In 2009, Maverick Books published John R. Erickson’s Story Craft: Reflections of Faith, Culture and Writing from the Author of Hank of the Cowdog. With permission from the publisher, we plan to post in our Saturday Series a chapter each month over the next half year.

On the morning of June 6, 2009, the country between our ranch and the cemetery in Lipscomb, Texas, was green from recent rains, verdant pastures flecked with spectacular sprays of a wildflower we call “Indian blanket.”

If Jim had been around that morning, he would have been smiling that big, crooked-tooth smile, and enjoying the sight of good grass, beautiful flowers, and cattle that were fat, slick-haired, and content. The news of his death had spread fast over a four-county area of the northeastern Texas Panhandle, aided by cellular phones and emails that he never used.

Mother’s Day in May and Father’s Day in June are major card-selling and gift-giving holidays, but National Grandparents Day in September is virtually ignored. That’s too bad, because without grandparents we wouldn’t have those holidays to celebrate.

Here’s a humble proposal: Why not move Grandparents Day to April so the commemorations would be in proper genealogical order? Here’s WORLD’s contribution to that effort: John R. Erickson, author of 70 beloved Hank the Cowdog books, writes here about his grandparents Mabel and Buck. —Marvin Olasky

March 6, 2017, had an ominous feel about it. The day was unusually warm for March and by 11 o’clock, the wind was howling out of the southwest, gusting to 50 mph. Everyone living on a ranch in the Texas Panhandle was aware that, for three days, the National Weather Service had issued red flag warnings for this day: extreme danger of wildfires.

Rupert Sheldrake is a British scientist who holds a doctorate in biochemistry from Cambridge University and the author of an intriguing book called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (Crown Publishers 1999).