The frozen rodeo, p.1
The Frozen Rodeo,
p.1
The Frozen Rodeo
John R. Erickson
Illustrations by Gerald L. Holmes
Maverick Books, Inc.
Publication Information
MAVERICK BOOKS
Published by Maverick Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 549, Perryton, TX 79070
Phone: 806.435.7611
www.hankthecowdog.com
Published in the United States of America by Maverick Books, Inc., 2020
Copyright © John R. Erickson, 2020
All rights reserved
Maverick Books, Inc. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59188-174-2
Hank the Cowdog® is a registered trademark of John R. Erickson.
Printed in the United States of America
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Dedication
Dedicated to Gerald L. Holmes
1940 - 2019
I join the Maverick Books family in mourning the loss of our dear friend Gerald Holmes, the artist who drew the illustrations for 74 Hank the Cowdog books and put faces on Hank, Drover, Sally May, Slim and all the other characters.
Gerald began illustrating my magazine articles in 1978 when he worked in a feedlot and I was working on a ranch. We had no money but had talent, energy, and big dreams, and we set out to do things that hadn’t been done before.
We worked together for 41 years. I didn’t tell him what to draw and he didn’t tell me what to write. We never quarreled and he never missed a deadline.
Gerald took his art into homes and schools and hospitals, to cow camps and deer blinds and drilling rigs. He did with art what I hoped to do with the written word: deliver the blessing of innocent laughter.
And he did it so well! He illuminated the imaginations of millions of children and there is no way to calculate how many of them drew their first picture, imitating Gerald’s Hank or Drover.
We mourn the loss of this gentle, humble man and celebrate the joy he brought into the world. Our prayers go out to his wife Carol and sons, Heath and Chris.
John and Kris Erickson & Family
Gary and Kim Rinker & Family
Trev Tevis
Nikki Earley
Janee McCartor
Contents
Chapter One - A Wasp Crisis
Chapter Two - The House Is On Fire!
Chapter Three - Smoke, Flames, Awful!
Chapter Four - Decorating Slim’s House
Chapter Five - Words of Comfort
Chapter Six - Uh Oh, The Boss Shows Up
Chapter Seven - A Crisis In Town
Chapter Eight - I Get Shanghaied
Chapter Nine - This Is Very Bad
Chapter Ten - Good Nutrition Is Very Important
Chapter Eleven - Rodeo On Main Street
Chapter Twelve - Incredible Ending, Just Amazing
Chapter One: A Wasp Crisis
It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. The mystery began in the spring, as I recall, a few weeks after Christmas. Wait. Christmas comes in the month of December, and the last time I checked, December falls in the winter, not the spring.
Hencely, the mystery couldn’t have begun in the spring, so disregard the previous message. The mystery began in the wintertime, January, yes of course, when Slim and I found ourselves roping cattle in downtown Twitchell during an ice storm.
Oops, you’re not supposed to know about that because it comes later in the story. See, what comes later can’t come sooner, so let’s be very quiet about this and not blab it around, okay? We won’t tell anyone that Miss Viola was there and so were the police. Oh, and the dogcatcher. Shhhh.
Now let’s get to the business of the fire. It was in the winter, the very worst time for your house to burn down. I was the one who first saw the flames and turned in the alarm, so I know what I’m talking about. I mean, I was inside the house.
It was a very tense and scary situation, and already I’m wondering if we should go on with the story. You know how I am about the little children: give ‘em a few thrills and let ‘em have fun, but don’t load ‘em down with the scariest parts of my work.
Hey, a dog in my position is trained to cope with the scary stuff—the crinimal investigations, the constant battle with the Charlies, the Red Alert emergencies, and fires of all kinds—but the kids don’t have that kind of preparation.
What do you think? Should we plunge into the story or call it quits and go do something else?
I figured that’s what you’d say. Okay, you’d better grab hold of something stout and hang on. Here we go.
We’ve already decided that it happened in the wintertime. Drover and I had pretty muchly moved our base of operations from the gas tanks down to Slim Chance’s shack, two miles east of ranch headquarters.
Why? Because Slim was a bachelor cowboy who allowed the Elite Troops of the Security Division to stay inside the house on cold winter nights, and that was a big deal. He had a nice wood-burning stove in the living room and we made our camp on the floor, near the stove. His carpet was as thin as the seat of his pants, but all in all, it was a great place to be on a cold winter night.
We had made it through the deep dark of the night with no emergency calls to interrupt our sleep. We were safe, warm, and comfortable on the floor. I don’t recall what woke me up…wait, yes I do, a yellow jacket wasp dropped from the ceiling and landed on my head.
We don’t expect wasps to fall on our heads in January. In a normal year, we don’t even see a wasp in January. Why? I’m not sure. Most usually they show up in the spring, hang around all summer, and make a nuisance of themselves in the fall, and they’re gone by the time snow arrives.
Maybe they fly south with the birds. Maybe they buzz themselves to death in the fall, and that’s why you find all those crunchy dead ones around window sills. But the point is that we never see them in January, but that particular January, we were seeing plenty of them. They were still lurking around, and nobody on my ranch was glad about it, especially me.
Do we have time for this? I mean, talking about yellow jacket wasps seems a waste of time, especially when we have classified information that our house was fixing to burn down around our heads. On the other hand, wasps are a pretty serious threat to public safety, so maybe we should say a few more words about them.
The main point here is that your average wasp is armed and dangerous. He carries a loaded stinger on the end of his tail and has no respect for the rights of people or dogs. One day a wasp crawled into Slim’s boot and guess what happened when he stuck his foot inside.
Wow, it sounded like the blast of a bull moose, scared me and Drover out of three months’ growth. He got over it, Slim did, but it sure darkened his mood for the rest of the morning, and he started checking his boots for booby-traps.
Oh, and he stopped walking around the house in his bare feet. Can you guess why? Because one night, right before supper, he stepped on a wasp and got knifed, so he dug out his old pair of sheepskin house slippers. He started wearing them around the house, don’t you see, and when he spotted a yellow jacket creeping around on the floor, he made a special effort to smash it.
Those slippers were patched with duct tape because…well, some unknown villain had chewed them up, but we don’t need to probe any deeper into that chapter of our lives. See, we never caught the Slipper Shredder, but guess who got blamed. Not Drover, a prime suspect in the case, and not Sally May’s rotten little cat, not the coyote brothers or Eddy the Rac.
Me. I got blamed! No kidding, and I was the Lead Investigator on the case. Outrageous!
Anyway, how did we get on the subject of slipskin sheepers? I don’t know, but before we leave that subject, let me whisper a Deep Dark Secret: Dogs who have dabbled in the sheepskin business will tell you…
Maybe we’d better skip the rest of this. I don’t think it would do either of us any good.
The main point here is that I know almost nothing about the sleepskin shippers, and to this very day, the case remains unsolved.
Now, where were we? Oh yes, the Wasp Crisis. I was in the midst of a peaceful sleep, on the floor of Slim’s bachelor shack, only moments before the place went up in flames, when something landed on my right ear and tripped an alarm in Data Control.
Naturally I tried to ignore it. Who wants to be disturbed in the middle of a peaceful sleep? Not me, but our sensors were picking up tiny signals suggesting that something was walking around up there. In other words, this wasn’t a piece of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling. Plaster fragments don’t have legs.
I punched in the commands for Ear Flick—twice, three times. No luck there. The motion sensors were still picking up creepy little signals on one of my ears and DC (that’s our code for Data Control) kicked on the General Alarm.
Gongs gonged and lights flashed, and I found myself standing on the bridge, shouting into a microphone. “All hands on deck! Bring sidearms and sandwiches, we’ve got pork chops creeping through the catnip! Approach and capture! Repeat: capture the roaches, this is not a drill!”
Thi
OWWWWW!
It stung like crazy. We had taken a direct hit from a missile or a torpedo, right in the…
HUH?
Okay, the stupid wasp had dropped from the ceiling and landed on my ear, and when that happens, the last thing you want to do is rough him up with a burst of scratching. Do you know why? Because you probably won’t kill the little heathen, and he will drill you with his poison stinger.
That’s obvious when you’re wide awake, but when you explode out of a deep sleep, it’s not so obvious, and yes, I followed the wrong procedure and got drilled, and the saddest part was that I didn’t even bag the wasp. I heard the buzz of his wings as he flew off to torment someone else.
Trembling with righteous anger, I blinked my eyes and glanced around. Okay, it appeared that I was in Slim’s living room, and there was a corpse on the floor beside me. Wait, that might have been Drover and he might have been merely conked out asleep. That was good news and I was about to shut everything down, when I noticed…
Good grief, the inside of the house was RED, and we’re not talking about slightly red. This was a bright, fiery red, and that’s when I was smoten by the awful reality.
OUR HOUSE WAS BURNING DOWN!!
Chapter Two: The House Is On Fire!
Hold up, there’s something we need to discuss. Is smoten the right word for this particular situation, or should it be smitten?
You know how I am about getting the right word for every situation. If we don’t set a good example for the kids, the next thing you know, they’ll be talking and acting like monkeys. They’ll start eating bananas and tossing all their peelings on the floor. Their ears will sprout hair and they’ll start scratching their armpits.
Is that the kind of behavior we want to see in the little children? Is that the kind of world we want to leave for our granddogs? Absolutely not, and it all starts right here, in the way we use language. Don’t forget: Without words, we’d all be speechless.
A lot of mutts don’t care and wouldn’t take the time to get it right. You know who cares? Cowdogs. We have to be just a little bit special, so let’s stop right here and take the time to get it right.
Write-wrote-written
Kite-coat-kitten
Bite-boat-bitten
Smite-smote-smitten
Okay, there we are, that’s the answer. It should be smitten, not written, kitten, mitten, or bitten. The next time you see a monkey, tell him to shape up and stop using trashy language. What belongs in the trash are banana peelings and peanut shells.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to get carried away, but somebody has to take a stand on these issues.
Where were we? I have no idea. It was something important, but it seems to have vanished in a fog. Maybe that was it, fog. We’d had a few foggy mornings after Christmas, and a dog can get lost in a fog. So can a frog.
I’m just killing time, waiting for something to click.
This is so annoying. To be honest, it drives me nuts. In my line of work, I have to stay focused and organized. Nobody expects much out of Drover. He can fill his mind with all kinds of nonsense, but the Head of Ranch Security has to…
Wait, hold everything, I’ve got it! THE HOUSE WAS ON FIRE! How could you have forgotten that? You know what? You need to start paying attention!
Okay, now we’re rolling. I was inside Slim’s house, remember? I’d been assaulted by a wasp and was wide awake, and when I glanced around, I noticed that the room inside of which I was whiching had turned a bright shade of red, fiery red.
And fellers, I knew we were in deep trouble.
I reached for the microphone of my mind and hit the button for 911 Alert. “May we have your attention please? This is the Special Crimes Division. We have fire in the hole! Fire in the house! You’re about to be barbecued alive, but please don’t panic!”
The alarm had a magical effect on Drover. I mean, the runt came flying out of a brick-like sleep, jumped three feet in the air and seemed to be swimming, then hit the ground and began running in circles. “Help, murder, mayday, there’s a hole in the fire!”
“Calm down, soldier, and stand by for orders! Proceed to your duty station and begin barking the alarm. We must evacuate the house and Slim must be warned!”
“Forget, that, I’m out of here!”
“Drover, hold your duty station and…”
He went streaking down the hall toward the bedroom, screeching, “Red, red, everything’s red! Under the bed or we’ll all be dead!”
You know, panic can be contagious. I mean, the house was filling with smoke and fire, flaming rafters were falling all around us, and Drover was racing down the hall, screeching insane poetry about being fried alive.
So, yes, I lost all discipline and went racing down the hall behind him. He dived under Slim’s bed and a moment later, I was right beside him. Even inside the bunker, everything was red, and I won’t deny that we were terrified.
It’s kind of mysterious that in such an extreme emergency situation, Drover began speaking in rhymes, isn’t it? I can’t explain it.
But there we were, huddled under the bed. I had to bring some order into the chaos. “All right, men, call in your damage reports. Has anyone suffered burns?”
“No burns, but I can’t breathe!”
“Why can’t you breathe?”
“All the smoke makes me choke.”
“Oh yes, the smoke is terrible. Install smoke filters at once.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Neither do I, so we’ll have to breathe through our noses.”
“Yeah, bud by doze is stobbed ubb.”
“What?”
“By doze. Id’s stobbed ubb. I bust be allergig to sboge.”
“Drover, what language are you speaking?”
“I’b dot sure, but I gant breathe through by doze.”
“You can’t breathe through your toes?”
“Doe, by doze!”
“Doe, ray, me? Are you trying to sing?”
“You dever lizzen!”
“A better lizard? What are you talking about? Wait, let’s try facial expressions. Give me some kind of clue.” I studied his face. “Okay, I’m getting it now. Your eyes are crossed. You saw a lizard and you crossed your eyes and now they’re hung in the crossed position?”
“Doe, doe!”
“Well, if I’m a dodo, what are you? You can’t even talk straight.”
“Helb!”
“Listen, pal, it’s too late for me to give you speaking lessons. The house is on fire and…” I sniffed the air and suddenly realized…. “Drover, I just noticed something odd.”
“Whud?”
“The house is on fire but there’s no smoke.”
“There’s nod?”
“No. It must be some kind of smokeless fire.”
“I’ll be derned. I thought I couldn’t breathe because of all the smoke.”
“You couldn’t breathe because your eyes were crossed. Stop crossing your eyes and let’s bark the alarm. We’ve got to get Slim out of bed. Come on, son, and load up your biggest barks!”
I crawled out from under the bed and was confronted by the terrible redness of the fire. Oh, you should have seen it! Once out in the open, I loaded up Number Three Warning Barks and began blasting away. Drover joined me and added a few squeaks, and we began pumping them out, bark after bark, blast upon blast.
As you know, getting Slim out of his bed is always a challenge. I mean, the guy is a hard-head. But even Slim was no match for our barrage of barking. We pumped ‘em out, until at last he sat up and…yipes, was that Slim or some kind of monster? I mean, the face looked like something you might see on a gut wagon.
But then he spoke…roared, actually…he roared, “Hush up! Knock off the dadgum barking!” He blinked his eyes and glanced around. “Good honk, everything’s red!”
