The Trouble with Chickens (4 page)

Chapter 11
Why Me?

V
ince's shadow had disappeared, and the commotion made it clear that it no longer
behooved
us to
rendezvous
.

I didn't have to turn around to tell what was going on behind me.

Sugar was coming at me as fast as those freaky little chickadee legs would take her.

She hadn't just inherited her mother's eyes, she'd inherited her mother's crazy.

“You're going in, right?” asked Sugar.

I rolled my eyes.

“I'm not going anywhere until I have more information.”

“You have all the information you need. Poppy and Sweetie are in the house. You said so yourself.”

“No, I said the trail leads to the house. Are you listening to me? Do you even have ears?”

For the first time that day, I bothered to check to make sure chickens had ears.

They do.

Sugar looked over at the house. The back steps were just a few yards away.

To the right was an old birdbath.

To the left was a droopy tomato plant.

Barb must have saved all the pretty for the front of the house.

“I'm going in,” Sugar chirped.

She was off in a flash with her eyes locked on the doggie door.

In that second I was sure of only one thing: If she went in, she wasn't coming out.

I grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and looked for someplace safe to stash her for a few minutes.

I tossed her up on the birdbath.

“Sit down and keep quiet.”

She kicked a pebble at me.

I thought about the small town in the Midwest that had held a parade in my honor after I pulled three tornado victims out from under a mountain of debris. If you had told me then that I'd someday be dodging pebbles tossed by a baby chicken, I would have bitten you.

Hard.

Like I said, I didn't belong here.

I was as out of place in the country as the guy I once pulled out of a snowy cave in his pajamas.

Life is strange, mister.

Chapter 12
Come on Down!

T
he stairs leading up to the back door were steep and narrow.

Each one sagged a little more than the one above it.

The back door was rusty and crooked, with one small window and a floral shade.

I steadied myself on my back paws and then peered in through the strip of glass beneath the bottom of the shade. I could see down a long, dark corridor with a polished linoleum floor. Off to the right, I could just make out the edge of a refrigerator in an orange kitchen. Straight ahead, at the end of the hallway, was a dark room with a big-screen TV showing a game show. The game-show host was laughing while an energetic woman in a wrinkled green dress was jumping up and down.

It was dizzying.

I had to look away to clear my head.

I looked back down the long, dark corridor.

I could make out the dim, gleaming arc of a giant plastic cone.

Vince was sitting on the couch, but only for a second.

Before I could even get my front paws back down to the top step, he leaped off that couch and charged the back door. Except at the moment that Vince should have been crashing through the doggie door, he was just crashing.

He was trying to get out, but the funnel had other ideas.

That mutt was in the fight of his life—with his own neck.

He lost the fight.

But I have to admit, at that moment he'd have won just a little bit of my respect if it hadn't been for the fact that he spent his entire life drinking out of a toilet bowl.

It was time to pull Sugar off the birdbath.

One problem.

There was nothing in that birdbath but dirty water and a wet note.

Sugar was gone.

I didn't need the note to tell me where she was. She was in the house.

Call it a hunch.

I met up with Moosh and Dirt back at my doghouse and showed them the note.

I thought Moosh might crack into a million pieces.

“Here are the hard facts—I can't get into that house. Vince will smell me coming a mile away. But we need more information if we're gonna get them out of there.”

Dirt was all ears. Moosh was all mouth.

“I can fit through the door. I'll go in,” she said.

Her left foot was bouncing up and down again.

That strange tic was really getting on my nerves.

“I've seen you under pressure,” I answered. “Bad plan. There's only one of us who can pull this off.”

Dirt planted her feet, raised her dark eyes, and stuck out her skinny chest. She looked like a toothpick with a head. She was about to speak when a ladybug flew by.

“Pretty polka dots,” she remarked.

Oh, brother.

Chapter 13
Rehearsal

S
earch-and-rescue dogs are a rare breed.

We have to be half strength, half perseverance, and half obedience.

Do your own math, tough guy—I'm making a point here.

If you don't have the good sense to follow orders, you are about as useful on a search-and-rescue mission as a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

I wasn't sure what Dirt was made of, but I'd seen her follow Sugar around and do what she was told.

If ever there was going to be a search-and-rescue chicken, she was it.

If ever there was a mutt who could train a rescue chicken, it was me.

I had one hour to teach a baby bird what had taken me and every other working dog I know more than two years of training to learn.

Luckily, we had plenty of chicken feed.

Turns out I'm a natural.

I used a stick in the dirt floor of the doghouse to draw a diagram of what I had seen of the layout of the house. It looked something like this.

I was going to go straight up the front steps and cause a distraction. When Dirt heard Vince barking, she was going to run in through the doggie door and make a mad dash for the couch. The funnel made it impossible for Vince to get into small spaces. Once Dirt was under the couch, she would be safe long enough to catch her breath.

Her mission was to look for any signs of her siblings and then get out.

Dirt was paying close attention.

Moosh did the same.

We went over it a dozen times.

Every time Dirt repeated my instructions back to me, she got a pawful of chicken feed.

Run.

Hide.

Breathe.

Watch.

Run.

I call it RHBWR, but it's hard to pronounce.

We practiced RHBWR for an hour.

Well, an hour in dog time.

Which is seven hours in people time.

Which translates into forty-three hours in chicken time.

It was a long time.

Moosh didn't interfere.

That's when I knew something was up.

Interference was Moosh's middle name.

I was about to send her chick into a strange house with an angry dog, and she had nothing to say.

I was so busy being search-and-rescue teacher of the year that I didn't realize who the actual student was.

I thought I was training Dirt.

But I had actually trained Moosh.

She stuck around just long enough to learn what she needed to know.

Then she used Dirt to distract me while she snuck off to RHBWR.

I had no idea how long she'd been gone.