Lost in the Blinded Blizzard by John R. Erickson Page A

looking for his coal-oil lamp, which he found and lit with the candle. Holding the lamp about shoulder high, he went to the front door and looked out. “Dogs, that old wind is gettin’ up. If it should happen to start snowing hard, we’d be in for a blizzard, sure ’nuff.”
    He set the lamp down and had just lowered himself into the rocking chair when, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, a bell began to ring. I shot a glance at Drover.
    â€œWhat was that?”
    â€œSounded like a bell to me.”
    â€œExactly. But there are no bells in this house.”
    It rang a second time.
    â€œThere it goes again, Hank! What does it mean?”
    â€œIt means,” I pushed myself up from the hearth and switched all my Hair Lift-Up circuits over to manual, “it means that the time has come for us to BARK. I don’t know what that thing is or where it came from, Drover, but a dog can never go wrong by barking.”
    And so we barked. We threw ourselves into the . . .
    Okay, in my original analysis, I had more or less forgotten that Slim had a telephone in his house and that telephones make a ringing sound—but not all the time. That’s the crucial point.
    See, those telephones will lurk in silence for hours and sometimes even days, and just about the time you’ve forgotten about ’em, they’ll stop lurking and start ringing.
    And for that reason, I’ve never trusted a telephone. There’s something just a little sneaky . . . I don’t like ’em, is the point.
    It took Slim a couple of minutes to find the phone. It had gotten lost beneath the shifting whispering sands, so to speak, of his living room—meaning that it had been buried beneath back issues of Livestock Weekly, dirty socks and old shirts, picture-show calendars, and other items too numerous to mention.
    It rang and rang, and we barked and barked. On the fifth ring, Slim found the cord and pulled on it until the phone appeared out of the rubble.
    He gave me a wink and said, “They can’t fool me.” He put the phone to his ear. “Hello. Yes. Yes. No, I wasn’t in bed. I couldn’t find the derned phone. Hold on a second.” He scowled at me. “Hank, dry up, will you?”
    At that point I figgered that I had barked just about enough, so I quit. I mean, I’d kept the phone from running out of the room, right? And I’d helped Slim find it, right? So I called off the Code Three and . . .
    Was that a mouse sitting on the toe of Slim’s boot?
    I narrowed my eyes and studied the object on the toe of his . . . yes, it certainly appeared to be a mouse. I shot a glance at Slim.
    He didn’t see it.
    â€œWhat? No, I’m baby-sittin’ Loper’s dogs tonight and they were barkin’ at the telephone. No, I have no idea why a dog would bark at the telephone, but they did.” He chuckled. “Yes, I’m very proud. Would you like to buy one of ’em?”
    I wasn’t paying much attention to the conversation. By that time I had gone into Stealthy Crouch Mode and was moving on silent paws and weaving my way through the clutter—closing the distance between me and the alleged mouse.
    Five feet away from the target, I stopped—froze, actually—and asked Data Control for a confirmation of my original sighting. It came back in a matter of seconds: yes indeed, we had us a live mouse at 0205.
    Not only was this mouse alive and sitting on the toe of Slim’s boot, but he was staring at me and wiggling his whiskers.
    Have we discussed mice? I am the sworn enemy of all mice, especially those that stare and wiggle their whiskers.
    I mean, you’d think a mouse would have sense enough to run at the approach of a Head of Ranch Security, but this one seemed to think that he owned the place.
    Well, he didn’t own the place, and I was fixing to send that little feller a message from the School of Hard Knots.
    I trimmed out my ears in the