The Case of the Night-Stalking Bone Monster. John R. Erickson

Scrap Rights.

      Kitty was in big trouble.

      I squared my enormous shoulders and rumbled off toward the yard gate. I could see him standing there—the boy, not the cat—I could see him standing there. He held a plate in his left hand. He was grinning.

      He would be shocked, of course, that I had intercepted his secret call to Mister Kitty Moocher. No doubt he had called the cat in a soft voice, hoping that we dogs would miss it. Ha! Little did he know the range and scope of our listening devicers. The same instruments that spy on turkeys can pick up the tiniest of whispers about scraps.

      And so it was that I stormed over to the yard gate and broke up this shabby little conspiracy before it ever got started.

      Our eyes met. Through tail wags and other modes of expression, I said to him: “Alfred, I’m shocked that you would try to hold a secret Scrap Time without consulting me. And furthermore . . .”

      He cut off my furthermore with a laugh. “Hi, Hankie. I knew that if I called for the kitty, you’d come. I fooled ya, didn’t I, Hankie?”

      HUH?

      I, uh, hardly knew how to respond. My mind was racing. My data banks whirred as I tried to make sense of his . . .

      I mean, who’d ever think that an innocent child might put out false information and phony calls? If you can’t trust the kids, who or whom can you trust? And what’s the world coming to?

      I, uh, went to Slow Wags and squeezed up a grin which said, “Hey, pal, we were on to your tricks from the very beginning. We suspected that you were operating in Backwards Code, and we just played along with it to, uh . . . what’s on the plate?”

      I lifted my nose and gave the air a sniffing. My goodness, when the readout came in from Data Control, we found ourselves, well, shaking with excitement, you might say, because our sensory devices had picked up fragrant waves.

      Holy smokes, the kid was holding a plate of STEAK BONES!

      He widened his eyes and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Hankie, guess what I’ve got on the pwate. Steak bones. Juicy, yummy steak bones.”

      Yes, we, uh, our intelligence sources had already . . . could we hurry this up a bit?

      “You want a bone?”

      Well, I . . . yes, a bone would be nice. Or two or three. Or, to make things simple, maybe all of them.

      He lifted a bone off the plate and waved it in front of my nose. Holy tamales, that was a fresh T-bone, saved from supper the night before! And have we discussed T-bones? I love ’em, absolutely love ’em, and oftentimes I dream about ’em at night, is how much I love ’em.

      He continued to wave the bone around in front of my nose. The fragrant waves of steakness filled my nostrils. My mouth began to water. I licked my chops and hopped up on my back legs, but the little scamp pulled the bone out of my reach. And laughed.

      Why was he doing this? I mean, he had a bone and I wanted a bone, so why couldn’t we cut a deal and be done with it? Before I could answer that question, I suddenly realized that we had been joined by a third party.

      Pete.

      Pete had raised his worthless carcass out of his bed in Sally May’s iris patch and had come slinking into our mists—grinning, purring, and holding his tail straight up in the air.

      The mere sight of him caused my lips to rise into a snarl, for you see, I don’t like cats.

      “Pete, for your own safety, I must advise you not to come any closer.”

      “Hmmmm. Well, hello, Hankie.”

      “Hello yourself, Kitty, and also good-bye. You’re walking into a potentially deadly situation here and you’d best leave.”

      “Oh really?” He slithered through the yard gate, rubbed on the gate post, and then began rubbing on my front legs. “I could have sworn that Little Alfred was calling me to scraps, Hankie.”

      “Wrong, Kitty. He was using Backwards Code, which means that he used your name as a code word to call me.”

      “Hmmmmm, how interesting. I’ve never heard of Backwards Code before.”

      “Of course not. You’re only a cat and cats know nothing about Security Work and the many codes we use.”

      “It sounds very complicated, Hankie.”

      “It’s complicated beyond your wildest imagination, Kitty, but the bottom line is pretty simple.”

      “Oh really?” He grinned up at me and continued rubbing on my legs, which drives me nuts. “What is the bottom line, Hankie? I can’t wait to hear.”

      “The bottom line is that these are my scraps. You got that? MY SCRAPS. Good-bye.”

      “But Hankie, if Alfred was using Backwards Code, then surely that means that the scraps are mine.” He fluttered his eyelids. “Backwards Code makes everything backwards, right?”

      I cut my eyes from side to side. This was a new sneaky trick and just for a moment it caught me unprepared. At last Data Control provided me with an answer.

      “Pete, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. And stop rubbing on my legs.”

      “No, it’s not stupid, Hankie. Backwards Code makes everything backwards, so if Alfred said, ‘Pete, come for scraps,’ what he really meant was, ‘Hankie, come for NO scraps.’”

      Obviously this was no ordinary dumb cat. He was a clever ordinary dumb cat, and I had to be careful. He was trying to lure me into a trap.

      Of course, there was no chance that he would succeed. I had vast experience in beating cats at their shabby little games. It was just a matter of framing up a tightly reasoned, highly logical answer to his ridiculous argument.

      But before I could get that done, Little Alfred pushed the bone—MY fresh juicy T-bone—in front of the cat’s nose. Pete’s eyes widened, and the rest was just what you would expect from a greedy cat.

      He dug his claws and sank his teeth into my bone, cut loose with a warning yowl, pinned back his ears, and began glaring ice picks at me.

      Well, you know me. Do unto others but don’t take trash off the cats. My patients were wearing thin.

      My patients were wearing thin clothes.

      My patients were growing thin.

      Whatever. I was getting angry.

      “Excuse me, Kitty, but you seem to have lost your mind, and you’re fixing to lose parts of your body if you don’t unhand my bone. Drop it, Pete. Reach for the sky.”

      His yowling increased in volume, and then he HISSED at me. He shouldn’t have done that. Nothing inflames a dog quite as much as hissing. It’s like throwing gasoline on a fire ant.

      My ears shot up. My lips rose in a deadly snarl. A growl began to rumble in my throat. And then . . .