The Phantom in the Mirror. John R. Erickson

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      I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Who was this guy, anyway? Whoever he was, he couldn’t be very smart, and it appeared that I would have to contribute a little bit to his education, so to speak.

      I mean, I don’t go around looking for fights, but when stray dogs start mouthing off to me on MY ranch . . . hey, that’s all it takes to start a riot.

      “Listen, pal, it’s clear to me you don’t realize to who or whom you’re speaking, so I’m going to give you one last chance. Get off the ranch and we’ll drop all charges, write it off as a mistake, and forget that it ever happened. That’s as good a deal as you’re going to get out of me.”

      “Ha! Ranch dog full of baloney!”

      HUH?

      The hair on my back shot up. My ears shot up. My lips shot up, revealing deadly white fangs. A growl began rumbling in my throat.

      “Hey Freddie, did you just say what I thought you said?”

      “Freddie say ranch dog full of baloney! And salami and prunes and brussels sprouts, ho ho!”

      That did it. I might have overlooked the baloney but not the prunes and brussels sprouts. I lumbered out to teach this Freddie a lesson he wouldn’t forget.

      “Hey Freddie, I’m feeling generous this morning. Do you want to learn your lessons through normal pasture fighting or would you rather get an exhibition of dog-karate? I’m a black belt in both, by the way.”

      “Ha! Freddie feed ranch dog karate for breakfast!”

      “Keep talking, guy. You’re digging your own tombstone, and the more you talk, the deeper it gets.”

      You know what the mutt did then? He belched, real loud.

      “Yeah? Well, some dogs learn easy, some dogs learn hard, and some dogs don’t live long enough to learn much of anything.”

      “Yuck yuck! Momma of ranch dog big, fat, and ugly. Have wart on nose, wear gunnysack underpants.”

      I rolled my eyes on that one. This guy was really desperate for something to say. He must have been scared stiff.

      Piecing together the bits of information at my disposal, I pulled up a profile of the little fraud. He had to be one of the pipsqueak breeds—poodle, terrier, Chihuahua. It’s common knowledge that your pipsqueak breeds tend to be short of stature and long on mouth.

      It’s called The Little Dog Complex, if you want to get into the technical side. We’ve worked up per­sonality profiles of all the different breeds, see, and we run into Little Dog Complex quite often.

      In a classic case of LDC, you have a shriveled up, quivering, lickspittle runt of a dog who tries to do with his mouth what he can’t do with the rest of his body. You can spot ’em right away and you don’t even have to see ’em.

      They all talk trash, and the trashier the talk, the smaller the dog.

      This Freddie fit the LDC profile. I mean, he was a classic case right down the line. I was positive that, when I crossed the last little hill between us and looked down the other side, I would see . . .

      HUH?

      You know, one of the things that makes coyotes particularly dangerous characters—I mean, aside from the fact that they are cannibals and have been known to eat ranch dogs—one of the things that makes coyotes particularly dangerous enemies is that they can BARK just like a normal dog.

      You wouldn’t expect a cannibal to bark, would you? I mean, they’re best known for their howling, right? That’s what coyotes are supposed to do, howl.

      But they’re also famous for cheating, and one of their favorite cheating tricks is to bark like a dog. They do this to lure an unsuspecting ranch dog away from the house, don’t you see, and it happens all the time, thousands of times each day in all parts of the country, and even the best and smartest of ranch dogs fall for it once in a while.

      So it was no disgrace, no big deal that I . . . that our equipment came up with faulty profiles and so forth and . . . hey, they were CHEATING, don’t forget that.

      Okay. You’ll never guess who I found waiting on the other side of that little hill. It wasn’t a loudmouthed little poodle, as you might have suspected, but Rip and Snort, the cannibal brothers.

      They had lured me into an ambush, see, by cheating and lying and using cheap tricks, and by the time I figgered it out, they had already . . .

      We needn’t go into every detail. I, uh, gave them the whipping they deserved and hurried back to headquarters to, uh, finish up my morning chores.

      I still had a lot of work to do.

      There just wasn’t time in my busy schedule for fighting and brawling and such childish things.

      Hey, I’m a very busy dog and . . . never mind.

      Let’s just say that too many cannibals in the morning can ruin your day.

      Chapter Two: Try It Again

      Can we start all over?

      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. It was a normal day on the ranch, early December, as I recall. After barking the sun over the horizon, I went straight back to headquarters and saw no stray dogs or anything else out of the ordinary.

      No fights, no scuffles, no violence of any kind. It was just a totally normal day, and at that point I was ready to launch my investigation into the Phantom Dog Mystery.

      Maybe you’re not familiar with Phantom Dogs, so let me pause here to . . .

      All right, maybe I’m withholding a few shreds of information and taking a few liberties with the truth, but who wouldn’t? Let’s face it, getting suckered into a fight with two coyotes isn’t something that most dogs can be proud of. It makes us look bad.

      It’s embarrassing.

      Humiliating.

      A humbling experience.

      Who wants to be humble? Not me. Humble is what cats are supposed to be, whereas your better breeds of cowdog . . .

      Okay, I’ll tell you the straight story if you’ll promise never ever to repeat it, and I mean NEVER EVER. If word of this ever got into the wrong hands . . . ears, I guess . . . if word of this ever got out amongst the crinimals of the underworld, it could have very serious consequences.

      Have you sworn yourself to silence with a solemn oath? If not, you’re not allowed to finish this story. Put your book away this very minute and go . . . I don’t know what you should do . . . go sit in the corner and count to 50,000.

      The main thing is, be quiet and don’t peek or listen to the СКАЧАТЬ