The Case of the Bone-Stalking Monster Read Free Page A

ornery little stinkpot. I’ve got no grudge against you, Pete, and I think it would be a crying shame for us to go into combat over something as silly as a bone. What’s a bone, Pete? The world’s full of bones. This is just one of thousands, millions.
    â€œAnd I ask you, Pete, sincerely and from my deepest heart: Is one measly bone worth all this? Just look what it’s done to you. You’ve turned into a greedy, selfish, miserly little brute.”
    He still had his teeth sunk into my . . . into the, uh, bone. I continued.
    â€œI don’t know about you, Pete, but I’m ashamed of myself, and I’m ashamed of yourself too. I mean, we have every reason to be friends. We share the same ranch, the same world, the same stars at night. Yet here we are, at each other’s throats over a . . . over a paltry, insignificant little bone.
    â€œTalk to me, Pete, tell me what you think. Am I right or wrong about this? I sincerely and honestly want to know your thoughts on this.”
    He dropped the bone. “Well, Hankie, since you put it that way . . .”
    Heh, heh. In one rapid motion, I snatched up my bone and buried Kitty beneath an avalanche of paws and claws. He never saw it coming and he never had a chance.
    Okay, maybe he didn’t stay buried under the avalanche for very long, and maybe he cut loose with a burst of fully-automatic catclaw fire that almost ruined my face, but I hasten to point out that he took cheap and unfair advantage of the situation.
    See, my mouth was full of T-bone, the very same bone he had just tried to steal only moments before, and with my mouth full of T-bone, I wasn’t able to defend my honor in the manner . . .
    Man alive, I had almost forgotten how much damage a sniveling little cat could do in a very short period of time. He buzzsawed my whole face, fellers, and we’re talking about lips, eyebrows, cheeks, gums, nose, the whole shebang.
    At that point I abandoned the path of reason, dropped the bone, and went to Total Warfare. If Kitty-Kitty had been just half a step slower, he would have paid dearly for his crimes. Instead, I had to settle for a moral victory: I ran him all the way to the water well and chased him up a tree.

    â€œThere!” I yelled at him in a voice filled with righteous anger. “And let that be a lesson to you.”
    He grinned down at me from the tree. “Yes, I’ve learned a valuable lesson, Hankie. Chewing on a dog’s face is a lot more fun than chewing on a bone. Let’s try it again some time.”
    I tried to think of a stinging reply, but my face and nose were stinging so badly by then . . . I mean, he had really trashed my face, the sneaking little weasel . . . I failed to come up with a stinging reply, so I whirled around and marched away, confident that I had won another huge moral victory over the cat.
    At least I had a bone to show for my efforts. Pete had nothing but a tree.
    Holding my trashed face at a proud angle, I marched proudly down to the . . . my goodness, there was Sally May at the yard gate. Acting on instinct, I altered my flight plan and pointed myself toward the gas tanks.
    I mean, there is something about Sally May that arouses certain feelings of, well, guilt in a dog. Even when we haven’t done anything naughty, her very presence makes us think we have. And in this case, I had more or less been involved in chasing her precious kitty . . .
    â€œHank, come here.”
    Uh-oh. There it was. She had seen everything. She knew everything. She always saw and knew everything. Didn’t she ever sleep?
    I altered course again and headed for the yard gate, but this time I switched everything over to Looks of Remorse and Mournful Wags. I began re­hearsing my story.
    â€œSally May, I know what you’re thinking. You probably think that I was beating up on your stupid . . . that is, you probably think I was fighting with your cat, and I realize that the, uh, evidence looks