Hank the Cowdog and Monkey Business. John R. Erickson

same pipe, you see, the con­centration of the sound will drive the rabbit out. Once he’s outside, we’ll catch him. Let’s get after it!”

      We put our noses into the pipe, the same pipe this time, and began the barking procedure all over again. I expected the rabbit to come out and surrender after a few minutes of this. But he didn’t.

      I withdrew my nose and sat down. “Drover, this isn’t working.”

      “Yeah, I’m all discouraged now and ready to go back to bed.”

      “But the important thing is that we have him trapped. He’ll have to come out of there sooner or later. He probably thinks that we’ll give up and leave, but he doesn’t realize with who or whom he’s dealing. We’ll just wait him out.”

      So we waited.

      I hate to wait. It bores me to death. Your active minds find it hard to adjust to the slow rhythms of a nincompoop rabbit who has nothing better to do with his life than to sit inside a pipe and wiggle his nose.

      The minutes crawled by. At last I could stand it no longer. I pushed myself up. “All right, we’ve completed Phase Two. Now we move into Phase Three. We’ll change ends again and see if that helps.”

      We swapped ends, went through the barking procedure once again, and . . . at that point I began to face the possibility that we would have to rip into the steel pipe and destroy the entire cattle guard. I hated to take such drastic action but this rabbit was testing my patience.

      So I took three steps backward and peered into the pipes one more time to confirm my visual . . .

      A truck was coming from the east. No, two trucks were coming from the east.

      Three trucks.

      Four.

      Five.

      A whole bunch of trucks. This was very strange. Seldom, if ever, had I seen so many trucks coming down our road at once. Someone on the creek must have been delivering a bunch of cattle that day, which meant that the approaching trucks were of the cattle truck variety.

      “Drover, stand back and prepare to bark at these cattle trucks. As far as I know, they haven’t been cleared to cross this ranch.”

      Each of us took a step or two backward, crouched down, and prepared to give them the barking they so richly deserved. Here they came, a long line of trucks . . . that was odd. Painted red, white, blue, and yellow? With pictures of clowns and elephants and monkeys and people swinging on trapezes painted on the sides?

      Hmmm.

      “Drover, I’ll want a complete description of every one of these trucks. I don’t know what the neighbors are up to, but it’s just possible that they’ve started raising elephants and clowns instead of cattle.”

      “I’ll be derned.”

      The first truck was roaring down on us. “Ready for Heavy Duty Barking? Just a few more feet . . . okay, Drover, let ’em have it!”

      When the front wheels of the first truck crossed the pipes of the cattle guard, we leaped out of the shadows, so to speak, and barked it from both sides. Pretty slick maneuver, caught ’em completely by surprise, and as you might expect, they didn’t even dare to slow down.

      The dust fogged around us but that didn’t stop us from challenging the second truck, or the third. It was from the window of the third truck that the paper cup filled with ice came flying, hit me dead-center on the back, kind of shocked me there for a second.

      I yelped but soon regained my composture, and by the time the back wheels of the truck crossed the cattle guard, I had jumped back into the struggle and torn most of the tread off the outside tire.

      I mean, when they make me mad, they have to live with the consequences. I don’t appreciate people throwing cups of ice at me when I’m on duty. They were just lucky I didn’t get a good bite on that tire or I might have disabled the entire truck.

      The dust boiled up, the trucks roared past and rumbled over our cattle guard, and we gave them a barking they would never forget. I had my doubts that they would ever risk coming down MY road again.

      It’s possible that the weight of the first five or six trucks mashed the cattle guard down, so that it was lower than the road. I say that because when the last truck came by, it bounced hard going over the cattle guard—so hard that a big red wooden box came loose from the top of the load and went flying off into the horse pasture.

      I opened my mouth to alert Drover to this turn of events, but the swirling dust was so thick that it filled my eyes and mouth with . . . well, dust, of course. I coughed and spat and waited for it to clear.

      “All right, Drover, they’re gone. Report in.”

      He sneezed. “It’s dusty.”

      “That checks out. We had the same conditions over here.”

      “Yeah, ’cause it was the same bunch of trucks.”

      “Exactly. Did we scare the liver out of those guys or what?”

      “I didn’t see any livers, but I think they were scared.”

      “You bet they were scared! They’ll think twice before they come down our road again. Oh, and did you notice that something fell off that last truck?”

      He moved out into the middle of the road, sat down, and began scratching his ear. “Well, I couldn’t see because of the . . .”

      “A big red box fell off that last truck and came to rest in our horse pasture. Stand by with search parties! We’re fixing to take possession of that box.”

      And with that, we leaped over the cattle guard—well, most of it. I landed three pipes short of the opposite side and lost a couple of legs in the pipes, but that proved to be only a temporary setback.

      Within seconds, we had located the Mysteri­ous Red Box and had surrounded it.