The Quest fort the Great White Quail

by John R. Erickson

“Doing what?”

  “You’re moving around like . . . I don’t know what. Like a donut that’s had a bite taken out of it. Normal dogs walk in a straight line, Drover. You’re walking like a crab.”

  “I’ll be derned. I’ve never even seen a crab.”

  “Nevertheless, you’re walking like a beached crab.”

  “I tried to eat a crawdad one time, but it bit me on the nose.”

  “Answer my question.”

  “I forgot. What did you ask?”

  I stuck my nose into his face. “Why are you walking in that ridiculous manner? To tell you the truth, Drover, it embarrasses me to see you doing that.”

  His grin faded. “Well, I guess I’m feeling . . .”

  “Yes? Yes? Finish your sentence. I’m a busy dog.”

  “I guess I’m feeling . . . guilty.”

  I gave him a triumphant smile. “Aha! I knew it. Drover, you should never try to conceal anything from me. I can read your thoughts like a duck out of water.” I began pacing in front of him. “Okay, soldier, out with it. What have you done this time?”

  “Well . . . what you said about Alfred’s toy truck made me feel pretty bad.”

  “We’ve already discussed this. Why are you still brooding about it?”

  “I started feeling this terrible burden of guilt, so I came up to the machine shed to hide. But you caught me.”

  “Are you sure you haven’t done something else? Look deeper into the darkness of your Inner Bean.”

  “No, it was the truck. It made me feel like a rat, messing up a kid’s toy.”

  “Drover, that doesn’t make sense. If you felt like a rat, why did you walk like a crab? Crabs and rats are not the same; therefore, they are very different.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Crabs bite.”

  “So do rats.”

  “That’s exactly my point. They’re completely different. Now, why are you still brooding over the toy truck?”

  He stared at the ground. “Well, Alfred’s out in the yard, looking for it. I thought you took it back.”

  “Huh? Well, of course I took it back.”

  “You’ve got something in your teeth.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, you’ve got something red in your teeth.”

  “Red? Don’t be absurd.” I whirled away from him and began scrubbing my teeth. “It must be some, uh, fragments of red meat.”

  “It looks kind of like plastic.”

  “It’s red meat, Drover.”

  “I’ll be derned. Where’d you get red meat?”

  “Never mind where I got it.”

  “Wait. Maybe some of the plastic came off the truck when you were carrying it back to the gate.”

  I beamed him a pleasant smile. “There we go! Of course. Ha ha. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “It’s still there.”

  I scrubbed harder on my teeth. “How does it look now?”

  He squinted his eyes. “You got it that time.”

  “Good, good. We certainly don’t want to go around with dirty teeth, do we? Ha ha. No siree. Listen, how’s your Chewing Disorder?”

  He beamed a silly grin. “You know, it’s much better. Those Words of Healing really helped.”

  “Great. Well, stick with the routine, son, and don’t forget to brush your teeth.” I lifted one ear and heard voices down at the house. “So Alfred can’t find his truck, huh? I left it right there by the gate. Tell you what, I’ll trot down there and help him out.” I gave Drover a secret wink. “Kids.”

  “What’s wrong with your eye?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got a twitch in your eye.”

  I gave him a withering glare. “Nothing’s wrong with my eye. I was giving you a secret wink so that we could share a little laugh about how kids are always misplacing their toys.”

  “Oh. Hee hee. Yeah, that was a good one.”

  “Just skip it, Drover, I’m sorry I mentioned it. Good-bye. I’m off to help a child in distress.”

  And with that, I left the dunce and went streaking down to the yard gate to, uh, help Alfred find his missing toy.

  Chapter Three: The Dreaded She Appears

  Alfred was standing outside the yard gate when I arrived in my patrol car. I screeched to a stop, switched off Sirens and Lights, and hurried to his side.

  He wore a troubled expression, holding his chin with one hand (sometimes these little details are important) and frowning at the ground. He looked up and saw me, but he didn’t smile.

  “Hi, Hankie. I lost my twuck and I can’t find it.”

  Instantly, I reached for the microphone of my mind and made an urgent call to Data Control. “DC, we’ve got a missing truck at the yard gate. Description: red plastic, a child’s toy. Run a tracer on it. Over and out.” I turned back to the boy and licked him on the face, just to let him know that, well, I had arrived on the scene and had taken charge of the case.

  He pushed me away. “I was playing wiff it yesterday, right here by the gate, but now I can’t find it.”

  I studied the ground in front of the gate. What I saw was a crime scene that had been muddled by unauthorized traffic: Alfred’s sneaker tracks, a large boot print (probably Loper’s), and a number of long parallel lines in the dust that appeared to be troy truck tracks . . . toy troy trucks . . . troy trick tracks . . .

  Phooey. Let’s back off and take another run at this. Toy. Truck. Tracks. There! That’s kind of a toughie to say, isn’t it? I’ll bet you can’t say it three times without getting your tang tungled . . . your tongue tangled, shall we say. Even I had a little trouble with it. Ha ha.

  But the point is that the crime scene had been decaffeinated so badly that I couldn’t make heads or toes of it. Whatever important clues might have been there had been lost. Going strictly on the evidence at hand, some ordinary mutt might have concluded that Alfred had stolen his own truck, but . . . well, that didn’t make much sense.

  I turned to the boy and switched my tail over to Slow Puzzled Wags, as if to say, “Well, that just about wraps it up. The truck vanished into thin air, so let’s just forget about it, huh?”

  At that very moment, the back door opened and out stepped . . . yipes, it was HER. Sally May. The boy’s mother and the lady of the house. “Did you find it, honey?”

  Have we discussed Sally May? Yes, I’m sure we have, but let’s go over it again. There is something about her that causes a dog to lower his eyes, drop his head, tuck his tail, and . . . well, start slinking away.

  It’s those EYES. They come at you like drill bits and bore their way into the dark corners of your mind. They’re always suspicious, always looking for something. If you’re a little boy, they’re looking for a hair out of place or jelly stains in the corners of your mouth.

  If you’re a dog, the eyes are looking for naughty thoughts.

  Fellers, if you have a naughty thought skipping around inside your mind, she’ll know about it. How? We don’t know. Science has no answer. It has something to do with motherhood. Some mothers seem to have this . . . this advanced form of radar, see, and it can pick up a naughty thought a mile away, even in the dead of night.

  Nothing escapes those eyes. It’s spooky. It’s creepy. And it’s enough to turn an honest, loyal dog into a nervous wreck.

  She left the porch and came toward the gate, and I could feel her eyes walking into the private room of my mind, lifting all the rugs, checking every dark corner, and peering under every piece of furniture. And all at once . . .

  You won’t believe this, but before I knew it, I had . . . well, bent myself into the shape of a horseshoe and was flashing her a loony grin, as if to say, “Hey, Sally May! Great to see you. How’s the family, huh? Yard looks great. Is that a buzzard’s nest you’re wearing? Oops, your hai
r. Sorry. Anyway, Alfred and I were just . . . Boy, this weather’s nice, isn’t it?”

  Okay, I had scolded Drover for bending himself into that ridiculous Horseshoe Position, but don’t forget that I was standing in the glare of Sally May’s eyes. She causes normal dogs to do crazy things, that’s all I can say.

  Did my groveling do any good? It was hard to tell. She scowled at me and said, “What’s wrong with that dog?”

  Alfred shrugged. “He’s twying to be friendly, I guess.”

  “Well, he looks ridiculous. Hank, stop that!”

  Huh? Okay, sure, you bet. I switched off Horse­shoe and beamed her a smile of greatest sincerity. I even went to Broad Loving Wags on the tail section. She didn’t notice. She was looking down at Alfred.

  “You still can’t find your truck? Honey, if you’d bring your toys inside at night, this wouldn’t happen. When we put our things in their proper place, we can always find them.”

  “I know, Mom, but how could it just disappear?”

  Her eyes swung around to . . . yipes . . . to me, and I began to melt. Did she know something? Had she been spying on me? Had Drover ratted on me? Don’t forget, he’d said he felt like a RAT.

  Suddenly a mysterious gravitational force seized my body and twisted it into the shape of a horseshoe again, and I felt a loony grin spreading across my mouth. I know, I know. I had already done this and it had only made her more irritable, but there are times when a dog isn’t the mattress of his own face . . . master of his own fate, let us say. This appeared to be one of those times, and it seemed to make her even madder.

  Her eyes widened and her nostrils flared out like the head of a rattlesnake and she screeched, “Will you stop that! What’s wrong with you?”

  I couldn’t explain it. It was too deep and complicated, and don’t forget that we dogs are limited to facial expressions and tail wags when we try to respond to our human friends. It isn’t easy to say, “It’s you! If you’ll stop staring at me like a chicken hawk, I’ll quit behaving like a chicken!”

  I couldn’t express these thoughts through tail wags. What’s a poor dog to do when all his efforts to communicate with the lady of the house have ended in failure? I was at my whip’s end . . . wit’s end, let us say, so in one last desperate effort to soothe her ruffled feathers, I . . . well, I licked her on the ankle.

  “Ahhhhhh!” She screamed and jumped backward, and now her eyes were flaming even wilder than before. “Don’t lick me! I hate that!”

  Huh? Okay, another bad idea. Some days, a guy just shouldn’t get out of bed. If we depended on these people for our happiness and satisfaction, our lives would be pretty grim.

  The good news is that she turned back to Little Alfred, letting me off the skewer of her eyes. “Honey, things don’t just disappear. Your truck is somewhere in this yard, and you’ll just have to hunt until you find it. I can’t help you, because I have to feed the baby.”

  She turned and started back to the house. Whew! But then . . . uh-oh . . . she stopped, turned slowly around, and beamed her deadly laser-beam eyes directly at me.

  Gulp. Now what?

  In a low, menacing voice, she said, “I don’t suppose YOU know anything about this, do you?”

  HUH? Was she talking to me? I glanced around to see if she might be speaking to someone behind me. No luck there. No, it appeared that I was the target of her burning question, and I would have to come up with some kind of response.

  In this moment of almost unbearable pressure, I decided to try Happy Dog. It had worked before, so maybe it would get me out of this crisis.

  I cranked my lips upward into a broad smile, lifted my ears as high as they would go, thrashed my tail back and forth, and began jumping up and down. Taken all together, these gestures beamed her a message of hope and joy:

  “Boy, what a beautiful day! Bright sunshine, clear sky, no wind. The birds are singing and flowers are blooming, and best of all, we have each other. And by golly, if we have each other in troubled times, well, what’s missing? Nothing. We have it all, Sally May, and I’m sure you’ll agree that we’re all so happy, we couldn’t be any happier. Right?”

  I studied her face to see if it was selling. She rolled her eyes, muttered something under her breath, and walked into the house. When the door closed behind her, I dared to resume my normal breathing. Whew! Boy, that had been quite a storm, and you know, I never did figure out if Happy Dog had warmed her heart or not.

  Probably not. It might have caused some melting of the outer layers, but the deeper permafrost regions remained as cold as ever. Oh well.

  I turned to Little Alfred and was saddened to see that he was giving me a suspicious look. “Hankie, you didn’t take my twuck, did you?”

  Huh? Me? Take his twuck? Heck no, honest. I could say, with a perfectly clear conscience, that I had never even seen a twuck in my whole life. I’d seen a few trucks, even a few toy trucks, but that’s not what he’d asked about. No, I knew nothing, almost nothing at all, about his missing twuck. No kidding.

  He smiled and gave me . . . arg . . . a big hug, such a loving embrace that it cut off the flow of carbon de angelo to my lungalary region and caused me to cough. HARK. And he said, “You wouldn’t steal my twuck, Hankie, I know you wouldn’t.”

  There, you see? When we want to get to the truth of any situation, we should ask the opinion of an innocent child. They don’t lie or spread vicious gossip. Out of the mouth of Sally May’s adorable child, I had been cleared of all charges.

  It was just a pity that his mother wasn’t around to hear the verdict.

  Chapter Four: We Search for the Missing Twuck

  Pretty touching scene, huh? You bet. A boy and his dog. It’s one of the most special relationships in the whole world, two different creatures whose souls are joined at the center. The rest of the world could go on fighting and bickering, but Alfred and I . . . well, we had a bond of trust and friendship that would make us pals forever.

  Should I lick him on the ear to seal the friendship? I pondered that for a moment. The last time I’d licked him, he’d pushed me away. And when I’d licked his mother on the ankle, she had recoiled in horror, as though she’d been bitten by a snake.

  Sometimes those licks work and sometimes they don’t. I decided to save it for another time.

  Alfred released me from his hug and his face settled into a mask of wrinkles. “Hankie, I want to play twucks. Will you help me find my twuck?”

  Me? Oh, sure, you bet. Anything at all. Be glad to help.

  He walked through the open gate. “Well, wet’s check the yard.”

  Huh? The yard? Now, hold on a second. It was a well-known fact that his mother had strict rules about Dogs in the Yard. I had just come through a narrow escape with that woman and I wasn’t anxious to push my luck. No thanks.

  He stopped and looked back at me. “It’s okay. Mom’s feeding Molly and she won’t notice.” He flashed a grin. “Molly likes to spit out her food and Mom’ll be busy wiping up the mess.”

  Yeah? Well, to be perfectly frank, it made me a little uneasy to bet my life on whether or not a little girl-child spitted out her food. Spat. Sput.

  “Come on, Hankie, I need your help.”

  I turned my gaze toward the house to see if The Face was lurking at the kitchen window, looking outside for lawbreakers. The window was clear, so . . . okay, maybe we had time for a quick search of the yard, although I had serious doubts that we would find the, uh, twuck.

  I slipped through the gate and entered the Forbidden Zone, and right away I could feel the tension moving over me. My mouth seemed very dry, and I noticed that my left eye had begun to twitch.

  You see what she does to me? I was in the yard to help her son find his toy, yet her dark presence hovered over the place like . . . something. Like the smoke from a thousand burning tires.

  We made one quick pass around the
yard, front and back, and our search turned up no sign of the missing twuck. It was discouraging, although it came as no surprise . . . that is, we were both pretty discouraged. At that point, Alfred changed the plan of attack. We would now do a thorough search of all plants, flowers, bushes, and shrubberies.

  Aye, captain! I activated Snifforadar, put my sensors down to ground level, and began sweeping the dense foliage that grew in the flower beds next to the house. I checked out a clump of bazoonias just north of the porch and continued on a northward course of 0400, following the foundation line of the house. Snifforadar was operating at the maximum level and showing nothing on the scope, so I crept onward until . . .

  BAM!

  Aaaa-eeeeee!

  Holy smokes, in the heat of the search, it had never occurred to me that a huge and deadly rattle­snake might be coiled up beneath the shrubberies, waiting to pounce on a passing mouse. Or a rabbit. Maybe even a stray goat, sheep, or cow– I­ mean, we’re talking about a snake that was big enough to swallow a half-grown cow!

  Huge snake, and I hate to be the one to give you the bad news, but the snake had made a direct hit with two Fang Missiles, right on the soft leathery portion of my nose.

  I guess you know what this means. It means that our story might turn out to be shorter than we’d planned. We’ve discussed rattlesnakes, right? We know what their deadly venom can do once it’s been injected into the living tissue of a dog, and we also know that the very worse place for a dog to be bitten is on the end of his nose.

  Alfred heard my cries of pain and came rushing over to me. By then, the deadly poison had already begun racing through my bodily processes and I was feeling faint. I staggered toward the boy, looked into his eyes, and delivered the terrible news:

  “Son, we’ve taken a direct hit and things are looking bad. By some estimates, we’ve got maybe one hour to rush me to the Mayo Clinic. As much as I hate to say this, we’re going to have to sound the alarm, alert your mother, and tell her to put in an urgent call for a Medivac helicopter. They fly out of Amarillo, so we don’t have a moment to spare.”