At last, and through some miracle, we reached Viola’s place and were still alive. I was never so glad to hop out of a pickup, and swore I would never say another critical word about Slim’s slow driving.

  We didn’t see any signs of people, so Slim trotted to the house and I followed. I can’t be blamed that he tripped on me and fell into the flower bed. “Bird brain, get out of the way!”

  Hey, in a fire emergency, every man and dog on this outfit has to wake up and pay attention to his business. I couldn’t be blamed, but of course he blamed me anyway. That’s what dogs are for, it seems. Any time there’s a mess, call in the dogs and smear ‘em with blame.

  Viola came out the front door and saw him sprawled across her mother’s flower bed. “Slim? What are you doing?”

  He picked himself up and brushed off his jeans. “Well, I was on my way to find you, but Jughead tripped me. Sorry about your mother’s flowers.”

  “The sheriff’s department is evacuating everyone on the creek.”

  “That’s why I’m here. Y’all need to get out, now.”

  “I know. Mom is packing a few things, but Daddy…”

  “Where is he?”

  She pointed to the south side of the house, where Woodrow was dragging a garden hose. “He says he’s going to stay and fight the fire. Maybe you could talk to him.”

  “I’d sooner talk to a flat rock.”

  “Slim! Try. Please.”

  “Okay, I’ll try, but y’all need to get on the road.”

  “And you?”

  “Once I get Woodrow loaded, I’ll follow you out. Did you see our heifers this morning?”

  “Yes. They were down on the south end of the Cottonwood pasture. Slim, you’re not…”

  “No, I just wondered. Go on, scat.”

  Viola went back into the house. Slim took a deep breath, licked his lips, hitched up his jeans, and marched like a brave soldier to Woodrow, who was spraying the side of the house with the hose. He must have lost his hat in the wind, and his white hair was flying around on his head.

  He gave Slim a hard glance. “Grab a hose and make yourself useful.”

  “Woodrow, you need to leave.”

  “I’ve been fighting grass fires all my life and never been burned up yet. Grab a hose.”

  “Woodrow, this ain’t just a grass fire, it’s a wildfire. It’s fifteen miles wide and has a fifty mile an hour wind behind it. The garden hose won’t do one bit of good. You need to leave with your wife and daughter.”

  Woodrow stiffened. “My granddaddy built this house. I was born in that upstairs bedroom, and I ain’t leaving. If it goes, I go with it.”

  “Woodrow, the sheriff’s department has ordered an evacuation. Is there any part of that you don’t understand? Law enforcement says to get out!”

  Woodrow gave a chuckle. “Well, law enforcement ain’t here, are they?” He went right on spraying the house. Slim shook his head and muttered under his breath. It looked hopeless, but then…

  A car pulled up in front of the house. It had flashing lights on the roof and appeared to be, well, law enforcement. A man in a uniform stepped out and came toward us.

  Hey, that was Chief Deputy Kile, and he looked mighty serious. He and Slim exchanged nods and the deputy pointed to the big cloud of smoke to the west. “You can’t believe how fast that fire’s moving. Never saw anything like it. We need to get these folks out of here, and I’m talking about fast.”

  “Bobby, I tried to explain it to Woodrow. He said he ain’t leaving. My next idea was to knock him in the head with a ballpeen hammer and load him with the tractor.”

  The deputy smiled. “I’ll talk to him.” He tapped Woodrow on the shoulder. The old man was surprised to see him. “Afternoon, Woodrow. The governor of Texas has declared this a disaster area.”

  “Is that right?”

  “He told me to come out here and make sure you complied with the evacuation order.”

  “Yeah, and bird dogs fly.”

  “We’ve been told by certain parties that you’re a stubborn old man and hard to deal with, so I brought handcuffs, just in case.”

  “Well, you can tell the governor…”

  The deputy brought out a set of handcuffs from his belt. “I’d rather not use them, but one way or another, you need to get on the road.”

  Woodrow scorched him with a glare. “Who do you think you are? You’re just a snot-nose kid with a tin star on his shirt!” Deputy Kile said nothing. “I was raised here and I’ve never run from a fire.” Deputy Kile said nothing. The old man licked his lips. “Is it that bad?”

  “Yes sir, worse than you can imagine.”

  “You’re getting too big for your britches.” Woodrow dropped the hose. “I’ll leave the water running. Maybe it’ll help.” With his head bent low, he walked to the front door, just as Viola and her mother came out with clothes and a few boxes.

  Slim and Deputy Kile gave sighs of relief, and Slim patted him on the shoulder. “By grabs, you got his attention. I take back all the bad things I’ve said about you.”

  Just then, we heard the roar of diesel engines and saw three big motor graders heading west on the country road. The deputy nodded. “Good, they made it. They’ll plow fire guards and the Forest Service is sending tankers from Abilene. Maybe we can save a few houses.”

  Slim and I walked him to his car. We could hear a lot of noise on the police radio. The deputy said, “Get ‘em on the road. You too. This is the real deal.”

  “Thanks, Bobby, and take care of yourself.”

  The deputy got into his car and drove west, toward the huge cloud of smoke. Viola came over to us. “We’re ready…I guess. What do you take? Should I ride with you?”

  “No, you go with your folks and drive. In case we get separated, go east to the highway, then north and make your way to town. I’ll catch up with you there.”

  She looked at the cloud in the west. “I hope they can save the house. See you in town.”

  She jumped into the car. Woodrow rode in the front and Rosella sat in the back with the two dogs, Black and Jack, and off they went, east down the county road.

  I started toward the pickup. I mean, the smoke was getting thick and I was ready to get out of there.

  Huh?

  Slim was walking toward the barn. Hey, what was the deal? I barked. He kept walking, almost as though…

  Surely he wasn’t going to try to move the heifers.

  This was crazy! The smoke was so thick now, you couldn’t see more than a couple hundred feet…AND HE WAS WALKING TOWARD THE BARN?

  Well, if he’d lost his brain, too bad. I hadn’t lost mine and I had no intention of…I glanced around. Everyone but us had left and I couldn’t drive the pickup.

  Gulp.

  Anyway, as I was saying, any cowdog worth his salt will stick with his people through thick and thicker, I mean, it’s just bred into us, so, yes, I kicked up the jets and caught up with him as he opened the corral gate.

  He looked down at me. “I should have sent you with Viola. Sorry, pup, I have one last job to do, and we need to be quick about it.”

  A sorrel mare stood in the pen, chewing on some alfalfa hay. She was sway-backed and had ribs showing and looked almost as old as Woodrow. Slim said, “I’ll bet she ain’t been rode in ten years, but maybe she won’t buck me off.”

  He went inside the shed and rattled around, looking for tack. He found an old dusty saddle with leather as stiff as shingles, and a bridle hanging on a nail. The reins were hard and dry and had cobwebs on them. He grabbed ‘em and had the mare saddled in five minutes, then ducked back into the shed, found one spur, and buckled it on his boot.

  He led the mare out the gate, tightened the cinch one more notch, and swung up into the saddle. “So far, so good. Let’s ride!”

  Gulp.

  Chapter Eight: Racing the Fire

  Okay, Slim was horseback on an old skinny mare and poked her with a spur. She pinned back her ears, wrung her tail, and crow-hopped. He slapped her with the bridle reins and I guess she figured out that she wasn’t hauling Woodrow or one of the grandkids. She straightened up and trotted south.

  Those ten heifers he and Viola had bought and calved out were staying in a pasture south of the corral. It was good bottomland on the east side of a little creek, and it had grown a bunch of tall grass last summer, thick and knee-high on a man.

  It made great pasture for a bunch of first-calf heifers. It also had tons of dry standing fuel for a prairie fire, and that’s the kind of thing nobody ever thought about until today. Always before, a rancher took pride in a pasture of tall grass. Today, that tall dry grass didn’t look so great.

  Through the smoke, we saw the heifers about half a mile away. Slim tried to squeeze some speed out of the old mare but didn’t have much luck. A slow trot was the best he could get. All at once, I lost sight of the heifers and the air got thick with smoke. Slim noticed too, and looked over his shoulder.

  I’ll never forget that sight. Off to the west, the smoke had become a wall, and it was flashing with red and yellow light. I mean, we couldn’t see flames, but they were there inside the smoke—big and coming fast!

  “Good honk, it’s already here! Hank, I don’t know if we can outrun that thing or not.”

  Yeah, well, why didn’t we stop talking about it and find out? Because it had come down to that.

  You might say that the fire built a fire under that old mare. When she saw what was coming, she must have decided that she was younger than she thought. Slim used his one spur and the old mare took care of the rest, I mean, she was hauling the mail out of there.

  I had to hit Turbo Five to stay up with her and, fellers, we were covering some country. I figured we were doing okay, I mean we’d finally gotten the old nag out of a trot, but Slim glanced back over his shoulder and yelled, “We can’t outrun that thing!”

  That sent a shock out to the end of my tail. Good grief! IF WE COULDN’T OUTRUN IT, WHAT DID THAT LEAVE?

  The smoke was so thick now, I could hardly breath. I could feel the heat and hear the crackling roar behind me. Slim was right, we were running full-speed and the fire was catching up with us, and in that sea of tall grass, there was no place to hide.

  We always assume that we’ll get twelve chapters out of a story, but maybe it doesn’t work that way all the time. What shall we do here? If we quit the story in the middle of Chapter Eight, we’ll never know how it turned out, but if we keep going, well, something bad might happen, really bad.

  Do we dare take the chance? Should we quit or go on?

  I knew you’d say that.

  Okay, we’ll give it a shot, but it’s going to be scary, so you need to get prepared. Go to the bathroom, drink some milk, and find a big solid chair you can hang onto.

  Ready?

  Okay, it looked bad. No, it looked worse than bad. Hopeless. If I’d been out there by myself, let’s be honest here, I think the fire would have gotten me. I mean, I had worked up several Anti-Fire Barking Procedures, and they’d worked pretty well on fires in the past, but this inferno was in a class by itself.

  And I was facing the wrong direction. See, you can’t bark-out a fire when you’re running from it, just doesn’t work. Imagine trying to douse a fire with a water hose pointed the wrong direction. Same deal. My Bark Launcher was point east and the fire was coming from the west, so the Security Division was out of the fight.

  Lucky for me, I was out there with a guy…you know, Slim doesn’t always come across as the brightest candle on the Christmas tree. He wasn’t at the top of his class in school, and I’ve heard him say that he enjoyed the eighth grade so much, he stayed there for three years. That might have been a joke, but the truth is, sometimes he does things that seem…let’s be kind and say odd.

  But on that one day, in that moment of greatest peril, he made a genius decision. We were running flat-out and losing ground. Up ahead, he spotted a little ravine that was about ten feet deep, and steered the mare toward it. She stopped on the edge and wouldn’t go down, so he bailed out of the saddle, took the reins, and led her down.

  She followed, and so did I, and nobody had to pull my reins. I took a flying leap and crash-landed into a clump of skunk brush. No problem there. I had never been so glad to hug a skunk brush.

  Down in the ravine, the smoke wasn’t bad and we had some air to breathe, but we could hear the roar and crackle of the fire, and it was LOUD. Scary. Slim pulled his shirt up over his head and lay flat on the ground. I did the same, only I didn’t have a shirt to pull over my head.

  The roar got louder…

  …and LOUDER…

  …and LOUDER!!!

  The air grew as hot as an oven and the roar was awful. But then it moved on: crackle, hiss, pop, then nothing but the moan of the wind.

  The mare swished her tail and nickered. Lucky for us, she hadn’t blown the cork and stomped us into the ground. Slim raised up…wait, where was Slim? I found myself looking at…at a man without a head!

  Well, you know me. When a headless man shows up in my foxhole, I bark! Yes sir, I fired off a couple of big ones and…okay, relax, false alarm. Ha ha. Maybe you forgot that he’d pulled his shirt over his head. Ha ha. Not me.

  Okay, I’d forgotten and there for a second, he looked exactly like some kind of headless creature, but he pulled his shirt down and he was Slim again, good old Slim, and he gave me a grin.

  “It’s me, Hankie, and I think we made it through the fire.”

  I glanced around. He was right! I flew into his arms and licked his face from ear to shining sea. Oh happy day! He wasn’t a headless monster and we hadn’t been turned into smoked brisket!

  You know what? All my life, since I was a little guy, I had always wanted not to be smoked brisket, and here and now, my fondish wist had come true.

  Slim pushed himself up to his feet and led the mare down the ravine, until he found a place where they could climb out. I followed, and once out on flat ground, we saw a huge cloud of brown smoke to the east, a solid wall that towered in the air. All around us, as far as we could see in every direction, we saw a smoking desert of black cinders.

  That ocean of grass was gone, every stalk of it. Clumps of grass and yucca were still burning. Cactus pads had been baked yellow. Dried cow chips smoldered and rolled in the wind. Down along the creek, big cottonwood trees blazed away and cedar trees exploded in puffs of black smoke. And the whole world reeked of smoke.

  Slim looked at it for a long time and shook his head. “Man oh man, it got everything!” He looked north toward Viola’s house, but couldn’t see it through all the smoke. He stepped up into the saddle and pulled down his cap against the wind. “Well, we might as well find out if we have any heifers left.”

  He rode south, toward the spot where we’d last seen them. I noticed right away that the ground was still hot—not burn-your-feet hot but definitely warm. Yucca plants, sage brush, cedars, and mesquite trees were still burning, and we had to steer around them.

  We reached the south fence and found no heifers. Most of the cedar posts had caught fire and the barbed wire had melted in several places. Slim stood up in the stirrups and looked around.

  “They would have run east, away from the fire. Maybe they busted down the fence and kept going. I hope so.”

  We rode east a while, then Slim stopped the mare. He was staring at something up ahead. He pointed his finger, the way he does when he’s counting cattle. His head sank and he mumbled, “It got ‘em, every last one.”

  I looked to the east and saw the smoking carcasses of ten heifers and ten baby calves. They had run as far as they could go and were bunched up against the fence when the fire swept over them.

  I wanted to do or say something to make him feel better, I mean, the look on his face…

  He turned the mare and we went north in a slow walk through the smoke and cinders. Slim was silent, but the wind was still screaming, filling the air with ash and the sickening smell of smoke. His face was smudged with black. The mare’s hooves and ankles were black, and so were mine. We were living in a world of soot.

  Up ahead, as the smoke thinned out, we saw the roof line of Viola’s house, then the whole thing. It had survived, but the barn, corrals, and saddle shed were gone. Woodrow’s tractor and army Jeep were blackened hulls, their tires still flaming.

  Through the smoke, we saw the flashing lights of a fire truck, and men spraying water on what was left of the wooden fence around the yard. Slim’s pickup had been parked in the circle drive and appeared to be okay.

  We moved on toward the house. Slim stepped out of the saddle, loosened the cinch, and led the mare to the yard, the only patch of unburned grass on the place, where Woodrow had been spraying water. He dropped the reins and let her graze.

  We heard a car approaching. It screeched to a stop and out stepped Chief Deputy Kile. He looked mad.

  Chapter Nine: We Search For Drover

  Deputy Kile was coming our way in a fast walk, and he had a storm on his face. “What in the Sam Hill are you doing out here? I ought to throw you in jail for being so stupid!”

  “Bobby, I had ten heifers and calves in that pasture, and thought I could save ‘em.”

  “Well, that’s the dumbest stunt you’ve pulled in a long time, and that’s really saying something! I told you to get out, I told you this was a bad fire.” He jabbed a finger in Slim’s chest. “This thing has burned a hundred thousand acres and we’re not even close to getting a handle on it. You see that tractor? That could have been YOU, and I’d have been the one to clean up your mess. Dumb! Unbelievable!”