Lost in the Blinded Blizzard (4 page)

Chapter Six: A Sick Baby

T
he world's best cure for a broken heart has always been a nice juicy bone. The next-best cure is a good night's sleep in front of a woodstove.

I had no juicy bones to help me through this dark and difficult period, and so when Slim came to the door and called us dogs into the house, I rushed inside and took my spot in front of the stove.

I still didn't think that a ranch dog had any business . . . I did it for medical reasons. A guy has to take care of his heart.

Did it work? Well, I managed to survive the night, even though I spent a large portion of my sleep time dreaming about a certain collie dog whose name I won't mention.

And listening to Drover's wheezing and grunting.

The next morning at daylight, I was awakened by the ringing of a bell. Not one to be fooled twice in a row, I suspicioned that it was the telephone and didn't bother to bark at it.

Okay, I barked at it a couple of times, but I was still asleep when I did it, so technically speaking, I wasn't actually fooled.

I heard Slim's feet hit the floor in the back bedroom. I heard him running down the hall. Then . . . his scratchy voice.

“Hello. No, I've been up for hours. Who is this? Oh, Loper. Morning. What time is it? I'll be derned. It is?”

Slim parted the curtains and looked out the window. “By gollies, it sure is. Looks like we might be in for a storm. The baby's sick? Say, that's no good. I guess the roads are too bad to . . . Cough medicine? Yeah, I've got a bottle of it somewhere. What? Speak up, Loper, I can't hardly hear you!”

“No, you stay put. I'll try to make it in the flat­bed. Oh, it ain't snowing that hard.” He peeked out the window again. “It is snowing pretty hard, ain't it? But I'll make it, don't worry. See you in twenty minutes.”

He hung up the phone and stretched his eyelids to get them open. “Little Molly's got a bad cough, dogs, and we've got to take some medicine up to her. I'd better find the derned stuff right now, else I'll run off and forget it, and wouldn't that be cute?”

He shuffled into the bathroom. Bottles clinked. He came out again, yawning and holding a bottle of something up close to his face. “Cough medicine, that's what it says. Okay, so far, so good.”

He came over to the front of the stove and opened it up. “Move, dog, unless you want to go into the firebox.”

On this ranch, manners don't get much exercise in the morning. The cowboys just grunt at you and threaten to throw you into the fire if you don't . . . oh well.

I moved.

He pitched in some crumpled-up newspapers and sticks of kindling, blew on the coals until the paper popped into flames, and then he added some chunks of fence-post cedar.

He'd slept in his one-piece red long-john under­wear and left his jeans and shirt draped over the back of a chair, so it didn't take him long to get dressed.

He went out into the kitchen and flipped on the light switch. Nothing happened. The electric was still out because of the storm. He grumbled about that and made himself a quick breakfast: a cup of cold day-old coffee and a peanut-butter sandwich.

He dug his sheeplined coat and five-buckle galoshes out of the closet, put on his warmest gloves and his wool cap with the ear flappers, and headed for the door.

He slipped the bottle of medicine into the pocket of his sheepline and turned to us. “Come on, dogs, we've got work to do.”

If I'd had a couple of minutes, I probably could have thought of a few things I'd rather do than go out into that cold blowing snow. I mean, it was pretty nasty outside, and there was never any question about whether or not we dogs would ride in the back of the pickup.

We rode in the cab with Slim.

We hadn't gone more than fifty yards down the road before we hit a deep drift. Slim had to get out and lock in the front hubs, and then we started out again in four-wheel drive. The county road up to Loper's place had already begun to drift over. The wind was blowing hard, straight out of the north, and we couldn't see much of anything.

Slim had to hold his head at an angle to see out the windshield. “Boys, this storm is worse than I thought. I can't find the road. If I'd a-known it was blowing this hard . . . boys, I've got a feeling that we ain't going to make it.”

All at once the pickup seemed to be sliding down­ward and tilting sideways, and Drover and I were sitting in Slim's lap, so to speak.

He shifted gears and gunned the motor, but we didn't move.

“Well, I've done it now,” he said. “We're off in the ditch and this is the end of the line. And Hank, you stink!”

He pushed me away and tried to open his door, but it was wedged against a snowdrift. He opened the door on the right side, pitched us out into the deep snow, and crawled out behind us.

Say, being out in that storm was a little bit scary. I mean, you couldn't see more than 25 feet in any direction and the wind was blowing so hard that it took your breath away.

For the first time, I noticed lines of fear on Slim's face. “Dogs, we have got ourselves in some trouble. If we can't find our way back to the house, we could be crowbait.”

That's all it took to send Drover into a nervous breakthrough. “Oh Hank, I don't want to be crowbait and I'm too young to be a widow, and I'm so cold I just don't think I can make it and . . . oh, my leg!”

“Come on, dogs,” Slim said, “stay close to me and don't get lost. We'll foller the barbed-wire fence as far as she goes, and then we'll have to strike out and walk into the storm—and hope we can find the house.”

He waded and stumbled through the snow that had drifted into the ditch, and climbed up the bank on the other side until he reached the fence. He turned the collar of his sheepline up against the wind and started walking east, holding the top wire in his left hand.

Drover and I followed. I mean, Slim didn't need to worry about ME sticking close to him. All of a sudden that storm had made me feel pretty small and insignificant, which ain't exactly a normal feeling for your Heads of Ranch Security.

The snow was so deep, I couldn't walk in it, had to hop from one spot to the next. It was even harder for Mister Squeakbox, since his legs were only half as short as mine. Or half as long, I guess you could say.

Anyways, he was sawed-off at the legs. He'd try to walk on the top crust of the snow, don't you see, and that would work for a while, but then he'd break through and disappear.

It was tough going for him, and since Drover has never been one to suffer in silence, I got to hear all about it: he was freezing, he was tired, his nose was cold, his ears were cold, he was going snowblind, he'd lost the feeling in his stub tail, and his leg hurt, of course.

I got tired of hearing it. “Drover, dry up, will you?”

“I want to go to the machine shed!”

“Fine. Go to the machine shed, if you can find it.”

“I wouldn't know where to look.”

“Then dry up and walk.”

“My legs are too short to walk in this snow!”

“Then fly.”

“I can't fly!”

“Then shut your trap.”

“Oh, my leg!”

It seemed to take us an hour to slog our way to the cattle guard, where the road turned north and went to Slim's place. Slim stopped and leaned against the corner post and fought for his breath.

I knew he was tired. I was tired too. Wading through that deep snow was a killer.

He caught his breath and knelt down. “Hank, come here, boy. My house lays a quarter-mile north of here. We won't have a fence to foller. Can you find the house?”

He had brought his face right down close to mine, and for some reason I felt an urge to give him a nice big juicy lick. Those urges sometimes strike me at odd moments, don't you see, and my tongue just shoots out before I have a chance to think about it.

And that's what it did—shot out and gave him a big slurpy lick on the face.

He spit and wiped his mouth. “Don't lick me, you dodo. Can you find the house in this storm?”

I glanced off to the north and saw . . . hmmm, a solid wall of white. No house. No road. No landmarks. No nuthin.' In other words . . .

I turned my eyes back to Slim's face. He looked pretty serious about this deal. I whapped my tail in the snow and tried to get the message across that, if our safety and survival depended on ME finding the house in that howling blizzard, we were probably in
real trouble.

But he didn't wait for my message. He raised up, gave me a boot in the tail section, and said, “Find the house, pup, and don't spare the horses. I'm fadin' fast.”

GULK.

ME? Find the . . . boy, this was no time for a miscalculation, I mean, if a guy happened to lose his bearings and head off in the wrong . . . surely I wasn't the best choice for this . . . perhaps if we postponed it until a nicer . . .

On the other hand, the awful responsibility of saving our little group seemed to have been thrust upon me. I got that impression when Slim booted me a second time and pointed his finger and entire arm toward the north.

“Find the house, Hank! Find the house!”

And so, with my heart pounding in my ears, I turned my nose into the howling wind and began walking into the terrible white nothingness before me.

Chapter Seven: Who, Me?

I
hadn't gone more than ten steps when I realized that I was totally lost and without any sense of direction.

Facing that terrible wind, I couldn't see anything, and I will admit right here and for the record that I began to feel a certain uneasiness. Call it panic, if you will.

Scared silly.

Terrified.

I had just about decided to throw the Towel of Life into the Ring of . . . something. Into the Ring of Fate. I had just about decided to give up the struggle when, all at once, my nose picked up a scent in the snow.

I can tell you that there aren't too many scents in a snowstorm. Snow covers up most of your scents, don't you see, and that makes it tough on a dog, because under normal conditions we rely pretty heavily on our noses.

When that nose blanks out, fellers, it throws our whole navigation system out of whack.

Okay. I happened to lower my nose to a point just a few inches above the snow—and I began getting a reading! I walked a few steps further to the north and picked up another one.

Now, if you're familiar with the navigation business, you know that one reading isn't worth much because it's impossible to draw a straight line between one point.

It takes two points to make a line, see, and once I got the second reading, I knew that I was onto something. I had the two points I needed, and a line that pointed somewhere besides Oblivion.

I went several more steps and ran another check, and sure enough, there was Point Number Three!

Even though the road was buried under the snow, I knew that I was following it. Following the road, that is, not the snow. Well, I was following the snow too, but . . . forget it.

I had found a scent that would lead me straight to Slim's house!

You want to guess what it was? You'll probably guess that it was a trail of gasoline that had leaked out of the flatbed pickup.

Nice try. The flatbed leaked gas, all right, and oil too, but the scent of gasoline doesn't last long. It evaporizes in the air.

No sir, the scent I had picked up came from
the tires of Billy's pickup
—which, if you recall, I had very carefully marked the night before.

Which just goes to prove how important it is for a dog to mark every tire of every vehicle that comes onto the ranch. A guy never knows when one of those routine marking jobs might save his life.

Well, once I had discovered my own mark in the snow, finding the house became a simple matter of switching over to instruments and running periodic checks of the navcom system. A piece of cake, in other words. No problem.

In fact, the only problem came when I got so far out in the lead, Slim had to call me back several times. Shucks, I was ready to take 'er on home and curl up in front of that stove!

When old Slim saw the house looming up ahead in the blizzard, he gave a cowboy yell and screeched, “You did it, Hankie! By gollies, you found the house!”

Well, what did he expect? I mean, you put the Head of Ranch Security in charge of things and you start seeing results, right?

I was the first to reach the house. I ran straight to the door and laid a mark on it, just to establish the fact that I had personally led a brave team of explorers through snow and ice and howling winds and conditions that weren't fit for man nor beets, and now I was planting our flag, so to speak, on the summit of the threshold.

Slim arrived next, huffing steam in the air, his cheeks rosy red from the cold, his beard covered with frost, and his glasses fogged over.

Last, and definitely least, came Little Mister Squeak Box. “Oh Hank, I'm so cold, and this leg of mine . . .” And so forth.

Slim opened the door and we all staggered inside. Drover and I made a dash for the stove, while Slim stripped down to his red long-johns and his socks, and collapsed into his easy chair.

“Whew! Dogs, I don't know about you, but I am wore out. That's a terrible storm out there, as bad as any blizzard I ever saw. We're lucky we made it back to the house.”

(I should point out that luck had nothing to do with it.)

Just then, the phone rang. Slim scowled at it. “Well, there's Loper, wondering what happened to us.” He picked it up. “Hello? Hello? Can't hardly hear you, Loper. Something must be iced over, either the string or the tin cans.”

He told Loper about our experiences in the blizzard—including the part about me guiding the expedition to the house.

“So we're afoot. I'm sure sorry, but man alive, I couldn't find the dadgummed road! It's bad out there. Well, how's Molly doing?”

I studied his face. He pressed his lips together and shook his head.

“Well, that settles it. I'll start out afoot. Huh? No, I told you I'd get up there with the medicine, and that's what I'm a-going to do. Don't worry, I'll make it.”

He hung up the phone and stared at us for a long time. “Boys, the thought of going back out in that storm kind of shakes me up, and I ain't scared of anything.”

He stood up and started pulling on his clothes. The phone rang.

“Hello. Who is this? Oh. Speak up, Loper, can't hear you. Yes, you're right about that. Well, sure, it's risky but . . . Yes, he did, he sure did. I was right proud of the old . . .”

Slim's face rose into a big smile, and suddenly he was looking directly at me. I held my head up high and thumped my tail on the floor. By George, old Slim was sure . . .

“You know, that just might work! Tie the bottle around his neck and send him down the road!”

HUH?

Whoa, wait a minute, hold it, halt!

Tie the bottle around HIS neck and send HIM down the road?

Who was the HIM to be sent down the road, and WHOSE neck was being volunteered for WHAT?

“By gollies, Loper, I believe that's the best idea of the year. I'll get him on his way.” He hung up the phone and flashed a big grin and took a step in my direction. “Here, Hankie, come here, boy.”

Oh yeah? “Here, Hankie” my foot! If old Slim thought that THIS Hankie was going to . . . no way was he going to pitch me out into . . . there must have been some mistake, because surely . . .

I, uh, went into Stealthy Retreat Mode and, uh, began slinking back toward the, uh, bedroom, so to speak, while casting glances back toward Slim to see if he, uh, had any crazy notions about, well, following me.

He did seem to have such notions, and yes, he was following me.

“Come here, Hankie, I've got a little job for you.”

He came at a slow walk. I moved away at a slow walk. He picked up the pace. I picked up the pace. He made a dash for me and I made a dash for the back of the house.

“Hank, come back here!”

Come back here?
Was he losing his mind? What kind of fool did he think he was dealing with?

Hey, I might appear dumb on a few rare occasions, but when the chips are down, and when they're MY chips, fellers, I don't just stand around looking simple.

I run and hide under the nearest bed!

I went streaking down the hall and slithered my way under the bed—fighting my way through all the cobwebs and dust and lint that had accumulated there. “Jenny wool,” we call it.

I saw Slim's nose appear under the bed, then his eyes. He was wearing a crazy grin on his mouth.

“Hi, puppy. I see you.”

Yeah, well, he could look at me all he wanted, but as far as me coming out . . . no sale.

“Hank, get out from under that bed!”

No way, Charlie.

“I'll get the broom.”

So get the broom.

He got the broom. He swept and he swatted, and I could have told him that no broom was going to flush me out from under that bed.

At last he gave up on the broom. His face appeared again. It didn't look so friendly this time.

“Hank, I've got this great opportunity for you.”

Yes, I knew all about his “great opportunity.”

“And I'm giving you one last chance to volunteer. And if you don't come out from under that bed, I'm a-going to pull off the mattress and springs and kick your little doggie butt up between your shoulder blades.”

I took a deep breath and thought the deal over one last time. Slim needed help. The baby needed the medicine. Duty was calling. I was the best dog for the job.

Ah, what the heck, maybe I could . . . I crawled out from under the bed and volunteered for the job.

Yes, I knew it was going to be one of the most dangerous missions of my entire career. I knew there was a chance that I would never reach my destination, that I might be lost in the raging storm and never heard from again.

I knew all that. But I also understood the terrible consequences that might occur if I didn't go.

I might become a permanent freak. I would be laughed at and scorned. I would never win the heart of another woman.

Girl-dogs will forgive many flaws, but they aren't impressed by guys who wear their fannies up around their shoulder blades.