A moment later, Sardina Bandana made her appearance, a lady dog of such gasperating beauty that I could hardly breathe. When I finally found my voice, I stammered, “Holy smokes, you’re gorgeous!”
She primped at her ears. “Oh foo. You probably don’t even remember me.”
“Ha! I remember you very well, my sugar plum. You come from Boston, you enjoy swimming in the ocean, and you hate lobsters. When they carried you away from my ranch this morning, I saw the tears streaming down your cheeks.”
“You did?”
“I did. And Sardina, my dumpling, ever since that moment, I haven’t been able to eat or sleep or think about anything but you.”
Her smile vanished. “Oh? I heard you talking to Saffron, and you said she was gorgeous.”
“Me? I said that?”
She turned two flaming eyes at me. “You certainly did, and how do you suppose that makes me feel? You probably go around saying that to all the girls.”
“I don’t.”
“You’re a cad!”
“I’m not. I’m the sweetest, kindest dog I’ve ever met, honest.”
She lifted her chin. “Then prove it. Choose one of us, me or my sister. You can’t have both of us.”
I paced a few steps away, gathering my thoughts. “Very well, if you insist. Sardina, when I first laid eyes on your sister, I thought she was gorgeous, but now that I’ve seen you again, I know that I was wrong.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. Next to you, a blooming rose is but a pitiful thing.”
“Oh, how sweet! You’ve chosen me?”
“Yes, and congratulations, my little cherry cobbler.”
She smiled and batted her eyelashes. “I’ll get Saffron and you can tell her the bad news.”
“Huh? No, wait . . .”
She dashed off toward the front of the pickup and a moment later . . . oops. Sackron . . . Snaffron . . . whatever her sister’s name was . . . stormed into view, and fellers, she looked steamed.
Chapter Eighteen: Never Mess with a Dog Named Choo Choo
Sardina’s twin sister scorched me with a couple of wild eyeballs and screamed, “What? I’m uglier than a mud fence? Is that what you told my sister?”
“I . . . I . . . I didn’t say anything about a mud fence, honest.”
“She said you did, and you know what I’m going to do?”
“Uh . . . no.”
She leaned toward me and said, “I’m going to tell my big brother!”
She vanished. Before I could speculate about what her big brother might add to the drama, Sardina returned, shaking her head. “What did you say to my sister?”
“Well, not much, but it really seemed to get her nose out of joint.”
“Did you say that she was uglier than a toad sitting on a mud fence?”
“What? No!”
“You shouldn’t have said that.”
“I didn’t!”
“Saffron is very sensitive and, well, you’ve crushed her spirit, calling her names.”
“I didn’t call her anything!”
Sardina lowered her voice. “I guess you know what’s going to happen now.”
“Well . . . she said something about a brother.”
She gave her head a solemn nod. “Have you met Choo Choo?”
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “Choo Choo? No. Is he big?”
“Like a train. HUGE. And he has . . . problems.”
“Problems?”
“He breaks things.”
“Things?”
“Trees. Furniture. Fireplugs. Dogs.”
“Good grief! Do you think I can whip him?”
“Ha ha ha ha!”
I found myself glancing over both shoulders and backing away. “Well, you tell the big ape that he can have a piece of me anytime he wants. Tell him I’ll be waiting for him up in Windmill Canyon, five miles north of here. And tell him to bring his own casket—a small one because there won’t be much left of him when the fight’s over.”
“Oh, you’re so brave!” she gasped, holding her paws together. “Will I be seeing you again?”
“Let me check my schedule, and I’ll get back to you.”
I turned and walked away in a slow, dignified manner. Okay, maybe I didn’t walk away in a dignified manner. I RAN. Would Sardina and I be seeing each other again? Not a chance. What a weird family! I mean, Sardina was gorgeous, but the sister seemed a little daffy, and the brother . . . I hadn’t met him yet, but already I didn’t like him. Any dog named Choo Choo was a dog I didn’t need to meet.
Anyway, I spent the next three hours hiding under a Jeep, as far away from Sardina and her family as I could get. Now and then, I would peek around the left rear tire to see if the brother had showed up. I didn’t see him, but when Sardina caught glimpses of me, she waved and blew kisses in my direction. She was begging me to come back, but that was too bad.
It seems cruel to put it this way, but Sardina’s good looks didn’t quite make up for the weirdness of her kinfolks. She could find herself another boyfriend.
I thought those three hours would never end. It was boring beyond description. Oh, there was one little flurry of excitement around five o’clock. A lazy wasp landed on Doug McGrubber’s elevated bohunkus, and he made the mistake of slapping it with his trowel.
Heh heh. Never slap a lazy wasp with your trowel. It will only make the wasp angry and he will drill you every time. Heh heh. Doug McGrubber thought he was pretty smart, but I guess he wasn’t as smart as the wasp that stung him. Tee hee. I kind of enjoyed it.
McGrubber howled with pain and leaped out of his unit, rubbing the injured part. “That does it! I’ve had enough of these stinging little monsters.”
At that point, Slim Chance climbed out of his hole. He was wearing a grin. “Let not your heart be troubled. I’ve got a cure for them wasps.”
The whole crew took a break and waited to see what kind of “cure” old Slim had up his sieve. Minutes later, he returned, carrying a dishpan filled with . . . something. Water? I couldn’t see. Mr. Wilkens drifted over and looked into the pan. “What’s that?”
“This is a cowboy wasp trap: soapy water. The soap breaks the surface tension. When the wasps land on it, they sink and drown. It works.”
“That simple? How’d you figure that out?”
Slim flashed a sly grin. “Well, I didn’t need a tape measure and a string level, we can start there.” He tapped himself on the temple. “Son, a country boy will survive.”
You know what? It actually worked. The pan of water drew every wasp in the neighborhood. When they landed on the surface, they sank like rocks. That was the end of the Wasp Crisis and Slim became a hero around camp . . . as incredible as that seems.
And speaking of rocks, by the end of the day, Slim and Alfred had pretty muchly exposed that rock in the center of their unit. Remember the rock? Earlier in the day, Wilkie had wondered why it was located away from the walls, in a spot where you wouldn’t expect to find a large rock. Now that Slim and Alfred had scraped all the soil away from it, Wilkie was even more perplexed.
Sitting on the edge of Slim’s unit, he tugged on his chin and studied the rock. “Why would prehistoric people have left a big rock sitting on the floor, in the middle of their house?” Wilkie looked closer. “And you know, it’s not a normal caliche rock. It looks different.”
Slim nodded. “It almost looks like . . . well, a tooth or something.”
“Yes, but it’s way too big to be a tooth.”
Little Alfred had been listening. “Maybe it’s a dinosaur tooth.”
Wilkie laughed.
Around seven o’clock, the crew quit for supper. Let the record show that after getting off to a shaky start, I had spent the entire afternoon being a Perfect Dog. I mean, I hadn’t dived into an
y holes, stepped on any Egyptian mummies, stumbled over any string lines, or had any violent encounters with Sardina’s brother.
I hadn’t even cast longing gazes at Doug McGrubber’s precious buffalo bone . . . although . . . hmmm. Maybe we should just drop the subject. As you will see, I still had some unfinished business with McGrubber’s bone, but . . . never mind.
Let the record state that I had notched up a record of perfect behavior and had earned the right to remain in camp for the night, and I’m proud to report that Mr. Wilkens agreed.
When the crew quit for supper, he and Little Alfred drifted over to the Jeep, in whose shade I had spent the afternoon. Wilkie peered down at me. “Alfred, your dog conducted himself like a gentleman this afternoon. Do you think we can trust him to stay in the tent tonight?”
He gave me a hard-edged look, so I did what dogs have done since the dawn of time. I gave him Loyal Eyes, Earnest Ears, and Slow Taps on the tail section, as if to say, “All I want in this life is to become the dog you want me to be, no kidding.”
I held my breath and waited.
Alfred said, “I think he’ll be good.”
“Well, okay. We’ll give it a try. He can stay in the tent with you and Slim.”
Alfred’s gaze went up to the sky. “Okay . . . but Swim doesn’t have a tent. All he brought was a blanket.”
Wilkie shook his head. “Of course. The Cowboy Way. Son, if it rains, you’ll get soaked. You want to camp with me?”
Alfred grinned and nodded. “Yes sir, ’cause Swim snores. What about my doggie?”
Mr. Wilkens gave me a hard look. I held my breath. “Okay, we’ll give it a try.”
Hey, perfect! They were putting me in the boss’s tent. Already I had gotten a promotion, and this was still my first day.
We joined the crew for supper. They had brought out camp chairs and placed them in a circle around a campfire. A tall skinny fellow named Witt brought out a sack of sandwich makings. He wore cutoff jeans and had a pair of bony legs that would have shamed a stork. He dumped the contents of the sack onto a small camp table and grumbled, “Here’s the grub, make your own, the cook’s on vacation.”
My ears leaped up. Hmmm! Ham, cheese, mustard, and bread. Well, sure, you bet. I moved toward the ham.
“Not you, dog.”
Huh? Well, sure, no problem. I mean, they’d been working all day in the heat and they deserved to go first.
I plopped myself down beside Mr. Witt and watched him build a huge sandwich: bread, a thick layer of mustard, two slices of ham, and that ham sure smelled good, two slices of cheese, two more slices of ham, and you know, nothing smells better at suppertime than sliced ham, and when he opened his mouth to take the first snap, my tongue swept across my mouth and I heard odd groaning sounds coming from somewhere deep inside my body.
His eyes came up and skewered me. “No.”
No what? I hadn’t asked for anything. Hey, I’m no beggar, and if he didn’t want to share his sandwich, that was just fine. I had better things to do than sit there and listen to him slurp and slobber.
I left and moved on around the circle . . . shopping, shall we say, and checking out the various food groups on display. Hmmm! All at once, my nose caught a pleasant aroma of something . . . well, you might describe it as a deep nutty smell—not “nutty” in the sense of being crazy, but nutty in the sense of smelling like . . . well, nuts, roasted nuts.
I fine-turned the settings on Snifforadar and traced the aroma to . . . oops, Doug McGrubber, the same guy who’d accused me of staring at his bone. To be honest, he had struck me as gripey, crabby, and generally unpleasant, but . . . well, he was eating something that smelled pretty yummy, so I decided that he might have qualities of spirit, let us say, that I hadn’t noticed before.
I mean, we should never make quick judgments about a person, just because he has a lousy personality.
I sat down beside him and waited to be recognized. He held a slice of bread in his left hand and with his right, he smeared the bread with a thick layer of something brown. I inched closer and began taking air samples, and yes, the good smell seemed to be coming from whatever he was putting on the bread.
He added a second slice of bread, opened his mouth like a crocodile, and, good grief, took a huge bite out of it. How many bites could a poor sandwich take and still survive? I inched closer and licked my chops.
His eyes swung around and drilled me. “Don’t give me them eyes, Shep. I don’t want to hear about it.”
Eyes? What was he talking about. Slurp.
He chewed and swallowed and leaned toward me. “You want a bite of this peanut butter sandwich, right?”
Well . . . okay, the thought had occurred to me, although I hadn’t actually known that it was peanut butter. But now that he’d brought up the subject . . . it did smell pretty good.
He grinned. “See? I can read you like a billboard, like one of them big electric signs in Las Vegas. It says,” he swept his hand around in a big circle, “‘Gimme a bite, I love peanut butter!’ Now, tell me if I’m wrong.”
Gee, was it so obvious?
He gave me a wink. “But here’s something you don’t know. You really don’t want this sandwich.”
How could he say that? I knew me well enough to know that I wanted it very much. If I didn’t get a bite or two, why, I might just wither up and die.
“No, you don’t want it, or you shouldn’t, and here’s why. Pay attention.” He leaned closer and dropped his voice to a creepy whisper. You won’t believe what he said.
Chapter Nineteen: Stricken with Tongue Hungalosis
What he said was one of the dumbest, most ridiculous things I’d ever heard! You won’t believe this. I sure didn’t. Here’s what he said, and this is a direct quote. He said, “Dogs can’t chew peanut butter.”
I stared at him. WHAT? Dogs can’t chew peanut butter? That was pure rubbish. Dogs chew bones all the time, and even sticks when we’re bored, and if we can chew bones and sticks, who’s afraid of peanut butter?
Absurd. Ridiculous. And to underscore the point, I inched closer to him and put on an awesome display of Yearning: moved my paws up and down, lifted my ears, fluttered my eyelids, moaned, and even sent a quiver through my entire body. Yes sir, all of that at the same time. It was pretty amazing.
He flashed a wicked grin. “Shep, don’t want what you shouldn’t want. You’d be disappointed, take my word for it.”
My whole body quivered with desire.
McGrubber shook his head and glanced around the circle. The other men were watching and waiting to see which of us would win this debate. Suddenly I realized that his sandwich was there in front of my nose . . . and he wasn’t watching.
Did I want a bite? No, but I would take the whole thing. SNARF! Tee hee. I snatched it out of his hand and disappeared. Foolish man.
Well, why not? I could see that the argument wasn’t getting us anywhere, and what did he expect? Hold a samwish in frump of a schtarving gog and only a dunce would pect him to sit there . . . lum mum lum . . . izpeck him to zit there . . . lumble mumble lum mum . . .
You know, I’d never tried to eat a peanut butter sandwich, and one of the things a guy never considers is that peanut butter sticks to the roof of your . . . I mean, it parks itself on the top of your mouth and . . .
Help! I was drowning! I couldn’t get my tongue unglued! It had been WELDED to the top of my mouth! I’d come down with a dangerous case of Tongue Hungalosis! I smacked my lips, ran around in a tight circle, and . . .
Laughter? This was NOT funny!
It took me five minutes of steady pulling, tugging, pawing, and smacking to get my tongue back, and at that point I noticed that Doug McGrubber had stopped laughing and was looking at me with his beady little eyes. He shook his head and said, “Shep, Shep! What did I tell you? Son, I can read . . . your . . . mind.”
&nbs
p; Yeah, well, he could find something else to read, and the men could find something else to laugh about. I lifted my nose to a proud angle and went off to enjoy my own company. And I did, too. I sulked for an hour and a half and loved every minute of it.
When darkness fell, I joined Mr. Wilkens and Little Alfred inside a tent with two sleeping bags rolled out on the floor. Alfred said he wasn’t tired, but two minutes after his head hit the pillow, he was gone. I curled up at the foot of his sleeping bag and watched Mr. Wilkens. By the light of a candle, he was writing in some kind of journal book.
He had been writing for, oh, ten or fifteen minutes when he looked up and saw that I was watching. “Field notes. I have to record the day’s events on the site.”
Oh. Swell.
“Today we exposed seven rocks on the north wall, found a peculiar rock in Slim’s unit, and Doug McGrubber made the best find of the day, that bison bone in unit 3. Tomorrow, we’ll map it in and take it out.” For some reason, my tongue shot out of my mouth and swept across my mouth. Slurp. Mr. Wilkens gave me a peculiar look. “Did you lick your chops when I said ‘bone’?”
Slurp. No, I did not.
“Bison bone.”
Slurp.
“Bone.”
Slurp.
He laughed. “I can’t believe this. Two bones.”
Slurp slurp.
“Three bones.”
Slurp slurp slurp.
“Three bones with cherry pie.”
Slurp slurp slurp slurp.
He doubled over with laughter. “Holy cow, you’re really doing it! One more time?”
No thanks.
“Bone.”
Slurp.
He wagged his head in amazement. “I’ve got to put this into my notes.” He began writing. “‘Shared my tent with a ranch dog who can count bones with his tongue.’ Nobody’s going to believe this!” Suddenly his laughter died and his eyes swung around to me. “Wait a second. Bison bone.”
Slurp.
“Bison bone tibia digging stick.”
The Case of the Most Ancient Bone Page 11
