Murder in the Middle Pasture

by John R. Erickson

  I noticed that their eyes were glazed, and suddenly I realized how I would make my escape. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

  Degenerate characters like Rip and Snort couldn’t be beaten by direct force. I mean, fighting was their game. They could fight from daylight until dark and get stronger and meaner by the hour.

  But I had hit upon the hidden flaw in their psychobasical whatchamacallit—their personality, I suppose you could call it, meaning the personality of your basic dull brute. The flaw was that they couldn’t stand preaching. It put them to sleep!

  Give them something to fight against and they would stay up for days, maybe weeks. But give them a good wholesome sermon to listen to, and within minutes they would be reduced to snoring wads of hair.

  It was a brilliant stroke. I could hardly contain my excitement. I launched into a sermon.

  “The trouble with you guys is that you don’t spend enough time doing good and spreading sunshine. Have you ever thought about how wonderful this world would be if every one of us tried to be wonderful all the time?”

  Their eyelids drooped. Rip yawned.

  “Just imagine how much better the world would be, Snort, if you concentrated on doing good. Instead of drinking and carousing and fighting and staying out all night, you could spend your days looking for the good deeds, the little acts of kindness . . .” I went on and on.

  I stopped and studied my victims. By George, it had worked! They weren’t just asleep, they were comatose. Now all I had to do was step over them, slip out of the village, and high-ball it back to the ranch.

  I rose to a crouch and crept forward. They were snoring so loud, their lips were flapping on the exhale. Perfect. Very carefully I picked up my feet and placed them in the open spots amongst the pile of legs. I had almost made it when, dang the luck, I stepped on Snort’s nose.

  He came out of sleep like a wounded panther. I dived to the rear of the cave, expecting to be mauled. Snort snarled, his teeth flashed, and he tore into his brother.

  “Not step on nose again, dummy, or Snort make big hurt!”

  They growled and snapped at each other for half a minute, grumbled for another minute, and went back to sleep. But this time Snort wasn’t sleeping as soundly as before. Every few minutes, he would crack one eye, look at me, look at Rip, and go back to sleep.

  My time was slipping away. I figgered I had maybe one more hour before sunrise. I didn’t relish the thought of walking over that pile of deadly fangs again, but sooner or later I would have to try it.

  I waited for my chance. I listened to them snoring. Felt kind of sleepy myself, had to concentrate hard on

  keeping my eyes

  open

  and staying

  A

  W

  A

  K

  E

  . . . zzzzzzzzzzz

  I went to dadgum sleep. My last night on earth, one hour before my execution, and I couldn’t stay awake!

  Next thing I knew, they were getting me up. Outside, I could see the first light of day. I looked up into that coyote face, realized that I had muffed my one chance to escape, and felt a cold shudder pass through my body.

  “No, wait a minute, let’s talk about bribes again . . .”

  “Sh-h-h-h-h! Hunk not talk! Must hurry and run away!”

  “Huh?”

  The face above me came into focus. It wasn’t Rip. It wasn’t Snort. It wasn’t Scraunch. It was Missy Coyote!

  “Missy, what are you . . . how . . .”

  She placed her paw over my mouth. “Come, follow Missy.”

  I soon learned how she had managed to enter the cave. There was a secret passage at the rear. I hadn’t seen it because it had been covered by the packrat’s nest. Coming in from the back side, Missy had simply dug her way through the cowchips and cactus petals and sticks and pieces of sagebrush.

  We dived into the tunnel and must have crawled twenty or thirty feet on our bellies. At last we came out into the fresh air. We were standing on a bluff above the village.

  I looked into Missy’s face. A gentle north wind tousled her long winter hair. “Why did you do it, Missy?”

  “Not want to see Hunk die. Hunk save Missy once. Now Missy help Hunk.”

  “You’re quite a woman, Missy.” Also very attractive. I couldn’t take my eyes off that gorgeous face. “Do you suppose this might lead to something in the romance department? I mean . . .”

  “Hunk run away! Must hurry, village wake up soon.”

  “Oh, they might sleep a little late this morning. I sure could use a big old sloppy kiss.”

  “Not be foolish! Scraunch bad bad fellow, he kill!”

  “Listen, gal, the way I feel right now, I just might go down there and slap your brother baldheaded. In fact, I think I could whip the whole family.”

  Down below, someone shouted. Then there were other voices.

  “Hunk, go, please go!”

  “Missy, it’ll take ’em a while to get percolating. We’ve got time. Now give me one little old sloppy kiss.”

  She puckered up and I puckered up and our lips met in an outburst of flaming desire, and then she BIT me. And I ain’t talking about a little nip, fellers, I mean she got a handle on my lower lip and played meat grinder with it. Just bit the tar out of it.

  I yelped. Who wouldn’t have yelped? It hurt.

  “Run away, foolish dog!” Then she leaned out and pecked me on my bleeding lip. “But come back another time, oh boy!”

  “Oh boy, you can depend on that! Bye, little darlin’, and thanks for everything!”

  I struck a high lope and headed south down the canyon. In the distance, I could hear Scraunch shouting at his warriors and telling them to hunt me down. Still, I couldn’t resist stopping and looking back one last time.

  There she stood on that wind-swept hill, waving good-bye. All at once I decided what the heck, I’d go back for one last kiss, didn’t figger old Scraunch could get his boys whipped up and on the trail for another ten or fifteen minutes, only he did and the thought of being torn to shreds right there in the snow overpowered my appetite for a kiss.

  I turned on the speed and went flying down the canyon, with Scraunch and his boys hot on my trail.

  As I passed the buzzard cave, I caught a glimpse of old man Wallace. He stuck out his skinny neck, looked at me, looked at the coyotes right behind me, and started jumping up and down.

  “Junior! Git outa that bed, airborne, airborne, our breakfast is runnin’ down the canyon!”

  That’s the kind of friend a buzzard makes. There’s always an ulterior motive.

  The old man hopped off the ledge, flapped his wings, and crashed into the snow, and I didn’t have time to see what happened next, because them coyotes were closing the gap on me.

  Leaping over rocks and bushes and fallen trees, running through deep snow, and doing things no ordinary dog could have done, I flew down the canyon, leaped the water gap between the west pasture and the home pasture with a single bound, scrambled up an embankment, and lit out across the rolling prairie country, taking dead aim for headquarters.

  I could see it up ahead, maybe a mile away. A coil of white smoke was coming out of the chimney, which meant that Slim had throwed a couple of fresh logs and last Thursday’s Ochiltree County Herald into the stove and was probably taking his dirty frying pan out of the ice box.

  If I could just get down close to the house, I could sound the alarm and old Slim would save my bacon. He’d come out the door in his red long johns and start blasting away with his pistol. If he didn’t shoot me by mistake, I’d be home free.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the Coyote Nation. I had a good fifty feet of cushion and I figgered I could coast on in to headquarters without any trouble. Them boys sure looked unhappy about the situation. I guess they was a little shocked by my i
ncredible speed and unbelievable endurance.

  I turned my eyes back to the front and was very surprised to see four dogs lined up between me and the house: Buster, Muggs, and the other two gangsters.

  They were coming out to help me. Receiving help from calf-murderers raised a few ethical questions in my mind but none that I couldn’t dispose of pretty quickly under the circumstances. I mean, dogs is dogs and coyotes is coyotes, and there’s a certain bond that ties us dogs together when a brother is in danger, regardless of our moral, religious, ethnic, socioeconomic . . . well, all of that stuff that makes us different.

  In other words, blood is thicker than coyotes, and when the chips are down, I don’t remember the last part of the old saying.

  “Boy, am I glad to see you guys!” I yelled.

  For some reason, Buster let out a wicked laugh. “You won’t be for long, cowdog. I’m taking over this ranch.”

  HUH?

  Come to think of it, they didn’t look too friendly. No, they sure didn’t. That’s why their teeth were showing and their eyes sparkling with a murderous gleam.

  Hey, those guys weren’t coming out to help me. They were coming out to GET me!

  Chapter Twelve: Another Amazing Conclusion

  I was by George trapped, is what it amounted to, between a pack of murdering wild dogs and a pack of murdering wild coyotes.

  Now, I could have whipped one group or the other. I mean, odds of four- or five-to-one were nothing out of the ordinary for me. In security work, we figger four-to-one is about a fair fight, five-to-one is a challenge, and six-to-one is a pretty good scrap.

  “One riot, one cowdog,” is the way we put it.

  But I hadn’t been training for seven-to-one, and the chances of me whipping and possibly annihilating both groups were pretty slim.

  Very slim.

  Out of the question.

  Which made retreat an attractive option, except there was no place to go. I stopped. Buster and his boys stopped. Scraunch and Rip and Snort stopped. The coyotes glared at the dogs, and the dogs glared back at the coyotes.

  Scraunch broke the silence. “Hunk belong to us. We not need fight everybody, only want Hunk.”

  That gave me an idea—the only one I had left, as a matter of fact. “Did you hear that, Buster? He said you guys better pack up and get off this ranch. And in case you don’t know it, he’s a very important official in the coyote tribe—no less than the son of Chief Many-Rabbit-Gut-Eat-in-Full-Moon.”

  Muggsie started laughing. Within seconds, they were all laughing. “What kind of two-bit foreign name is that! Many-Rabbit-Gut! Har, har, har!”

  I turned to the coyotes. “There’s your answer, Scraunch. Buster says you guys are a joke and you’d better vanish before there’s a big fight.”

  Rip and Snort might not have understood every word of this, but they did savvy the word fight. And all at once their eyes lit up and they started whispering.

  Buster took a step toward me. “Why don’t you shut up. I can talk my own fights without any help from a yellow-bellied cowdog!”

  “Did you hear that, Snort? He told you to shut up, and then he called you a yellow-bellied cowdog!”

  The hair went up on Snort’s back, and he took two steps forward. “Snort not like big talk.”

  Buster’s eyes moved from me to the coyote. “Oh yeah? Well let me tell you something, pal. Me and my boys got some business to take care of, so why don’t you just shove off?”

  Snort and Buster glared at each other. Then Rip stepped out and swaggered up beside his brother.

  Buster grinned. “Oh yeah? Hey Muggs, come here.” Muggs moved up beside Buster and curled his lip at the coyotes. “Give ’em a growl.”

  Muggs puffed himself up and let out a deep growl. Rip and Snort looked at each other and started laughing. I mean, those guys had been in so many fights, the idea of running a bluff was a joke.

  That didn’t sit too well with Buster. “Wise guys, huh? Ho-kay, whatever you think.” He looked back and jerked his head at the other two goons. “Come here, boys. We got a couple of wise guys here.” The two dogs came up and took their place in the line. Buster turned to Rip and Snort and grinned. “Now, like I was saying, why don’t you guys go chase a rabbit and we’ll tend to our business, huh?”

  It was a stand-off. Both sides bristled and glared and snarled and stared, but neither one made a move. Then Scraunch came up. “Not need fight with many dog, only want . . .”

  Buster’s head shot around. “Yeah, I bet you don’t want fight with many dog, Chief-Chicken-Guts-in-the-Moonshine.”

  Muggs broke up on that. “Har, har, har! Chief-Chicken-Guts, har, har, har, in-the-Moonshine, har, har, har!”

  Snort’s eyes bulged. “Not laugh at Scraunch!”

  “Oh yeah?” said Buster. “Listen, pal, we’re taking over this ranch and my boys can laugh at anything they want, see? Go on, Muggsie, laugh for the bumpkins.”

  “Har, har, h . . .”

  That was one har too many for Snort. If you recall, he wasn’t a real bubbly sort and had a lousy sense of humor. He piled into Muggsie, Scraunch lit into Buster, and Rip took on the other two. And fellers, the fight was on!

  Snow was flying, hair was flying, teeth were flashing in the sunlight. It took my coyote pals maybe thirty seconds to clean house on them junior thugs. I mean, you talk about a whipping! Buster and his boys got a very quick and very painful education on pasture fighting.

  Buster was the first to put his education to good use. About thirty-five seconds into the fight, he broke away and went tearing down the county road, with Scraunch right behind him, taking a snap out of his tail every five steps.

  When Muggs and the others saw their fearless leader running for his life, they tried to surrender. But Rip and Snort were just getting tuned up and didn’t care about taking prisoners, so Muggs and the boys broke away and lit a shuck down the county road, with Rip and Snort in hot pursuit.

  “That’s what we do to calf-killers!” I yelled. “And the next time I catch you on this ranch . . .” They had already disappeared. That was the end of that.

  I headed down to the house and met Slim and Drover in the pickup. They were coming out to the pasture to see what all the noise was about. Slim had his gun. I was real glad he didn’t get a chance to use it.

  “Hank, what in the world . . . we thought we’d find you dead up here. What did you do to those brutes?”

  What could I say? One riot, one cowdog.

  “Good dog, good dog!” He got out and rubbed me behind the ears. “Get in and let’s go check the heifers.”

  Just then I heard a voice from heaven: “Dang the luck! There goes our breakfast, Junior!”

  I hopped into the cab and sat down beside Drover. He stared at me with eyes as big as saucers.

  “How’s it going, son?”

  “How’d you get out of that? You’re not even hurt!”

  “Oh, I just read ’em the law, told ’em what was likely to happen if they stuck around here very long.”

  “You just . . . no foolin’?”

  “You saw the results. Need I say any more?”

  He scratched his head. “I guess not.”

  We checked the heifers, didn’t find evidence of another murder, and Slim was kind enough to give me the credit I so richly deserved.

  Then we went back to the house. I got double dog food and for the rest of the day I was treated as a conquering hero and resident dignitary. I accepted it graciously, even though it was long overdue.

  That night was Christmas Eve, and old Slim was feeling so generous and full of holiday cheer that he let me and Drover into the house again. In fact, he let me occupy the place of honor in front of the stove.

  He’d cut a scrubby little cedar tree up in the canyons that afternoon. He set it up in a corner, and after he’d burned himsel
f some supper, he started decorating the tree.

  He cut some pretty pictures out of a magazine and tied them on with string. He wedged some apples and oranges against limbs and hung his spurs out on the ends of a couple of others. Then he took his foil chewing tobacco pouch and made a star out of it, and he put the star right up on tippy top of the tree.

  Then he stood back and said, “What do you think, Hank? I believe we’ve got ourselves a Christmas tree.”

  Looked okay to me.

  Just then, we heard a knock at the door. Slim frowned and said, “Wonder who that could be,” and opened the door.

  “Surprise! We decided to come on home.” Loper stepped inside and started stomping the snow off his boots.

  Instead of going back to his little house down the creek, Slim bunked out on the sofa and I curled up on the rug in front of the stove.

  It was a joyous, old-fashioned, cowboy kind of Christmas, the best Christmas I’d ever known. There was only one small incident that marred what was an otherwise lovely occasion.

  Around nine o’clock on Christmas morning, Sally May found fleas in her bed.

  Even though Slim had occupied that bed for several nights, guess who got blamed for the dadgum fleas. I was banished from the house.

  But I couldn’t complain. A guy can’t expect to sit on the precious moments of this life and hatch them out into something better.

  In the security business, you make your own bed and sleep in it. Every once in a while you have to expect a few fleas.

  Further Reading

  Have you read all of Hank’s adventures?

  1 The Original Adventures of Hank the Cowdog

  2 The Further Adventures of Hank the Cowdog

  3 It’s a Dog’s Life

  4 Murder in the Middle Pasture

  5 Faded Love

  6 Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

  7 The Curse of the Incredible Priceless Corncob

  8 The Case of the One-Eyed Killer Stud Horse