Or swallowing a fishhook. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that I would ever swallow a fishhook or that I would have to be rushed to the . . .

Oops. I’m getting ahead of myself. Forget I said anything about a fishhook. Just skip it.

Where were we? Oh yes, exhausted and asleep under the gas tanks. Maybe you’ve heard the expression “dog-tired,” as in the statement, “He was dog-tired.”

Well, there’s a reason why such an expression exists, and it has nothing to do with fishing or fishhooks. The reason is that a dog such as myself has to put in eighteen hours a day to keep the ranch going. At the end of one of those long days—and we’re talking about days when the temperature climbs up to a hundred degrees or even higher—at the end of one of those scorching summer days, a guy staggers home at ten o’clock at night, falls into his gunnysack bed, and tries to grab a few winks of sleep, so he’ll be ready to do it all over again come daylight.

To use the old expression, he’s “dog-tired.”

Yes, the work and worry, the cares and responsibilities of running my ranch had just about worn me down to a shadow of my former self, and there I was on the old gunnysack, trying to recover from all the exhaustion and so forth.

That’s when I awoke and heard the sounds of someone or something creeping around in the darkness. It must have been around five o’clock in the morning, quite a bit too early for anyone on our outfit to be creeping around.

Most of your ordinary ranch mutts would have ignored the sound and gone back to sleep. Not me. As you may know, I’m Head of Ranch Security. I’m also pretty serious about it. When someone is creeping around my ranch before daylight, I want to know who it is and who gave him permission to be out there in the dark.

I lifted my head and tried to coordinate the position of my ears so as to maximize their ability to gather in sounds and vibrations. It’s pretty important that a dog get those ears pointed in the proper direction, see, otherwise he’ll end up listening to nonsense signals that can throw him off the track of the trail.

Well, I went right to work—activated the Earatory Scanner Network and began “sweeping,” as we call it, the entire Western Quadrant of headquarters. And suddenly I found myself picking up signals that . . . well, just didn’t make much sense.

See, my left ear was beaming data saying that someone, perhaps a human person, was out there in the darkness. But my right ear was sending a totally different report to Data Control. It said that we were picking up an enemy submarine on radar.

Pretty shocking, huh? You bet it was. I mean, those two reports were very different, yet both had been gathered by my very own ears. Something was wrong here.

A lot of your ordinary ranch mutts would have considered it a hopeless situation. They would have quit and gone back to sleep. Not me, fellers. One of those reports was phoney and I intended to run Diagnostics until I found the error.

I mean, if we had an enemy submarine running loose on the ranch, someone needed to know about it and start barking an alarm, right? I decided to check with my Assistant of the Watch to see if he’d been picking up any strange signals on his equipment.

“Drover, wake up. Report to the bridge at once.”

“Bridge over troubled porkchops . . . lorkin murgle snork.”

“We’ve got a problem. We’re getting garbage reports on the Earatory Scanners.”

“No thanks, I just ate, and there’s too many potato peelings.”

“Not potato peelings, Drover. We have reason to think it might be an enemy submarine.”

His head came up. “Hank, is that you?”

I stared at the face in the darkness. “Affirmative. That is, I think so.”

“Oh good. If you’re Hank, then I must be Drover. What are we doing here?”

“I . . . I’m not sure. I was sound asleep when all at once we started getting reports about . . . an enemy submarine, I think.”

“I’ll be derned.”

“How about you?”

“Oh, pretty good, thanks. I must have been asleep too.”

“Hmm, yes. That makes both of us, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.” He yawned. “I wonder what woke us up.”

“I . . . I don’t remember. Did you wake me up?”

“I don’t think so. Seems like you woke me up.”

“Hmm, that’s odd. Why would I have awakened you in the middle of the night? It must have been something important, but I can’t . . . Drover, I’m almost sure that you woke me up. What was the reason? Concentrate. Try to remember.”

“Well, okay, let’s see here.”

There was a long moment of silence. “Drover, did you go back to sleep?”

“No, I’m thinking. I don’t think too fast in the dark.”

“I see. What does darkness have to do with your thought processes?”

“Well, when I can’t see anything, it’s hard to think. I guess. Does that make sense?”

“No. Your brain lives in the dark all the time. It’s inside your head, don’t you see, and the inside portion of your head is dark.”

“I’ll be derned. How did you know that?”

“Because you have no windows.”

“What about my eyes?”

“They’re brown.”

“Thanks.”

There was another long moment of silence. “Drover, I’m beginning to feel that our conversation lacks meaning and purpose. Why are we awake at this hour of the night, and why are we talking at all? We should both be asleep.”

“Yeah, I think we were, but then we woke up.”

“Right, and that brings us to the nut of the fruit. What woke us up?”

“I was trying to remember that, but then it was too dark. Let’s see here.”

“Wait, hold everything. I remember now. You woke me up and said something about . . . picking up an enemy submarine, I think.”

“That sounds pretty crazy. With my teeth?”

“What?”

“I said, did I pick it up with my teeth?”

“Pick what up with your teeth?”

“The enemy submarine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, I don’t know. You said I said I picked up an enemy submarine in my jaws and . . . did something with it.”

“I did not say that. In the first place, submarines are very heavy. Number two, there isn’t enough water on this ranch to support a submarine. And number three, none of our enemies own a submarine. Therefore, the weight of the evidence suggests that you are talking nonsense.”

“Can I go back to bed?”

“Not just yet.” I stood up and walked a few steps away. “Drover, I think I’m beginning to understand this deal.”

“Oh good.”

“You see, we were both in a deep sleep, then something woke us up. I think this bizarre conversation can be traced back to the fact that—” Suddenly, I whirled around and faced him. “Drover, up until this very moment, we’ve been half-asleep. That would account for your claim that you ate a submarine.”

“Yeah, and maybe it was a submarine sandwich, not a real submarine.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. That makes sense, doesn’t it? You were dreaming about food.”

“Yeah, I love food. I’d rather eat food than anything. And I am kind of hungry.”

“See? There you are. Your sleeping mind transformed your hunger into a dream about a submarine sandwich. It all fits together. We were merely talking in our respective sleeps, Drover. It could have happened to any two dogs on the globe.”

“If we live on a globe, how come we don’t fall off?”

“Good question, son. Ask it again some time.” I hurried back to my gunnysack. “Good night. Hold my calls and don’t wake me up again.”

“Nightie-night.”

“Nightie . . . snork murgle muff womp.”

“Hank? I just heard something down at the corrals.”

“Murf snirk puffing triangles.”

“Hank, I think you’d better wake up. Someone’s down there, no fooling. I see a light in the saddle shed.”

I sat up, pried open my eyes, and rushed to the radar screen of my mind. There, before my very eyes, as plain as day, I saw . . .

I leaped to my feet. “Holy smokes, Drivel, there’s an enemy submarine down by the saddle shed!”

“My name’s Drover.”

“Never mind your name. Battle stations! Red Alert!”

“It was only a sandwich.”

“This is no sandwich, Drover, and it’s no drill. This is the real stuff. Come on, son, we’d better go in for a closer look.”

And with that, we went streaking down to the saddle shed to find out exactly what that submarine was doing on my ranch.