The Case of the Haystack Kitties

by John R. Erickson

  Are you shocked that Slim would step out of a moving pickup and leave me alone in the cab? It sounds pretty dangerous, but it really wasn’t. We did it all the time, Slim and I.

  See, when two men feed hay, one drives while the other cuts the wires on the bales and throws the hay off on the ground. When only one guy feeds, he puts the pickup in the slowest gear, climbs up on top of the load, and does the so-forth. The purpose of this procedure is to make sure the hay gets scattered over a long line. If you don’t scatter the hay, the biggest cows and the ones with horns will end up with all the grub.

  You’re probably amazed that a dog would know so much about the business of feeding hay to livestock. Well, I have to admit that it’s pretty amazing, but it’s the sort of thing a Head of Ranch Security has to know about and understand. A lot of your ordinary ranch mutts pay no attention to such matters. They just sit there in the pickup, looking out the window and saying, “Duh.” Or they sleep.

  Drover sleeps. He knows nothing about haying livestock, even though he’s spent most of his life on a ranch, and the reason is that he sleeps all the time and doesn’t pay attention. It hurts me to say that about Drover, but it’s true.

  Oh, and one more thing about the Moving Pickup Maneuver: it only works if you have a wide, flat area, a feed ground, as we call it. If you’re in rough country, with hills and ravines and canyons, you can get yourself into a world of trouble. I guess you can see why. It wouldn’t be funny if the pickup ran off a cliff whilst the driver was up on top of the hay.

  But never fear. We had us a nice, flat feed ground just west of the creek. There was no chance of the pickup running amuck. On flat ground, it steered itself, don’t you see, and if it ever started heading toward the creek, Slim would jump down and steer it back on course. Or . . .

  Hmmm. I had never actually tried to steer the pickup myself. I mean, that would have been asking a lot of a dog, even a Head of Ranch Security, but what was the big deal about steering a pickup?

  Heck, Little Alfred was steering the pickup for his daddy when he was three years old.

  When Alfred was three years old, not Loper. When Loper was three years old, Alfred was just a baby. No, wait. When Loper was three years old, Alfred wasn’t even born.

  Okay, but the point is that steering a slow-moving pickup was no big deal, and I had a feeling that if Slim or Loper ever asked me to do it, I could handle it. All you have to do is keep her between the ditches, as they say. Or to bring it closer to home, keep her out of canyons and creek bottoms.

  Anyways, the pickup was chugging along in first gear, which we ranch dogs refer to as grand­ma-­low or granny-low or grandma or granny or sometimes compound. Why do we call it compound? I have no idea.

  I sat up in the seat and watched the scenery up ahead. Through the side mirrors, I couldn’t see Slim, but I could see the signs of his work: alfalfa leaves flying around in the wind and blocks of hay landing on the ground.

  He was busy. That was good. Maybe it would take his mind off of singing.

  I must admit that it made me feel kind of important, sitting up there in the seat of that big old pickup, all by myself, the only dog within miles. I mean, it was kind of like . . . well, being the captain of a steamboat or a battleship or something. You’re the only dog on the bridge (that’s what they call the cab of a ship: a bridge). Anyways, you’re the only so-forth, and you look through the windows at the vast ocean in front of you and . . .

  Well, you can steer the ship, if you want. The wheel is right there in the bridge, and all you have to do to steer that huge ship and make it change course is . . . well, place one paw on the wheel and push down. Which I did, and sure enough, the ship . . . pickup, actually . . . the ship changed course to the right.

  Or to the starboard bow, as we ship captains call it. See, in the steamboat and battleship business, we never say left or right. That would be too common, and we don’t use common terms. We say starboard and . . .

  Where did that big rock come from? There was a big rock dead ahead, and I was pretty sure it hadn’t been there just a minute before. Or if it was, I hadn’t seen it, and although it wasn’t a huge rock, it was pretty big.

  No problem. Ship captains encounter rocks all the time; also islands, ice cubes, and choral reeps. Icebergs, not ice cubes. An ice cube would be no sweat. Say, that’s kind of a play on words, isn’t it?

  An ice cube is no sweat. Get it? Heh. I get a kick out of messing around with words and . . .

  BUMP!

  Oh yeah, the rock. Well, what can I say? I’d gotten all wrapped up in the excitement of being the captain of a naval battleship and had more or less forgotten to steer a course around the rock. No problem. The ship went over it . . . the pickup went over it, shall we say, and while it caused us to bump and lurch from side to side, we came through it with smiling colors.

  Flying colors, I guess it should be. We came through the scary ordeal with flying colors. In fact, it was kind of fun. Calm seas are nice for some people and dogs, but those of us with a taste for adventure and danger . . .

  I froze. My eyes were locked on the right side mirror. Why had Slim thrown off that big pile of bales in one spot? I mean, the whole purpose of feeding hay from a moving vehicle was to scatter it out, right? So why had he dumped . . . my goodness, there must have been ten bales on the ground.

  Well, I would have to talk to Slim about this. I knew he was impatient sometimes and had a tendency to be . . . how can I put this? Might as well just blurt it out. He had a tendency to be lazy, and no doubt he’d gotten lazy and had dumped a bunch of bales on the ground in one spot. Well, there was no excuse for that. If you’re going to do a job, you might as well . . .

  There was a leg sticking out of those bales.

  I’m not kidding. I saw it with my own eyes, in the mirror on the right side of the pickup. It appeared to be a human leg with a boot on the end of it. And an arm? A human arm?

  Dear gussy, this was a real puzzler. Who or whom could that be? I mean, when you see an arm and a leg, you naturally assume that . . . well, you assume there’s more. Other body parts. A person. Hmmm.

  Okay, a pattern began to develop here. Some unknown person had been walking around in our Dutcher Creek pasture. Why? We still didn’t know. And another thing we didn’t know was why Slim had decided to dump about ten bales of hay on him.

  Wait, hold everything! Remember that rock? You’d probably forgotten about it, right? Well, we ran over a rock, which caused the pickup to lurch and . . . it’s coming fast now, so hang on. Remem­ber what I said about tying down the load with ropes? Slim chose not to do it, right? And remember my observation that the right rear corner of the load appeared to be cushy?

  Ha! Well, guess what. Just as we’d passed that stranger in the pasture, the pickup had lurched over the rock, causing the load to shift suddenly to one side and spilling twenty bales on top of the poor hapless stranger.

  There you are. The mystery was solved, and guess who had predicted it. Not Slim, fellers. It was ME. I had known . . .

  Wait a minute. What were the chances of encountering a total stranger in the Dutcher Creek pasture? And what were the chances that our load of hay would fall on top of him, burying every part of him but one arm and one leg?

  Not great. No chance at all. Out of the question. Okay, so whose arm and leg . . . I stared into the side mirror. A head appeared from the rubble of hay bales. I recognized the head. It belonged to . . .

  Slim?

  I’m sorry, but I broke into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. I know it’s tacky to laugh at the misfortunes of others, but think about it. It was so fitting, so right, so heavy with justice and irony. I mean, here was the guy who’d been too lazy to tie down his load with ropes, right? Who’d been warned by the Head of Ranch Security that we might lose the load, right?

  Well, by George, the chickens had come home to rot. Old Shin had
chosen to do a sloppy job, and he’d gotten buried by his own load of hay. That was rich. I loved it! I could hardly wait to hear what he had to . . .

  HUH?

  Wait a minute. If Slim was back there, climbing out from under his stacking job, and if I was sitting in the seat of a moving . . .

  My eyes swung around to the front. We were heading straight for the creek bank.

  Gulk.

  Okay, I’d seen just about enough. I hit the button for Major Alarm. “Attention all hands. This is your captain squeaking. Speaking, that is. We have veered off course and are heading for a disaster. Therefore, as your captain, I am giving the order to abandon ship. At the end of this message, I will dive out the window. I urge the rest of you to save yourselves. Thanks for your loyal service and courage in the face of a crisis. Until we meet again . . . good luck, men.”

  I signed off and glanced around the ship that had been my home upon the waters for so many months and years. Then, with a heavy heart, I went into a deep crouch and sprang upward and outward, toward the vast sea from which we all . . .

  BONK!

  Was this a joke? Someone had . . . somehow the window had . . . and then I remembered, and the total reality of my situation came crashing down upon me.

  Slim had rolled up the dadgum window. I was trapped inside a moving pickup that was . . . yikes . . . headed straight for the creek bank!

  Okay, this called for drastic measures. I had no choice but to hurl the full weight of my enormous body against the window and destroy it in a crash of flying glass. I hated to do that to Slim’s pickup, but . . . hey, was I going to ride that sucker all the way down into the bottomless waters of Wolf Creek?

  No way, Charlie. I was getting out of there.

  I took three deep breaths, loosened up the muscles in my soldiers, and prepared my mental energies for an emergency procedure we call Doggie Battering Ram. We very seldom use it and very sel­dom need it. Now . . . we needed it.

  And so it was that, after preparing myself mentally and physically for this dangerous escape procedure, I coiled my legs under me, hurled myself like a cannonball at the window, and . . .

  BONK!

  Holy smokes, I was trapped inside a runaway pickup!

  Chapter Seven: The Runaway Pickup Plunges into the Bottomless Creek

  Pretty scary, huh? Yes, I had found myself in many scary and dangerous situations in my career, but this one may have been the very worst.

  Just think about it. I was locked up in a sealed runaway pickup, which was heading for the bottom­less waters of Wolf Creek, and the only guy who could save me was buried under twenty bales of alfalfa hay.

  I’m not sure you’ll want to go on reading. This could get bad. It could get so bad and so scary, it might stunt your growth or . . . I don’t know, cause you to break out in warts or something. Use your own judgment. If you don’t think you can handle it, just put the book away and find something else to do. Never mind that you’ll be turning your back on a friend and leaving me all alone in my moment of greatest need.

  Maybe you can find another friend. If you do, I hope you’ll treat him better than you’ve treated me and that you’ll stand by him through thick and thicker.

  Or maybe you’ll keep on reading, and we’ll ride this thing down together, friends to the bitter end. That would be the only decent thing to do, and it’s the sort of thing you’d expect a real friend to do. But, as I say, you’ll have to make up your own mind. Don’t let anything I’ve said influence your decision.

  It’s a free country, and you’re old enough now to start making decisions for yourself. If you want to be a scrounge, a quitter, a backstabber, and a total bum, I guess you can leave.

  But I don’t have that option. I have to get back to the story. Are you with me or not? Okay, let’s get on with it.

  Things looked bad, real bad. You want to know how bad they were? Through the windshield, I could see two big birds circling above me. Would you care to guess what kind of birds they were? Not crows, not starlings or blackbirds or swallows. No sir. They were buzzards, and you might recall that ancient piece of cowdog wisdom that states, “When buzzards show up, fellers, it’s usually a bad almond.”

  Omen. Whatever. It’s a bad sign.

  And there they were, circling overhead, and I even recognized them. Wallace and Junior. Those guys had followed me around for years, hoping that someday I might fit into their dinner plans, and here they were again—and this time, they just might get their wishbone.

  They wheeled around in the air for a while. Then one of them—Wallace, it turned out—came swooping down, buzzed the pickup, so to speak (a buzzard buzzing the pickup, get it?), and came within inches of hitting it. He came so close, in fact, that he clipped the radio antenna and broke it off. No kidding.

  Well, it wasn’t actually an antenna, not the kind you buy in the store. Slim had busted off the real antenna about six months before. He’d run into a tree limb or something, and that had left him with a stub and no radio reception. So he’d rigged up his own. Would you like to guess what it was? A metal coat hanger, fastened to the stub with baling wire.

  It was a typical Slim fix-up deal—ugly, tasteless, and tacky—but you know what? It worked, but that was before it got clipped off by a swooping buzzard.

  Anyways, Wallace swooped past the windshield and clipped the antenna, and as he passed, I saw that he had a wild, joyful expression on his ugly beaked face, and I heard him yell, “Hi puppy dog. Me and Junior’ll be standing by for rescue work. Adios!” And then he swope away.

  Swoped. Swopen. Swoopen. Do I care?

  Well, seeing hungry buzzards in the sky didn’t give me a great feeling of confidence about this deal, but it did make me wonder how those guys always managed to show up in the darkest of moments. I don’t have much good to say about buzzards, but you’ve got to admit that they’re geniuses when it comes to smelling disaster.

  Gulp. And it appeared that I had one in progress. I was sealed in a Ford F-250 casket and was chugging toward the creek. There was no escape, no hope, no solution. What did I do? I did what any nor­mal, healthy cowdog would do.

  I began chewing on the steering wheel.

  At first glance, you might think that was a dopey thing to do. How could it help? Well . . . I’m not sure. All I can tell you is that, amongst us dogs, it’s a normal and healthy response. When scared beyond recognition, we start chewing on the first object we encounter. In my case, it happened to be the steering wheel.

  I don’t think there’s anything special, or magical about steering wheels. When they’re handy, we chew ’em, that’s all. And can testify that it made me feel better. It sort of took my mind off my problems as I chug, chug, chugged toward the creek.

  I knew Slim would understand. After, they sent down the divers to find the pickup, after they hooked the winchline onto the back bumper and hauled it out on dry land, he would open the door and find my lifeless carcass, and there beside me would be the chewed-up steering wheel. And through his tears of grief, he would say, “Well, I reckon it brought a little aid and comfort to my pal Hank in his last hour, so it went to a worthy cause.”

  Pretty sad, huh? But I’ll tell you something about steering wheels. They’re hard to chew, and they don’t taste so great. If I’d had it all to do over again, I might have chewed something softer, such as the seats.

  Well, we’ve put this off as long as we can. Sooner or later we’ve got to come to the bad part, when the pickup finally goes over the bank and into the creek. Are you ready? I guess I’m ready. Thanks for sticking with me. Thanks for all the memories. Thanks for helping me chew the steering wheel.

  I held my head at a proud angle, and like a ship’s captain about to go down with the ship, I . . .

  Who would have thought that this particular stretch of Wolf Creek was only about six inches deep? Not me. Heck, I’d supposed it was, oh
, fifty, sixty feet deep at least. It looked deep. Okay, maybe it didn’t look all that deep, but who notices such tiny details when he’s sitting in the cab of a runaway pickup? And chewing the steering wheel? Not me.

  And I’ll guarantee you that Drover wouldn’t have noticed. Why, if he’d been in there with me, he’d have . . . I don’t know what he’d have done, but it would have been loud and weird.

  Okay, let’s wrap this thing up. The pickup chugged up to the creek bank and went plunging over the brink of the edge. You probably thought it would be a sheer drop-off of thirty or forty feet, but it was more on the order of . . . well, two or three feet, but it was a sheer drop, and it did rattle my teeth. (I had a hard bite on the steering wheel, don’t you see.)

  Once in the creek bed, the pickup continued chugging forward, out into the water, which you thought was bottomless but which turned out to be only six inches deep. Or maybe four. It was deep enough so that I saw three minnows and a water spider swimming along.

  Pretty shallow, actually, and the pickup moved across the creek until it came to a tree, and there it quit moving. And then the motor died. Whew!

  An eerie silence moved into the cab. I glanced around and realized that I was alive and in one piece. What amazing good luck! By George, I had ridden that speeding runaway pickup right up to Death’s Doorknob and had lived to tell the story.

  Hmmm. The steering wheel showed some signs of, uh, heavy use, shall we say, and that might take some explaining. Or if I was lucky, maybe Slim wouldn’t notice. Or through wags and sad looks, I might be able to convince him that . . . well, termites had done it.

  Anything could chew up a steering wheel, not just dogs. And sometimes they just fall apart. No kidding. Happens all the time.

  Speaking of Slim, at that very moment he came running up. I guess he’d worked his way out from under that pile of hay and had come streaking after the pickup to save . . . well, ME, you might say, his loyal dog. He was huffing and puffing, and his face was bright red from all the exertion. See, Slim wasn’t exactly an Olympic champion when it came to running. His usual mode of moving was a slow slouch.