The Case of the Vanishing Fishhook. John R. Erickson
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Название: The Case of the Vanishing Fishhook
Автор: John R. Erickson
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Учебная литература
Серия: Hank the Cowdog
isbn: 9781591887317
isbn:
It’s too complicated to explain. It was an instrumentation problem, and once I had made the sprint down to the corrals, everything had cleared up and I began to realize that the business about the “enemy submarine” was bogus.
It wasn’t an enemy submarine. It was Slim Chance, the hired hand on this outfit. But what the heck was he doing down at the corrals in the middle of the night? At first I thought he might have been walking in his sleep. Then I remembered that his shack . . . house . . . the place where he stayed and slept at night was two miles down the creek, which made the Sleepwalking Hypotenuse highly unlikely.
Nobody walks two miles in his sleep. So I probed the matter deeper and in more detail until I came up with a solid explanation.
You know what he was doing? He’d gotten out of bed and had driven up to headquarters to check on a first-calf heifer that was about to deliver her first calf.
Have we discussed heifers and the process of calving them out? Maybe not. It’s an important job and I happen to know quite a bit about it. Here’s the deal. Every year the ranch has to replace old cows with young cows. Young cows are called “heifers,” and if you want to know why, ask a heifer. I don’t know.
What would be wrong with calling them “young cows”? That would be much simpler and then you wouldn’t have to remember whether “heifer” is spelled “heifer” or “hiefer” or “heffer,” but nobody asked my opinion.
Every year our ranch saves 20 or 30 heifers, and when the time comes for them to deliver their calves, Slim has to watch them closely, because sometimes heifers have trouble. If they don’t get help from the local cowboy-vet, the calf might die, and sometimes the heffer . . . heifffer . . . sometimes the young cow will die too.
Slim has to check them in the middle of the night and sometimes he just sleeps down at the barn with them. If they have trouble shelling out the calf, he assists them.
He calls himself “Dr. Slim,” but I think that’s some kind of joke. I don’t think he actually has a doctor’s degree.
I’m sure he doesn’t.
Anyways, I have watched him deliver calves on several occasions—I being his most trusted assistant and also the only one on the ranch who will stay up all night with him in a drafty shed—and I know the procedure fairly well.
It’s called “pulling a calf” and it’s done with two pieces of equipment: a small-gauge chain with a loop on each end (it’s called an “O.B. chain”) and a device called a “calf-puller.” Shall we run through the procedure? Might as well.
Okay, here’s the deal. When the heifer has been straining for several hours and hasn’t shelled out the calf, Dr. Slim throws his rope over the heifer’s horns and snubs her up to a post. The reason for this is that young cow mothers don’t always appreciate having a cowboy doctor in the pen with them and will sometimes try to run him out of the operating room.
With the heifer tied to the snubbing post, Dr. Slim loops the ends of the chain around the baby calf’s front feet, then hooks the chain into the calf-puller, which has a cranking device that pulls the calf out. He ratchets the lever while the heifer strains, and after a minute or two the calf pops out and lands on the ground.
Pretty slick, huh? And it’s pretty impressive that a dog would know so much about medical science, but knowing such things is just part of my job as Head of Ranch Security.
I had watched Slim pull dozens of calves, but this time I noticed that something was different. For one thing, the heifer was already lying on the ground when we got there, and Dr. Slim decided he wouldn’t need to snub her to the post. Bad idea.
For another thing, Slim had left his calf-pullers up at the machine shed. Was that smart? No, it was unsmart and also very careless of him. If he had a pregnant heifer in the corrals, why had he left the calf-pullers in the machine shed? I have no idea, but I sure wouldn’t have done it that way.
Anyways, the heifer was laid out on the ground and was trying to squeeze out her calf. Dr. Slim sized up the situation, chewed his lip for five seconds, and came up with a plan.
Here’s what he said, word for word. He said, “Welp, she’s down so I don’t need to snub her, and I ain’t got time to go chuggin’ up to the machine shed for the calf-pullers, so we’ll pull this little feller the cowboy way.”
And then he gave me a wink. Why did he wink at me? I already knew that he’d just made the dumbest decision of the week and that this was going to turn into a train wreck. He should have saved his wink or given it to someone else who didn’t know what was coming.
I heaved a sigh, rolled my eyes towards heaven, and waited for the ineffible to happen.
Uneffible.
Interebbible.
Do you have any idea what it means to pull a calf “the cowboy way?” It’s a special technique cowboys use when they are out in the pasture with no calf-pulling equipment at hand, or when they’re too lazy to gather up the proper equipment, or when their lives have gotten so dull that they need some excitement.
You guess which one applied to Slim.
Here’s what he did. He looped one end of his O.B. chain around the calf’s front feet and then he looped the other end of the chain around his right wrist.
Do you see what’s coming? I did. I could have told him . . . in fact, I tried to tell him. I barked three times, hoping to bark some sense into his thick skull, but did he listen? Oh no. I was just a dumb dog and he was Mister Expert on Pulling Calves and Just About Everything Else, and so naturally he didn’t listen to the Voice of Reason.
He sat down on the ground, braced his feet against the heifer’s hips, and began tugging on the chain. Oh, and he said, “This won’t take but a minute.”
Ha.
If you were a young cow mother, lying on the ground and trying to deliver a calf, and some guy started pushing on your hips with his boots and pulling on you with a chain, would you just lie there and be sweet about it? I wouldn’t have, and neither did that heifer.
One second she was lying on the ground, and the next second she was on her feet—snorting, bellering, blowing smoke, and throwing her horns.
Well, I saw the wreck coming and I knew that it was up to me to save Slim from his bonehead behavior. I sprang into action with a burst of barking, then dived in front of the heifer and bit her on the nose. At the time it seemed a good strategy. See, if she came after me, she couldn’t possibly harm Dr. Bonehead with her horns, right?
But all at once Slim was squalling. “Hank, don’t get her stirred up! Leave her alone!”
HUH?
Okay, I hadn’t considered that once she began chasing me around the corral, Slim would be . . . don’t forget that he’d looped that chain around his wrist, and don’t forget that I’d had nothing to do with that decision. I never would have done such a crazy thing.
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