The Case of the Haystack Kitties

by John R. Erickson

  I didn’t know what. He would be a begger, a tramp, a ragamuffin, a broken heap of a man who had tried to forget that awful night in March . . . April . . . May . . . whenever it was that he had staked out his friend on a stake and left him to fight off the assault of a herd of bellowing bulls.

  Okay, one bull, but he was a big bull.

  What a cheap trick. I should have known he’d come up with some lousy job, but I’d been a fool, a trusting fool. I’ll say no more about it.

  Yes I will. I want this entered into the record. Notice that his solution to the bull problem didn’t involve any posthole digging. That tells you all you need to know about Slim. With that, I shall rest my case.

  We marched over to the patched fence. I marched with my head high and a look of steely resolve in my eyes, a proud member of the elite Ranch Security Forces. He, on the other hand, slumped along be­cause he was already struggling under the terrible weight of his guilty conscience.

  Life would be hard for him after this. I almost felt sorry for him.

  No I didn’t. I felt sorry for ME! Surely he wouldn’t actually go through with this. Surely he’d change his mind and . . .

  He tied the other end of the rope to a corner post. He bent down and patted me on the head—as though that was some big deal and would make up for sticking me on a lousy guard job.

  “Well, here’s our camp. Pretty nice place, huh?”

  I glared daggers at him.

  “And I want you to know, Hankie, that I sure appreciate you volunteering for this job.”

  Ha. What a joke.

  “And it just breaks my heart that you get to camp out tonight, and I have to go home to a nice soft bed!”

  Right. With dirty sheets.

  He rubbed his chin and looked off to the west. “The way I figger it, he’ll come back in the night for some more of that hay. All you have to do is give him a bark or two. I’m bettin’ he’ll take off running and won’t come back.”

  Sure, and if he did happen to come back?

  “But if he, does, just . . . you know, beat him up. Bite off his ears. You’re the cowdog around here, and I’ll bet you’ll think of something.”

  I was thinking a LOT of somethings, and some of them involved Slim.

  “Well, pleasant dreams, pooch. I’ll check you in the morning. And I sure hope there ain’t a bull in here. I’d be real disappointed.”

  And with that veiled threat, he left and walked back to the pickup. Well, he had sure done me dirt on this harebrained scheme, but there was one bright cloud on the silver lining. As he walked away, I was proud to note that he had a water stain on the seat of his britches. Tee hee. And he was scratching his behind. Served him right.

  I listened to the whine of his pickup motor fade into the distance. A deep silence moved in around me, and also darkness. The sun was going down, don’t you see, and when the sun goes down, it gets . . . well, dark, of course.

  Burp.

  And if I ever wanted to poison an enemy, I would feed him one of Slim’s mackerel sandwiches.

  Well, I did a scan of the horizon and saw no bulls. So far, so good. Maybe he wouldn’t come tonight. Maybe he had gotten bored with tearing down fences and would go do something constructive. A guy could always hope.

  But in the meantime, I needed to grab some sleep and revive my precious bodily fluids. Would I be able to sleep in this lonely outpost, knowing that somewhere out in the honk snork murging darkness there lurked a sassafras porkchop zzzz zzzzzzzzzzzz.

  In other words, yes, I was able to sleep. In Security Work, we are forced to grab sleep when it’s up for grabs, which often comes in short naps. I did manage to grab a short nap, but suddenly . . .

  My ears flew up. I raised my head to an upright position and checked Data Control. A warning light was blinking on the Earatory Scanners circuit. I hit three switches and threw all circuits over to Manual.

  We were picking up strange unidentified noises. It appeared that my long night had just begun.

  Chapter Ten: Surrounded by a Bunch of Urchin Cats

  Pretty spooky, huh? Me all alone and tied up in the stack lot and hearing strange, unidentified sounds in the growing darkness? You bet it was, but what made it even spookier was that those strange sounds were not made by a bull.

  I had no idea what they were. Shall I try to describe them? Okay, they weren’t the deep bellowing of a bull but rather . . . well, high-pitched squeaks. If a guy tried to attach a word to the sound, he might describe it as “mew.”

  Hmmm. Very strange. I couldn’t imagine what the source might be, although I was pretty sure that the mews were coming from something. But what? Big mice? Rats? Some new variety of night bird that I hadn’t observed or cataloged or put into our database of night birds?

  It was a puzzle. I homed in on the sounds and twisted my head to get better reception on the Earatory Scanner Network, but still . . .

  I froze. Something was crawling through the weeds between me and the haystack!

  How did I know? Simple. I could hear the swish and crackle of something moving, and I could also see the tops of the weeds quivering. A lot of dogs would have missed that last clue, the quivering weed tops, but I caught it. And all at once it occurred to me that the Whatever that was slithering through the weeds might be . . . a snake. Or even worse, several snakes.

  Have we discussed my position on snakes? I don’t like ’em, not even a little bit. I know what you’re thinking: “Most snakes in the Texas Pan­handle are harmless, including your bullsnakes, your coachwhips, your hognoses, your racers, and your gardening snakes. Only the rattlesnake is dangerous.”

  Ha! Don’t tell me about bullsnakes being harmless. Try to play with one sometime and see what happens. I tried it once, and you know what he did? He coiled up, hissed, and struck me on the nose. They are the most ill-tempered, unfriendly snakes on the ranch, and the fact that you won’t die from their bite doesn’t make getting bitten any fun.

  No sir, I’ve got no use for a snake of any kind, and by George if those were snakes out there, slithering through the grass and weeds and coming in my direction, I was fixing to . . .

  “Mew, mew.”

  Wait a minute, hold everything, halt. You thought those were snakes? Ha, ha. Not at all, and do you know why? You forgot a very crucial piece of evidence: snakes might hiss, but they don’t mew. And here comes the real shocker. Do you know what kind of animal, vegetable, or mineral says mew?

  You’ll be shocked, stunned, surprised, and even embarrassed that you missed this piece of the puzzle, because it just happened to fit with some information we had already gathered in this case. Are you ready? Hang on.

  Kittens. Baby kittens. Young cats.

  No snakes at all. None. What a relief, huh? See, what you forgot was that, earlier in the day, we had uncovered and exposed a stray cat amongst the hay bales, and this same stray cat had kittens. Are you getting it now? I know, it’s a little tough keeping track of all the clues and evidence that come flying at us from all directions, but . . .

  Where were we? Oh yes, kittens. The weeds were alive with mewing kittens, and as we tracked their every movement through Data Control, we began to see a pattern emerging. They appeared to be heading, toward . . . ME.

  Great. There I was on Night Guard, trying to protect our ranch’s supply of winter fottage . . . for­age, fodder . . . I was so-forthing the so-forth, and I was about to be joined by a herd of squeaking cats.

  I needed that, and also three ringworms and a toothache. And another, bupp, mackerel sandwich, excuse me. Or to put it another way, the last thing I needed was a bunch of homeless vagabond yowling kittens.

  I watered and witched. I waited and watched, shall we say, as the trails of quivering weed tops continued to move in my direction, and as the sounds of their mewing came closer. My ears were perked and fully alert, my eyes darted from weed to
weed, and I noticed that my lip on the left side of my . . . well, mouth, of course, where else would you find a lip? . . . was beginning to rise into a snarl.

  When the urchins popped out of the weeds, I would be ready for them.

  They popped out of the weeds. Two of them. Three. Four? They kept popping out of the . . . five? SIX? Good grief, this was turning into a convention of unwanted urchin cats!

  They stared up at me. I glared back. They mewed. I snarled back. They were trying to look cute, you know, with their big smokey eyes and their little kitty faces and all that other stuff that cats use to weasel their way into the lives of others, but I wasn’t fooled, not for a minute. I had been to school on cats, and I knew all their tricks, backward and forward.

  Anyways, they mewed and tried to melt my heart with their so-called cuteness, and it didn’t work. I stuck my nose right into the middle of them.

  “Go home. Get a job. Chase a mouse. I don’t like you.”

  Do you think they took a hint? Of course not. Cats don’t take hints. Tell ’em, “Go away, I don’t like you,” and they think that means, “Oh goodie, a bunch of kitties, and will you please start rubbing on my legs and sticking your spiky little claws into my feet?”

  That’s just what they did. They were like . . . I don’t know what. Ants. Flies. They gave me the creeps. It was time to go to sterner measures. I barked.

  “Listen, you little brats. Go away and leave me alone. This is a Security Zone, and I have a job to do. If I want company I’ll call you, but don’t hold your breath. Now scram. Scat.”

  They mewed and gave me pitiful looks and kept up their cuteness routine. Okay, I had given them fair warning. It was time to roll out my song about cats. Have we done it before? Maybe not. Here’s how it went.

  Cats from Little Kitties Grow

  Now gather around, you kitties and kids. It’s time for your cat education.

  I’ll tell you truth, the unvarnished truth, without tact or mere speculation.

  There’s a principal here, I want you to know. I assume that your momma forgot

  To tell you the story of kitties and dogs, so I’ll tell you it, like it or not.

  The fact that you’re here, the fact that you’re mewing, the fact you’ve invaded my space

  All tell me that you just don’t get it at all and you’re not comprehending your place.

  So let me be blunt, go straight to the point. Little darlin’s, you’ve got it all wrong.

  You’re cats. I’m a dog. Do you know what that means? It means that you’d better move on.

  It’s dangerous here, I want you to know. I’m not what you want me to be:

  A kindly old grandpa, an uncle or friend, who’ll take you upon his knee.

  I’m mean and I’m gripy, too set in my ways to be nice to a gaggle of brats.

  But the bottomest line I can tell you, my dears . . . is I don’t like cats!

  I know that you’re cute little bundles of fur. You’ve only just started to grow.

  But give you six months of mooching my scraps, and your true cattination will show.

  You’ll be fatter than Pete and twice as obnoxious, and then you’ll be driving me bats.

  So kindly shove off, go away and get lost, ’cause little kitties will grow into cats.

  Pretty fine song, huh? You bet it was—maybe not my very best, but you seldom get the very best from a subject as dreary as cats. But it certainly captured my feelings, and even more important . . .

  It worked. Yes, it worked! After listening to my song, all six kitties broke into tears and ran back to wherever they had come from. To their mommy, to their house of hay.

  You probably think I felt like a louse, reducing six kittens to tears. Not at all. Part of my job around here involves being firm with cats. You have to keep them humble, or they’ll try to run the place.

  If you want to have a nice garden, you have to pull the weeds. That’s my last word on the . . .

  Okay, maybe chasing Pete was more fun than making kittens sob and weep, but I didn’t feel bad about it. And just to be sure I wasn’t tempted to feel bad about it, I pushed it out of my mind. Totally and forever. I turned my attention to the peace and crying of the . . . that is, the peace and quiet of the evening. Yes, it was a beautiful evening, so peaceful and cryit . . . quiet, except for all the wailing and moaning that was coming from the haystack.

  What was the big deal? Why all the noise? Good grief, all I’d done was to sing them a little song and tell them the truth about Life. If they couldn’t handle the truth, they were just a bunch of little crybabies. I had more important things to do than to worry about . . . phooey.

  They weren’t my problem, and don’t forget that they were stray cats who had moved into our hay­stack without being invited, and they were trespassing. You know where I stand on the issue of . . .

  Uh-oh. Here came Momma. No doubt she would throw a walleyed fit and accuse me of terrible crimes and maybe try to claw my face off. Well, she could try, but I had a few tricks for cats like her.

  She didn’t appear very threatening when she walked up to me. I mean, she wasn’t humped up or hissing. Her ears weren’t lying flat on her head, and her eyes didn’t have that wild, crazy look cats get when they’re about to turn on their buzzsaw of claws. Hmmm. Maybe it was a trick. I mean, she actually looked humble, if you can believe that. I wasn’t sure I believed it.

  Don’t forget: never trust a cat.

  She stopped several feet in front of me. She raised her chin and spoke in a . . . well, sort of a trembling voice. “Sir, my children said you told them to leave.”

  “Yes ma’am, that’s the long and short of it.”

  “Were they bothering you?”

  “Yes ma’am, I must admit that they were.”

  “They said you don’t like cats.”

  “That’s correct. Nothing personal, and don’t get your feelings hurt. We just happen to be on opposite sides of the law, that’s all.”

  She dropped her head. “I’m sorry the children bothered you. I know you’re an important dog with many things on your mind. But you see, sir . . .” Her lip trembled, and she turned away. “They’re hungry. They’re still too young to hunt, and I’m not giving enough milk.”

  “I see. This may be too obvious to mention, ma’am, but I’m not a dairy dog. I don’t give milk. Maybe you should be eating better. Then you could give more milk. I mean, you look kind of skinny to me.” She started bawling. “Okay, you look thin, svelte . . . uh . . . lean . . . gaunt . . . pleasantly gaunt, so to speak.”

  “No” she cried, “you had it right the first time. I’ve become a skinny old hag. But there’s never time for me to hunt food. I give everything to my children, and at the end of the day, I’m out of milk and so tired, all I can do is crawl into bed.”

  “Hmm, yes, I see. So you’ve come over here to ask for a handout, right? Free food and maybe a place in the machine shed, right?”

  She stopped crying and stared at me. “No sir, that’s not why I came over here. I came to apologize because my children were bothering you. I’m trying to teach them manners. I’m trying to teach them right from wrong. It’s not right that they were disturbing you, and it won’t happen again. Good evening, sir.”

  She turned and walked away. Well, it appeared that I had just scored another moral victory over the cats.

  Chapter Eleven: The Bull Comes and Attacks the Poor Cats

  But somehow I didn’t feel too proud of myself. “Wait a minute. Don’t get your tail in a wringer. I wasn’t trying to insult you.”

  She stopped. “Yes sir, but you did.”

  “Okay, I’m . . . let’s say that I was misquoted.”

  “Does that mean you’re sorry?”

  “No, it means . . . look, lady, let’s don’t get too picky. I’m Head of Ranch Security, and you’re squatting o
n my ranch. Let’s just say that I’m sorry I was misquoted.”

  Her voice was soft but firm. “We may be squatters in your haystack, but we have our pride, and we ask for nothing. As soon as the children can travel, we’ll be leaving. You weren’t misquoted, and you’re not sorry you insulted us. Good evening, sir.” She turned to leave again.

  “Wait. Will you just hold your horses?” She stopped and looked back at me. I ground my teeth together and prepared to say the most painful words in the language. “Okay, I’m sorry.”

  Boy, that hurt, almost killed me.

  “Thank you. It’s nice of you to say so.” Her gaze went to the rope. “Are you tied up?”

  “Not exactly tied up, ma’am. I’ve been given a very important assignment. You see . . .” And I told her all about the bull and so forth.

  She nodded. “Yes, we’ve seen him. He’s huge. I worry that he might harm the children. Do you think he might?”

  I chuckled at that. “He might think about it, ma’am, but as long as I’m on duty, he won’t come back into the stack lot. That’s a guarantee. Your kids are safe. Oh, and by the way, if they want to wander over this way, it’ll be all right. No problem.”

  “It’s their bedtime, but thank you. May I call you Hank?”

  “Sure, why not? And maybe you have a name too, huh?”

  “Gertie. Good night, Hank. I wish you luck with the bull.”

  “Don’t need luck, Gertie, just brute strength and a brilliant mind. But thanks, and say good night to the kids.”

  She went back to her place in the haystack. I watched until she disappeared in the gathering darkness. She definitely needed a few square meals. She was as skinny as a pencil, but not a bad old gal . . . for a cat, of course.

  I had just turned toward the west and was watching the flashes of lightning in a storm cloud, when who or whom do you suppose came scampering up? Mister Stub Tail. The Original Cotton King. Drover.

  “Hi Hank. I wondered where you were, and here you are, and I’ll be derned, they’ve got you tied up. Are you guarding the kitties? Gosh, that’s nice. They sure are cute.”