Hank the Cowdog – Every Dog has His Day

John R Erickson's Hank the Cowdog story Every Dog has His Day is a ranch comedy for 8 year olds told by a dog who is absolutely certain he is in charge.

What happens

Hank is Head of Ranch Security. He says so constantly. He files reports, runs patrols, marks tyres for future reference and refers to his own naps as monitoring incoming signals.

The catalogue has this as Hank's tenth adventure, so your reader is dropping into a job he has held for a while.

It starts with roundup day. Pickups arrive, horses come out of trailers, and Hank goes charging down to bark at everybody, on the grounds that nobody cleared any of it with him.

Then a border collie called Benny gets out of one of the pickups. Champion parents. Grand champion grandfather. A grin he never turns off. Benny has been brought in to show what a real stock dog can do, and he mentions that the job might become permanent.

You can see where this is heading. Hank cannot. He waits confidently for the cowboys to tie up the newcomer, follows the boss up the hill to watch it happen, and it takes him several paragraphs to work out that the rope has gone round his own neck.

So the whole roundup happens without him. He watches from a gate post while Benny trots off with the crew.

What makes it funny is Hank's version of events. He is never wrong. He is merely working with incomplete data, or being let down by his assistant, or forming what he calls a Working Hippopotamus, having lost his grip on the word hypothesis. He gets startled by a cowboy in the shed and immediately explains it as a tactical decision to give a little ground.

His assistant Drover is the other half of it. Drover forgets his own questions, answers questions nobody asked and falls over when he sees a pretty beagle. Long stretches are just the two of them going round in circles, and children find this sort of thing enormously funny.

One thing to know. The voice is thickly Texan and stays that way. Fixing to, by George, ain't, derned, fellers, feller. A confident 8 year old will roll with it. A reader who is still working hard at decoding may find it slower going, so it is worth reading the first chapter together.

What to read next

If your reader wants more of Hank thinking far too highly of himself, The Curse of the Incredible Priceless Corncob is stocked too. Same ranch, same put-upon Drover, and this time Hank comes into what he is convinced is a fortune.