The Case of the Missing Cat Read Free Page A

following the movements of three alleged rabbits: the one we called the Cake-House Bunny, who stayed under the cake house; the Cattle-Guard Bunny, who lived in the cattle guard just north of headquarters; and the Lumber-Pile Bunny.
    I knew them all on sight, had memorized their markings and habits, and had been keeping all of them under pretty close surveillance for months and months.
    â€œHow could one dog keep track of three rabbits at the same time?” you ask. Good question. All I can say is that I did it. A lot of dogs would have found it difficult, if not impossible, but for me, it was just part of the job.
    The next thing you’re probably asking yourself is, “Where did the Lumber-Pile Bunny get his name?” Another good question.
    I had assigned the code name “Lumber-Pile Bunny” to this particular rabbit because . . . well, because he lived in a lumber pile, and maybe that was fairly obvious. But there was nothing obvious about where the lumber pile came from.
    Here’s the scoop on that. Back in the spring, the cowboys became so embarrassed by the appearance of their corral fence that they took the drastic step of replacing twenty or thirty rotten, warped, moth-eaten boards with new lumber.
    Any time those guys give up on using a baling wire patch the action can be regarded as drastic. Yes, they did in fact replace the old boards with new boards, but did they haul off the old boards?
    No sir. Throwed ’em in a pile on the west side and drove away, saying, “We’ll haul that lumber off when we get caught up with some of this other work.” But did they? No sir.
    That’s a pretty sorry way to run a ranch, seems to me, but did anyone ask the opinion of the Head of Ranch Security? Again, NO. I’ll say no more about it.
    Except that lumber piles attract rattlesnakes and skunks and provide a place of refuse for sniveling little rabbits, speaking of whom . . .
    Would you care to guess who took up residence in the lumber pile? That’s correct, a certain cottontail rabbit, to who or whom I assigned the code name “Lumber-Pile Bunny.” This was the guy I was after.
    Okay. Some ten feet north of the gas tanks, I throttled back to a slow gliding walk, switched my ears over to Manual Liftup, began testing the air with full nosetory equipment, and directed my VSD’s (Visual Scanning Devices; in ordinary dogs also referred to as “eyes”) toward a patch of grass directly west of the gas tanks.
    This procedure soon bored fruit . . . bared fruit . . . produced results, as my instruments began picking up the telltale sounds of a rabbit munching grass.
    It was the Lumber-Pile Bunny.
    He was munching tender shoots of grass some 25 or 30 feet to the west of my bedroom. The foolish rabbit seemed unaware that he had entered a Secured Area and that the Dark Shadow of Doom was slipping toward him like a dark shadow in the night.
    Well, maybe not in the night. You wouldn’t be able to see a dark shadow in the . . .
    Even though I had switched over to Silent Mode, the bunny heard me coming. They have pretty good ears, don’t you know, and it’s hard to slip up on one.
    But get this. Instead of running away, he stood up on his back legs, looked straight at me, and wiggled his nose in what I would describe as “a provocatory gesture.”
    Okay, what we had here was a rabbit who had never been taught his place on the ranch. Or else one that had lost his mind. He wanted to play with fire, so he was fixing to learn about fire.
    Well, this was it. I glanced back to be sure that Pete was watching (he was), took a deep breath, and rolled my shoulders several times to loosen up the enormous muscles that would soon propel me at speeds unknown to ordinary dogs.
    I turned back to the rabbit, locked in all guidance systems, and began the countdown procedure, which goes something like this, in case you’re not familiar with technical stuff:
    â€œFive! Four!