Drover's Secret Life. John R. Erickson

      Her mouth dropped open, and for a whole minute she couldn’t speak. “A handsome prince? That’s a job? Do you need training?”

      “I don’t know. Maybe there’s a Handsome Prince School somewhere.”

      She turned away and shook her head. “Oi yoi yoi! But you’ll move out of the yard, right?”

      “Well, you know, I was thinking . . .”

      “You’ll move out of the yard. If they’re not hiring princes, try pointing birds, anything. And son, always remember . . .”

      “Okay.”

      “I haven’t said it yet.”

      “Oh. Sorry.”

      “Always remember, my son, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight that matters.”

      “Yeah, I’ve heard it a thousand times. It’s the size of the bog in the fog.”

      She stared at me for a long moment. “For you, that’s close enough.”

      “Thanks, Mom. You always know what to say.”

      “Really? Ha ha ha!” For some reason she walked away, laughing like crazy. Me? I left home and went out into the world to find myself.

      And that’s the story of my sad and lonely childhood. Like I said, it wasn’t all that sad and lonely, but I did spend some time worrying about my tail.

      Chapter Three: Alone in a Cold World

      You know, it’s kind of funny. Living here on the ranch, I’ve noticed that it turns cold in the wintertime, and it happens every year. You can almost predict it. I think it has something to do with Halloween.

      Before Halloween, the days are warm and sunny. But then the birds leave and I’ve never understood why they do that. All summer they seem happy, chirping and singing and hopping around on their skinny legs and flying through the air.

      They seem to enjoy flying through the air, don’t they? I would too, if I could fly, but I can’t. I tried it once. My friend Pete (he’s a cat) told me that if I jumped out of the back of the pickup and wiggled my ears, I could soar like a weevil.

      I gave it a try, but mostly I soared straight down and crashed my nose into the ground and it hurt pretty bad. Pete said I didn’t do it right, that’s why I crashed, and he told me to wiggle the left ear more than the right one.

      He boosted up my confidence so much, I felt like Super Dog and tried it again, took a another dive off the back of Slim’s pickup. That one hurt too, but Pete was right there at my side when I picked myself up. He’d watched the whole thing, so he told me what I did wrong.

      You’ll never guess what it was. It was such a tiny little mistake that I never would have noticed, if Pete hadn’t told me. I forgot to press my lips together. Can you believe that? I felt so silly.

      Since this is my secret story, I can admit something. That wasn’t the first time in my life that I’d felt dumb. It wasn’t the second time either. It’s happened a lot. It’s never good to go around feeling foolish about yourself. It affects your whole attitude and that’s the great thing about having a friend like Pete.

      Maybe I shouldn’t call him my friend. He’s a cat, you know, and I could get in big trouble for saying that I’m friends with a cat. Hank would throw a fit, but it’s the truth. Pete is my friend and when I crashed that second time . . . third time . . .

      I crashed a whole bunch of times that day. Twenty or twenty-five times. I just couldn’t get the hang of flying. Each time, I made some little mistake and I felt sure that Pete would get tired of watching one failure after another and get discouraged and quit helping me, but he didn’t.

      I got pretty discouraged myself, and even started crying. “Pete, I just can’t do it anymore, I can’t go on with this. I feel like such a failure!”

      I’ll never forget his words, they were so touching. He said, “Drover, the only difference between a failure and a hero is . . . one leg’s the same.”

      Gee, I’d never thought of that, and his words went through me like a wooden nickel and gave me hope and courage. With his help, I climbed back into the pickup bed and made another flight.

      By the time darkness fell that evening, we had erected a Monument to Dogs in Flight. Pete called it a “Backward Monument” because it didn’t stand up like a statue. It went down into the ground, like a hole.

      It was a hole, the hole my nose had punched into the ground, but like Pete said, by golly, it was OUR hole, and there it was for everyone to see, a living tribute to brave dogs and their flying machines.

      It sure made me proud, seeing that monument. I’d put a lot of myself into making that hole, but I couldn’t have done it without Pete’s help.

      But where was I? Oh, yeah, there’s something about Halloween that makes the weather turn cold. That’s when monsters come out, too—skeletons and witches and some guy in a helmet named Dark Vader. He wears a black cape and talks like he’s got a bad cold and he scares the bejeebers out of me. He comes to the ranch every Halloween.

      The first time he came to Loper and Sally May’s house, Hank made me go out and bark at him. I didn’t want to but I did, gave him one bark and ran like greased lightning to the machine shed.

      Hank got mad and called me a chicken liver but I didn’t care. Dark Vader came back the next year and I ran for the machine shed again, only this time I didn’t bark at him. He keeps coming back every year at Halloween, but we’ve kind of reached an understanding: I never bark at him and he never eats me. Whenever he comes to the ranch and gets out of the car, I go straight to the machine shed and stay there until he leaves. No muss, no fuss, no noise, no nothing.

      I don’t know why he keeps coming back on Halloween, but he never seems to do any harm. If he ever tried to hurt anyone or steal something, maybe I’d leave the machine shed and bark at him. Or maybe not. Probably not.

      I don’t remember what I was talking about when I started this chapter, but I think it’s time to start another one. You can’t stay in the same chapter forever. If you told your whole life’s story in one chapter, it might seem kind of boring.

      The next chapter is going to be exciting.