He turned away, muttered, shook his head, and walked around in a circle. “Well, what happened?” Slim told about racing the fire and diving into the ravine. The deputy’s expression didn’t change. “You got lucky. God looks after fools, drunks, and cowboys, else you’d be charcoal. What about the heifers?”

  Slim shook his head. “Gone. I bought ‘em with borrowed money. They sure were a nice set of heifers.”

  The deputy’s face softened. “Well, that’s tough. I’m sorry. I’m afraid the death loss from this fire is going to be bad.”

  “How ‘bout Loper and Sally May’s house?”

  “The Forest Service planes dropped chemical to slow down the fire. It split and went around headquarters. Last I saw, it was still there, even the corrals.”

  “That’s good. Any idea about my place?”

  The deputy removed his hat and wiped the soot and sweat off his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. “I don’t know. Maybe we can drive over there, if you want to check.” He looked down at me and squeezed up a tired smile, and even gave me some rubs on the head. “Hank, I’m glad you made it. Hard day, huh?” He looked at Slim. “Where’s the other dog?”

  Slim glanced around. “I don’t know. I guess he stayed at the house.”

  The deputy’s brows rose. “Well, let’s see if we can get down the road and check.”

  We loaded into Deputy Kile’s police car and started driving west. Trees, fence posts, and utility poles were still burning, and we had to steer around several big limbs that had fallen across the road. The pastures were black smoking deserts. We turned right at Slim’s mailbox (it was still standing) and followed the dirt road to the north.

  We pulled up in front of Slim’s place…and it was gone, nothing but a pile of smoking rubble. I recognized the wood stove and what was left of the refrigerator. The stack of firewood on the porch was still blazing.

  We got out of the car. Slim shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “Well, I won’t have to wear my suit again.”

  He walked around the edge of the debris. Now and then, he stopped and kicked at something, then moved on. He leaned down and picked up the remains of a boot. He looked it over and tossed it away and stepped through the ashes to the refrigerator. He jerked open the door, reached inside, and brought out something black.

  “My boiled turkey necks got ruined. There went supper.” He left the refrigerator door hanging open and came toward us, walking with his head down. “Old Job had it right. Naked we come into this world and naked we’ll leave it. A fire sure don’t have much pity.”

  “I’m sorry, Slim.”

  He broke off a piece of the turkey neck and held it up to me. “You want to try some of this, pooch?”

  Well, sure. I hadn’t given much thought to food, but a guy should never turn down a bite of turkey neck. He pitched it in my direction and I snagged it.

  Gag! It was cinderized! No thanks. I sput it out.

  Slim glanced around, cupped a hand to his mouth, and called, “Drover? Come on! Here, Drover!”

  We waited and watched. A minute passed. The men glanced around in a circle. Slim called again and we strained our ears, hoping…he pressed his lips together and shook his head. “He must have been on the porch when it hit. He always was a little scaredy cat.”

  Oh no! I couldn’t believe…

  We were lost in terrible thoughts when I heard a faint sound to my left. I didn’t bother to look, I mean, what was there to see? Then I heard this…this voice. It said, “Oh hi. Where’d the house go?”

  I whirled around and saw…you won’t believe this, I guarantee you won’t believe it, and you’ll never guess…IT WAS DROVER! He wasn’t barbecued or singed, and didn’t even have a spot of soot on his coat!

  He’d come through the fire without a scratch! Now, wasn’t that Typical Drover? How in the world did he do it?

  Slim’s dirty face broke into a smile. He scooped up the little mutt and gave him a hug. “Holy cow, you made it!” He set him back on the ground and turned to Deputy Kile. “Well, I lost my heifers, my house, my clothes, everything I owned, but we’ve still got the dogs.”

  Deputy Kile chuckled. “Slim, I hate to leave you, but I’ve got to get back to work. They’ve got big problems east of here. You’re welcome to stay with us. We’ve got plenty of room, and you can stay as long as you want.”

  Slim glanced around and sighed. “I don’t know what comes next, Bobby, but I appreciate the offer. I’d better start checking cattle. If we’ve got any left alive, they won’t have anything to eat.”

  We walked back to the car. “How much hay do you have?”

  “If the hay stack didn’t burn, we’ll have some, but not enough for this.”

  “We’ll get you some hay.”

  We drove back to Viola’s place. The fire crew had put out all the fires around the house and had moved on east. Deputy Kile heard on the police radio that the fire had now grown to more than two hundred thousand acres, and the towns of Lipscomb and Higgins were being evacuated. Canadian was on high alert.

  He shook his head. “This thing’s liable to burn all night, maybe for days, but you’re in a safe spot. There’s nothing here left to burn.” He offered his hand. “I’ll be checking on you. If you need anything, call the sheriff’s office. Keep your spirits up. Help is on the way.”

  He sped off to the east with his lights flashing. Slim’s gaze drifted around and he took a deep breath. “Well, dogs, we’ve got work to do and not much daylight.” On the way to headquarters, we passed thirty cows standing in the ashes. Slim slowed down and gave them a closer look. “By grabs, they made it through the fire and I can’t see that they’re even burned! Maybe our luck won’t be all bad.”

  As we approached headquarters, we saw what Deputy Kile had described: the fire had split and burned on both sides of the compound, leaving everything intact: corrals, house, machine shed, stock trailers, even the hay stack.

  We backed up to the stack and Slim loaded the pickup with bales. We fed the cows we had seen from the road, loaded up with more hay, and drove north to other pastures where we found the same story: blackened pastures but the cattle alive.

  It was getting dark when we made it back to headquarters. Loper and Sally May hadn’t returned (all the roads were still closed) and the house was empty. I figured Slim would spend the night in the house, but that wasn’t his way of doing things.

  We spent the night in the pickup, parked in front of the machine shed.

  I was shocked and disappointed that he kicked us out of the cab and made us sleep in the back. “Y’all smell worse than a couple of roasted goats.” Fine. He didn’t smell so great either. But this was March and it got cold after dark, and guess who got called up for duty. Us. The dogs. When we jumped inside the cab, he said, “Y’all stink but you’re warm.”

  He wrapped up in a couple of saddle blankets, which kind of changed the perfume in the cab (horse sweat), and we huddled up. Slim and Drover fell right off to sleep. Not me. I was worn out but couldn’t sleep. Can you guess why? I had to find out how Drover had survived the fire.

  I woke him up. He blinked his eyes and yawned. “Oh, hi. Where did you come from?”

  “If we go back far enough, I came from my mother.”

  “I’ll be derned, me too. Maybe our moms were friends.”

  “They weren’t friends.”

  “Yeah, after nursing nine pups, Ma wasn’t very friendly.”

  “Our mothers weren’t friends because they never met.”

  “I was the last pup at home. Boy, was she crabby! She locked me out of the yard and made me go look for a job.”

  “Drover, stop blabbering about your mother and tell me how you survived the fire.”

  “What fire?”

  “The fire that burned the ranch and destroyed Slim’s house.”

  “Oh, that one. Did you see it?”

  “Everyone in four counties saw it. Let me refresh your memory. When Slim and I left yesterday morning, you were sitting on the porch.”

  “Oh yeah. Boy, what a great porch. I wonder what happened to it.”

  “It burned down, along with the house and half the Panhandle. How did you manage to survive?”

  His eyes rolled around. “Well, let me think. I smelled smoke.”

  “That checks out. Go on.”

  “And I started hearing sounds, a crackle then a roar.”

  “Okay, that fits. It was the fire approaching. Go on.”

  “Well, you know me and loud noise. I got scared.”

  “Can we hurry this along? You got scared, then what?”

  “Well, I ran for the machine shed.”

  The air hissed out of my lungs. “The machine shed was three miles away at ranch headquarters.”

  “Yeah, I kept looking for it and couldn’t find it. And the air was hot.”

  “Okay, let’s concentrate on that terrifying moment. The air was hot and filled with smoke, and you could hear the roar of the fire. Did you dive into a stock tank?”

  “Oh no, I hate water.”

  “Drover, the world was in flames but you didn’t even get singed. How did that happen?”

  His gaze drifted around. “You know what? That moon looks just like a cantaloupe.”

  I stuck my nose in his face. “Stop jabbering about cantaloupes! How did you survive the fire?”

  “Well, I can’t remember. Wait. Maybe I fainted.”

  “You fainted? Okay, we’re getting close to something and this could be crucial. I need facts and details. Where did you faint?”

  “Well, let me think here.” He twisted his face into a knot. “Here we go. It must have been on the ground somewhere. I fainted on the ground. When I woke up, I couldn’t find the porch, so I sat down and cried.”

  Why do I bother talking to the little lunatic? I wadded up the deposition and threw it in the trash.

  Drover went right back to sleep, but I lay there for…snorky puffball pickle bloom zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

  Chapter Ten: Help Arrives

  I heard a tapping sound and my head shot up. I had been awake for hours, catching up on repeats. On reports. The sun was so bright, it almost put out my eyes, and somebody’s foot was in my face, a dog’s foot. Who…oh, Drover.

  What was going on around here? Where was I? I blinked my eyes and glanced around.

  Inside a pickup? Ah yes, the piddles of the portion began falling into puddles…into place, shall we say. The pieces of the puzzle began so forthing. We’d spent a miserable, freezing night in the pickup, and a strange man was tapping on the window. Sometimes a dog can’t think of anything to say first thing in the morning, so I barked.

  Okay, it was Loper. Good.

  Slim roused himself out of the saddle blankets, opened the pickup door, and staggered outside. The smell of smoke hung in the air. It was cold and he hugged his arms. “I must have overslept. You got any coffee?”

  Loper handed him a thermos. “Everybody in the county has been worrying about you. How are you doing?”

  “Give me a minute.” He took a swig of coffee and glanced around. “I feel like a robin in a snow storm. I’m cold.” Loper pitched him a warm coat. “Where’d you get that?”

  “The ladies at the church sent clothes and food. I’m sorry about the house.”

  “Yeah, that was a shock.”

  “How come you slept in the pickup?”

  “Well, I didn’t have permission to stay in your house.”

  Loper rolled his eyes. “Knothead! When your house burns down…never mind, we don’t have time to argue.”

  Loper had been listening to the news on the radio and gave Slim an update. The wildfire had burned more than three hundred thousand acres in four counties, but the wind had shifted in the night, sparing the little towns to the east of us. Even so, the damage to ranch land and livestock had been terrible.

  Loper ran his eyes over the blackened landscape. “Well, do we have any cattle left?”

  Slim nodded. “I fed three pastures before dark and got the full count. They weren’t even burned.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Beats me. They must have gotten in low spots and the fire blew right over ‘em. I didn’t find the horses.”

  Loper thought about that. “Well, maybe that’s a good sign. If the fire had killed ‘em, you would have seen something.”

  “That’s what I figured. My heifers weren’t so lucky.”

  Loper stared at him. “All ten? Calves too? That makes me sick.”

  “Me too. Let’s talk about something else. What’s the plan for the day?”

  Loper took a deep breath and chewed his lip. “Well, we’ve got three hundred cows, three hundred calves, and a hundred and twenty yearlings, and they don’t have one bite to eat. We have enough hay for maybe a week, and two week’s worth of sacked feed. I guess we’ll feed till it’s gone, then…I don’t know. Move the cattle? Sell out? We might be finished this time.”

  Slim nodded. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll stick around as long as I can.”

  “I appreciate that.” Loper swiped at a tear and looked away. “We made it through the stinking drought, and now this!” We heard a roaring sound in the distance. Loper walked to the corner of the machine shed and looked east. “Do you know anything about two semi-loads of hay?”

  Slim shook his head. They got into Loper’s pickup and we dogs hopped into the back, and drove to the county road, where two big trucks were parked with their motors running.

  The driver of the first truck, a nice red Pete, rolled down his window. “Where do you want this hay?”

  “What hay? Who are you?”

  “We’re from Garden City, Kansas, heard about the wildfires and figured you could use some hay. We’ll be back tomorrow with more.”

  Loper jumped on the running board and shook his hand. “Brother, you don’t know how glad I am to see you! Our world is upside-down.”

  “Man, this place looks like the moon! I’m sure sorry about your loss.”

  We led the trucks to the stack lot. Instead of unloading the bales one at a time and putting them into a neat stack, Loper used the tractor to push the bales off the trailer into a big pile. That got the truckers back on the road, and Slim and Loper went to work loading both pickups with hay.

  They were in the midst of doing that when three pickups pulled in, neighbors whose ranches hadn’t burned. They showed up in work clothes and said, “Tell us what to do.” Loper seemed a little confused at first, then said, “Load up with hay and drive until you find hungry cattle. Feed ‘em, come back, load up, and do it again.”

  That’s how the morning went, load after load of hay going out to cattle that were living in a place that looked like Death Valley, only black. What the cattle ate that day was what we threw out of the back of a pickup.

  In case you wondered, I took the Lookout Position on top of every load of hay. Drover rode in the cab with Slim.

  Around noon, a caravan of cars arrived from town: Sally May, Miss Viola, and some volunteers from the church. They had brought food, clothes, paper plates, blankets, jugs of drinking water, and—get this—a big sack of DOG FOOD, and it wasn’t the cheap stuff we usually get around here. This was a fancy brand, Arfo, that had a rich gravy flavor.

  Wow. Drover and I ate so much, we had to do Reruns on some of it. Sally May wasn’t proud—that’s an understatement; she was grossed out—but the men laughed. Anyway, everybody on the crew got a good hot meal, loaded up with bales, and went back to feeding the ranch.

  I happened to be near Slim when he and Viola spoke their first words since the fire. I was hoping that, well, maybe she and I could have some time alone, don’t you know, but that flopped. She went straight to Slim and seemed a little, uh, raw. Angry.

  “We were worried sick about you! If the sheriff hadn’t called, we’d have thought you were dead! Why on earth didn’t you evacuate?”

  “I wanted to save our heifers.”

  She stared at him. “Heifers! What would I have done with heifers if you’d gotten yourself killed? You are so,” she stamped her foot, “so thoughtless!”

  Slim studied the ground. “Well, are you glad to see me or not?”

  “Ask me later.”

  “We lost all ten heifers, calves too. If I’d gotten there fifteen minutes sooner, I might have been able to cut the fence and save ‘em, but I was too late.”

  She raked him with her eyes. “We’re lucky we’re not at the funeral home right now, picking out your coffin!” Her eyes softened and she took a deep breath. “I’m sorry about the heifers.”

  “Viola, we lost eight thousand dollars and I can’t pay it back. I don’t even have an extra pair of socks.”

  “I’ll get a job in town. We’ll pay it off, five dollars a month for seventy years.” She looked into his eyes. “Don’t you get it? We still have each other, and that’s everything. The rest is just an inconvenience.”

  Slim gave her a hug. “I wish I was as brave as you. I’d better get back to work.”

  He turned to leave and she said, “Where will you live now?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll stay in touch. I’ll be okay.”

  “For the record, I’m glad to see you.”

  He laughed. “It took you a while to say it.”

  And so the work began again, all afternoon: load hay, drive to a pasture, find cattle, count cattle, scatter bales of hay, back to the hay lot, and load up again. When the wind picked up in the afternoon, clouds of ash blew across the desert landscape and a few big trees along the creek burst into flames. Nobody paid attention to them because there wasn’t anything left to burn. The water in the creek had turned black with ash.

  Around five o’clock, we located the horses. The fence around the horse pasture had burned and fallen down, and they had drifted two miles to the northeast. They were splotched with soot but in good shape, unburned. One old mare didn’t make it. She must have been too frail to outrun the fire.