The Frozen Rodeo
John R. Erickson
Illustrations by Gerald L. Holmes
Maverick Books, Inc.
Publication Information
MAVERICK BOOKS
Published by Maverick Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 549, Perryton, TX 79070
Phone: 806.435.7611
www.hankthecowdog.com
Published in the United States of America by Maverick Books, Inc., 2020
Copyright © John R. Erickson, 2020
All rights reserved
Maverick Books, Inc. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59188-174-2
Hank the Cowdog® is a registered trademark of John R. Erickson.
Printed in the United States of America
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Dedication
Dedicated to Gerald L. Holmes
1940 - 2019
I join the Maverick Books family in mourning the loss of our dear friend Gerald Holmes, the artist who drew the illustrations for 74 Hank the Cowdog books and put faces on Hank, Drover, Sally May, Slim and all the other characters.
Gerald began illustrating my magazine articles in 1978 when he worked in a feedlot and I was working on a ranch. We had no money but had talent, energy, and big dreams, and we set out to do things that hadn’t been done before.
We worked together for 41 years. I didn’t tell him what to draw and he didn’t tell me what to write. We never quarreled and he never missed a deadline.
Gerald took his art into homes and schools and hospitals, to cow camps and deer blinds and drilling rigs. He did with art what I hoped to do with the written word: deliver the blessing of innocent laughter.
And he did it so well! He illuminated the imaginations of millions of children and there is no way to calculate how many of them drew their first picture, imitating Gerald’s Hank or Drover.
We mourn the loss of this gentle, humble man and celebrate the joy he brought into the world. Our prayers go out to his wife Carol and sons, Heath and Chris.
John and Kris Erickson & Family
Gary and Kim Rinker & Family
Trev Tevis
Nikki Earley
Janee McCartor
Contents
Chapter One - A Wasp Crisis
Chapter Two - The House Is On Fire!
Chapter Three - Smoke, Flames, Awful!
Chapter Four - Decorating Slim’s House
Chapter Five - Words of Comfort
Chapter Six - Uh Oh, The Boss Shows Up
Chapter Seven - A Crisis In Town
Chapter Eight - I Get Shanghaied
Chapter Nine - This Is Very Bad
Chapter Ten - Good Nutrition Is Very Important
Chapter Eleven - Rodeo On Main Street
Chapter Twelve - Incredible Ending, Just Amazing
Chapter One: A Wasp Crisis
It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. The mystery began in the spring, as I recall, a few weeks after Christmas. Wait. Christmas comes in the month of December, and the last time I checked, December falls in the winter, not the spring.
Hencely, the mystery couldn’t have begun in the spring, so disregard the previous message. The mystery began in the wintertime, January, yes of course, when Slim and I found ourselves roping cattle in downtown Twitchell during an ice storm.
Oops, you’re not supposed to know about that because it comes later in the story. See, what comes later can’t come sooner, so let’s be very quiet about this and not blab it around, okay? We won’t tell anyone that Miss Viola was there and so were the police. Oh, and the dogcatcher. Shhhh.
Now let’s get to the business of the fire. It was in the winter, the very worst time for your house to burn down. I was the one who first saw the flames and turned in the alarm, so I know what I’m talking about. I mean, I was inside the house.
It was a very tense and scary situation, and already I’m wondering if we should go on with the story. You know how I am about the little children: give ‘em a few thrills and let ‘em have fun, but don’t load ‘em down with the scariest parts of my work.
Hey, a dog in my position is trained to cope with the scary stuff—the crinimal investigations, the constant battle with the Charlies, the Red Alert emergencies, and fires of all kinds—but the kids don’t have that kind of preparation.
What do you think? Should we plunge into the story or call it quits and go do something else?
I figured that’s what you’d say. Okay, you’d better grab hold of something stout and hang on. Here we go.
We’ve already decided that it happened in the wintertime. Drover and I had pretty muchly moved our base of operations from the gas tanks down to Slim Chance’s shack, two miles east of ranch headquarters.
Why? Because Slim was a bachelor cowboy who allowed the Elite Troops of the Security Division to stay inside the house on cold winter nights, and that was a big deal. He had a nice wood-burning stove in the living room and we made our camp on the floor, near the stove. His carpet was as thin as the seat of his pants, but all in all, it was a great place to be on a cold winter night.
We had made it through the deep dark of the night with no emergency calls to interrupt our sleep. We were safe, warm, and comfortable on the floor. I don’t recall what woke me up…wait, yes I do, a yellow jacket wasp dropped from the ceiling and landed on my head.
We don’t expect wasps to fall on our heads in January. In a normal year, we don’t even see a wasp in January. Why? I’m not sure. Most usually they show up in the spring, hang around all summer, and make a nuisance of themselves in the fall, and they’re gone by the time snow arrives.
Maybe they fly south with the birds. Maybe they buzz themselves to death in the fall, and that’s why you find all those crunchy dead ones around window sills. But the point is that we never see them in January, but that particular January, we were seeing plenty of them. They were still lurking around, and nobody on my ranch was glad about it, especially me.
Do we have time for this? I mean, talking about yellow jacket wasps seems a waste of time, especially when we have classified information that our house was fixing to burn down around our heads. On the other hand, wasps are a pretty serious threat to public safety, so maybe we should say a few more words about them.
The main point here is that your average wasp is armed and dangerous. He carries a loaded stinger on the end of his tail and has no respect for the rights of people or dogs. One day a wasp crawled into Slim’s boot and guess what happened when he