“And you have to prepare yourself for that.”

  “I c-c-can’t d-do it!”

  “Of course you can. Every coin has a silver lining, Junior. If Wallace doesn’t make it, you’ll be a free bird. You won’t have to ask his permission every time you want to sneeze.”

  “If P-p-pa d-dies, I w-won’t ever w-w-want to s-s-sneeze again.”

  “All right, forget sneezing. You can sleep late if you want. You can sing at all hours of the day or night. If you don’t want to fly around looking for dead rabbits on the highways, you won’t have to.”

  “Y-yeah, but I’d s-s-starve w-w-without P-p-pa.”

  “No you wouldn’t. You’d adjust, you’d find a way to get by. I’m sure this kind of thing happens to buzzards all the time.”

  “W-w-well, m-m-maybe.”

  “Think about it, Junior. Hope for the best, but prepare yourself for the worst.”

  “O-okay, th-th-thanks.”

  With his head down and his wings drooped to the ground, Junior waddled off by himself, and while Drover and Little Alfred and I watched and listened, Junior sang this song.

  My Daddy Had a Wreck Today

  My daddy had a wreck today, I think it wrecked his mind.

  He didn’t have a lot to lose, what’s lost, he’ll never find.

  My daddy’s lying in the snow. He thinks he’s somewhere new.

  He’s helpless, hopeless, all alone. I don’t know what to do.

  I’m thinking now of how he was, this morning on our roost.

  He woke me up in the tone of voice to which I’ve gotten used.

  He bellered, yelled, and fumed at me and said I’d never ’mount

  To much of anything at all, I’m lazy and no-count.

  If Pa should die and leave me here, I wonder what I’d do.

  Spread my wings and fly away and start my life anew?

  Or would I sit here in the snow and cry myself to sleep

  And let the morning find us in one big feathered heap?

  My daddy had a wreck today, I think I’ve had one too.

  This rowdy partnership of ours is strange but also true.

  I want my Pa, for good or bad, forever and a day.

  And never mind my freedom, Pa, with you I’m going to stay.

  The three of us listened to Junior’s song, and by the time it was over, we all had some moisture in our eyes that didn’t come from the snowflakes.

  There to our left was Old Man Wallace, lying in the snow and babbling crazy things. And there to our right was Junior, the picture of a defeated buzzard.

  Drover broke the silence. “Oh my gosh, that was the saddest song I ever heard! It just broke my heart.”

  Little Alfred sniffed and swiped at a tear that was running down his cheek.

  Now, you must understand something about Little Alfred. He was still at that magic age when he could talk back and forth with animals. He could understand us and we could understand him. Whereas Slim hadn’t heard a word of that buzzard’s song, Little Alfred had heard it all.

  And you could tell that it had punched him right in the heart bone.

  “Poor old buzzood! Nobody wikes him. Nobody wants to help a poor old buzzood.”

  By this time, my mind was working at full capacity, and in case you haven’t been around a Head of Ranch Security when his mind is working at full capacity, I must tell you that it’s very impressive.

  My eyes moved from Junior to Wallace, then swung around to the south and locked on Slim, who was taking the last of the busted glass out of the windshield. Then I turned to Drover and Little Alfred.

  “Boys, I think I’ve got this thing figgered out.” And I told them my plan for saving Old Man Wallace.

  Whether or not he deserved being saved was a horse with a different collar.

  Chapter Five: I Discover Three Mysterious Camels

  Slim had no idea what was in store for him when we went trooping back to the pickup. Little Alfred took the lead, I came along behind, and Drover rode the caboose, so to speak.

  Slim had just removed the last section of shattered glass from the frame of the windshield and dropped it into a gunnysack.

  “Well, there’s that mess cleaned up. It’s liable to be a little breezy driving to town against that north wind, but I bet we can do ’er. Load up, boys, we’re burnin’ daylight.”

  He threw the gunnysack full of glass onto the bed of the pickup and started to climb inside. It was then that he noticed us there—me and Drover sitting in the snow and wagging our tails, and Little Alfred, our spokesman, holding his hands behind his back and looking up with big brown eyes.

  Slim frowned at us. “What’s this? Y’all want to go to town or sit on the bank and watch the crawdads eat? Let’s go.”

  “Swim,” Little Alfred began, “that buzzood’s huut.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. He knocked a little chip out of my windshield. Load up.”

  “Swim, do you think . . .” The boy rocked up on his toes and studied the sky. “Do you think we could take the buzzood wiff us and help him get well?”

  Slim’s mouth dropped open several inches. “Do I think . . . get well . . . a BUZZARD? Button, I’ve nursed sick calves and colts with distemper and baby rabbits and a couple of worthless dogs in my time, but I’ve never nursed a buzzard back to health.” He shifted his chewing tobacco around to the other cheek and spit. “And I ain’t fixin’ to start now. Get in.”

  He got in and slammed the door. We didn’t move. Little Alfred looked at me, and I looked at him and gave him the sign to move into Phase Two: Heavy Begs and Pleading.

  Two big tears popped out of Alfred’s eyes and began rolling down his cheeks. At that same moment, Drover began to whine and I hopped up on my back legs and held the front ones out in the Beg Position.

  Slim stared at us with a bewildered look in his eyes. “What is this? It wasn’t my fault that a buzzard went through my windshield. He got just what he deserved.”

  Little Alfred squeezed out two more tears. Drover increased the volume of his whine. I held my begging paws higher.

  Slim climbed out of the pickup, jerked off his hat, and slapped it against his leg. “NO! I ain’t running a hospital for ruptured buzzards. My answer is no and no and HECK NO! Why, if any of the neighbors was to see me hauling a wounded buzzard around, I’d never hear the last of it. They’d laugh me plumb out of the county. No.”

  We turned up the volume.

  Slim threw his hat on the ground and started waving his hands in the air. “Now, y’all stop that! I can’t . . . nobody picks up wounded buzzards on the side of the road. It just ain’t done! It ain’t . . . I wouldn’t know what to do with a derned buzzard if I had one!”

  Again, we turned up the volume.

  Slim stood there staring at us for a long time. The hard lines in his face began to melt away. “I ain’t believing this.” He picked up his hat, shaped it, and slapped it back on his head. “If somebody had told me that I’d be . . .”

  All at once, he bent down and aimed a skinny finger at our spokesman. “Okay. But if you tell anybody that I did this, Little Alfred, and I’m talking about your daddy in particular—if you tell one living soul about this, I’ll deny it. And then I’ll tie a plow weight to your leg and throw you into the deepest hole on Wolf Creek!”

  Our spokesman swallowed hard. “Okay, Swim.”

  “Okay.” He snatched an empty gunnysack off the bed of the pickup, stomped out into the pasture, and began the process of gathering up Wallace the Buzzard.

  That wasn’t as easy as you might think. I mean, old Wallace was wounded and about half cockeyed, but he still had some fight left in him. He managed to squawk and flap and put up a pretty respectable struggle. One of his wings hit old Slim in the face, sent his hat flying and knocked his glasses down around his upper lip.

  But Slim was no quitter. He got old Wallace caught by the feet and sacked him up. While all this was going on, Junior was about to have a stroke, hopping around in circles and squawking about his poor pa.

  I slipped over and told him not to worry, his old man would get the best medical care available. To a buzzard, that is.

  “We’ll be down at Slim’s place tonight,” I said. “Check for us there.”

  Slim threw the gunnysack over his shoulder and walked back to the pickup. He found a loose cake string and tied the neck of the sack, so’s Old Man Wallace wouldn’t bust out on the way to town. He laid the sack, now filled with a wounded and crazy buzzard, right behind the cab.

  Then he jammed his hands on his hips and scowled down at the three of us. “Now can we go to town? And can we make the trip without picking up any more strays and rejects? If I don’t get my shopping done, my name’s liable to be worse than mud.”

  “Wet’s go to town!” cried Little Alfred, and all three of us piled into the pickup.

  I had never been involved in such a trip before, where the trip was made in a pickup without a windshield and driving into a snowstorm. We all liked to have froze to death, even though Slim had the heater running full blast. And by the time we made it to Waterhole 83 on the south edge of town, we had a fair-sized snowdrift started on the seat.

  Slim stopped at the Waterhole, went inside and got himself a cup of hot coffee. Little Alfred didn’t make a squeak or ask for anything. I guess he didn’t want to push his luck.

  While Slim was in the Waterhole, I glanced to my right and saw four town dogs sniffing at our tires. My first thought was to growl and tell the thugs to scram and leave our tires alone, and in fact, a growl did come to my throat.

  But then . . . hmm. Hadn’t I seen those guys before? Hadn’t I once caught them on my ranch, whipped them, and run them off? Yes, indeed I had. Their names were Buster and Muggs, and there were two other hoodlums in their gang, whose names I didn’t know.

  They were tough guys, real tough guys. And I had reason to suspect that they didn’t have fond memories of me. Hence, instead of creating a nasty scene, I . . . uh . . . scrunched down in the pickup, so to speak, and looked the other way.

  There was no law against stray dogs, uh, checking out pickup tires at the Waterhole.

  Slim came out, blowing on his coffee. He kicked snow at the dogs and told them to scram, and I was sure that we would see no more of Buster and Muggs that day.

  Little did I know . . . well, you’ll see.

  When Slim climbed back into the pickup, he pulled a candy bar and four pieces of bubble gum out of his pocket and gave them to Little Alfred.

  “There, and don’t you dare tell your ma that I bought you candy and junk.”

  Alfred was a pretty good boy—kind, unselfish, considerate of others, polite, had good manners—and he shared his candy bar with me and Drover.

  Slim watched us swapping bites and curled his lip. “Boy, if your momma only knew . . .”

  We left the Waterhole, turned north, and headed into town on Main Street. Fellers, this was an exciting place! You’ve heard about New York and Paris and Amarillo? Well, those places may be bigger and a little fancier than Twitchell, but I can tell you that on the day before Christmas, Twitchell, Texas, is one of the most exciting places in the whole entire world.

  I mean, they had cars and houses and stores and people and dogs, a big wide Main Street with candy canes and holly wreaths hanging from the light poles, colored lights strung across the street, people carrying packages out of stores. Christmas carols in the air—I mean, the whole nine yards of excitement.

  Oh, and did I mention the camels? Strangest thing I ever saw. Three head of camels on the courthouse lawn! Also some sheep, two donkeys, a little barn, four or five guys standing around with rags on their heads, and . . . a BABY?

  Now, I’ve told a windy tale or two in my life, but this is the whole absolute truth. They all stood there motionless in the cold and the snow, didn’t move a whisker or an eyebrow the whole time I watched them.

  Oh, and they weren’t wearing coats either.

  Don’t ask me what camels were doing on the courthouse lawn, but I saw ’em there.

  Anyways, Twitchell was a very exciting and mysterious place, and to a dog fresh off the ranch it was almost, by George, overwhelming.

  Slim motored down the street, squinting at the stores and saying their names. Every now and then he’d find that the pickup had wandered across the center line and he’d jerk it back over.

  At last, he found the place he’d been looking for. “There we go! Foxie’s Ladies’ Wear. That’s the place for me.”

  He herded the pickup into the nearest parking place against the curb, and we began our adventures in town.

  Lots of adventures, but we didn’t see any more camels.

  Chapter Six: The Poodle Incident

  We climbed out of the pickup. I looked down the street at all the cars parked against the curb.

  “Holy smokes, Drover, we’ve got to mark all these tires before we leave.”

  “Oh my gosh. It tires me out just to think about it.”

  “I know what you mean, but it’s got to be done.”

  “How come?”

  I glared at him. “What do you mean, how come? Do I have to explain everything to you?”

  “Well, not everything, but how come we have to mark tires in town? Aren’t we off duty?”

  Hmmmm. I really hadn’t thought that one out to its logical extremities, but . . . I had this powerful instink, see. It kept telling me that a good ranch dog shouldn’t rest until he had marked every tire in sight.

  That worked okay out at the ranch where the traffic wasn’t too heavy, but here in this huge town with cars lined up by the dozens . . . a guy could work himself to death.

  In other words, for the first time in years Drover had raised an important question: Why should a ranch dog feel a mortal obligation to mark every tire in town?

  “Tell you what, Drover, let’s mark three or four apiece and call it good. That’s close enough for government work.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know what it means, but that’s what Slim says every time he builds fence, and if it’s good enough for Slim, by George, it’s good enough for me. Come on. I’ll take the first one and you take the second.”

  We threw ourselves into the task and had just about notched up our four or five apiece when Slim saw us and called us back.

  “Hank, cut that out! Come back here.” We went over to him, sat down, and wagged our tails. “Quit acting like a couple of country fools. You’re in town and there’s ladies around, so mind your manners.”

  He shifted his eyes to Alfred. “Now, I’m going into this store to Christmas shop. You stay here close and make these dogs behave, or I’ll take all three of you to the dog pound.”

  “Okay, Swim, we’ll be vewy, vewy good.”

  Slim grunted and checked to be sure the buzzard was still tied up in his sack. Then he adjusted his hat, slapped some mud off his pant legs, took a deep breath, and plunged into Foxie’s Ladies’ Wear, saying, “Well, here’s goes,” under his breath.

  About a minute later, he came back out, un­­­loaded his chewing tobacco, and pitched it into the gutter.

  The three of us sat down on the curb and waited and concentrated extra hard on being good. The first minute went by pretty fast, but after that the time sure began to drag.

  I hate sitting around. Waiting. Doing nothing. Burning daylight. Killing time.

  Fellers, I was bored. I got up from the curb and began pacing around. Back and forth, back and forth. But with each circle, my backs and forths got a little further apart until I had strayed, so to speak, from the sidewalk immediately in front of Foxie’s Ladies’ Wear.

  I had reached the north end of my pacing peri­meter and was about to turn back south, when all at once I heard a sound that caused my paws to stop in their tracks.

  I lifted my head, raised my ears to Semi-Alert position, and listened. Barking? Yes, barking, and it appeared to be coming from inside a certain big white fancy car parked at the curb nearby.

  The barking was high-pitched and shrill, and I noted a certain insulting tone about it. I listened more closely and began to desiphon the message. What I had originally thought were mere sounds began to take on the shape of words: “Yee yee yee, you can’t touch me! Har har har, I’m safe in the car! Ho ho ho, you’re out in the snow!”

  It was then that I noticed the little white poodle sitting up on top of the seat in the big white car. I glanced around to see if perhaps he had been directing his smart remarks at someone else. Seeing no one else nearby, I swaggered over to the car.

  The window was open a crack on the driver’s side. As I approached, the poodle went into a frenzy of barking—yapping, actually, since poodles don’t have whatever it takes to make a decent barking sound. All they can do is yap and yip.

  He yapped and yipped, and by the time I hopped up on my back legs and looked in the window he was lunging at me and talking all kinds of trash.

  “You’d just better get your nasty paws off my car!”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but I thought I heard somebody over here making some smart-mouth remarks. I don’t suppose you’d know who that was, would you?”

  I noticed that his hair was all clipped and shaped. He was wearing a rhinestone collar around his neck, and his toenails were painted. That was a new one on me—painted toenails.

  “It’s a free country,” he said, “and I can say anything I want to say, and what I want to say is yee, yee, yee! And if you don’t like it, just come through that window and see what happens.”

  I studied the opening and saw that it was about three inches wide. “You know, if you’d drop that winder another six inches, I’d sure do my best to get in there with you.”

  “You’d be sorry if you did. I’d tear you up so bad, you’d think you’d picked a fight with a chain saw.”