Books with author Mary Ellen Cook

This is a true story of Dinner, a real Ameraucana chicken. Dinner is hanging out with her friends Weasley, a Maine Coon cat and Norman, a Rhodesian Ridgeback dog. They all live on a farm.Dinner shares with Norman and Weasley the story of how she came to be on the farm and some of her experiences since being there. She was bullied and beaten up by the older chickens, lost a friend and a sister, and also had a very close encounter with a coyote. She has a very happy and privileged life, is very grateful for the life she has, and for her two special friends. As of the publication of this book, all three friends are alive and are still living on the farm.

When a puppy goes to the pet store so he can find a special family to take him home, hes understandably nervous. But then he sees all the other puppies, kittens, fish, and birds playing. Hes happy to join everyone.When he wakes up from a nap, he looks out the pet store window and sees a beautiful little girl staring at him. Next to her is a man with a friendly face who calls the little girl KC. Is this going to be his new family, the puppy wonders.When the puppy arrives at his new home, he begins to investigate and meets everyone in his new family. Theres even a little boy thats just his size to play with. The pup does some more investigating and his new mom tells him his name is Tanner Dog. You are a good boy Tanner Dog. We love you, she tells him.Tanner Dogthe private investigatordoesnt know it yet, but there will be plenty more mysteries to explore, and in the future, hell have some help from the professor cat next door, Mr. Vlad.

When Tanner Dog meets the cat next door, they decide to go to explore the park.Mr. Vlad the cat knows that not all dogs and cats get along, and at first hes careful with his new friend. When Tanner Dog asks Mr. Vlad if he wants to go back to the park, Mr. Vlad says he needs to check his work schedule.Thats when Tanner Dog learns that Mr. Vlad is a professor of knowledge who spends most of his time reading books from the library.Tanner Dog tells Mr. Vlad that hes a private investigator, and that the two of them should team up to investigate mysteries. You can do the research from your library books. Then together we can understand things we are curious about! he says.Mr. Vlad agrees, and the first mystery they investigate is, What is a best friend? The question leads to a series of adventures that ends with a startling answer that will change their lives forever.

Excerpt:A September afternoon in the Big Horn mountains! The air crystal clear; the sky cloudless; the outlines of the hills distinct! Elk Creek Valley lay golden in the sunshine, silent save for the incessant hum of locust and cricket, the hurrying of the creek waters, and the occasional bellowing of steers on the range beyond the foot-hills; deserted except for the distant cattle, a coyote stealing across the hills, a pheasant scurrying through the buck-brush by the creek, and some cotton-tail rabbits and prairie dogs, who, sure of safety, meant to enjoy the sunshine while they might.The foot-hills more than half-encircled the Valley. North, east, and south they tumbled, their brown, closely-cropped sides glowing here and there with the yellow of the quaking-asps, the red of hawthorn, and the bronze of service-berry. Above them rose the higher ranges, clothed in gray-green sagebrush and scant timber, and cut by canyon-forming mountain storms, invisible from the Valley; and far above all, seemingly near, but in reality miles away, the mountains extended their blue, snow-furrowed summits toward a bluer sky. Peak above peak they rose—some isolated and alone, others leaning upon the shoulders of the higher—all silent, majestic, mysterious, as though they held in their great hearts the secrets of the world—secrets of which Elk Creek Valley could never know. Yet the Valley looked very happy and content. Perhaps it had lain so long beneath their protection that it knew no fear.The creek, rushing madly from the northern foothills, and fed by melting snow from the higher mountains, had cut a canyon for itself in its tumultuous journey from the hills; but as the land became more level, it slackened its pace, content to make but a slight depression through the Valley. Across it toward the west, beyond a great gap in the foothills, stretched an open plateau, which rose in undulations, and extended as far as one could see toward other far distant mountains, on less clear days dim and hazy of outline, to-day almost as blue and distinct as the nearer ranges, though sixty miles away. This great sea of open prairie rolling westward was cut in as many pieces and bore as many colors as a patchwork quilt. Golden wheat-fields, the wheat shocked and piled in wigwams on the plain, met acres of black, freshly-plowed soil, which, in turn, bordered upon the tender green of alfalfa and of newly grown winter grain. Scattered over the prairie stretches, at intervals of a mile, perhaps of several, were homes—here, large ranch houses with out-lying buildings—there, the rough shack of a lone homesteader.

She—Virginia Hunter—was a year younger, and for sixteen as tall and strong as he for seventeen. She was not pretty, but there was something singularly attractive about her clear, fresh skin, brown now, except for the red of her cheeks, her even white teeth, and her earnest gray eyes, at times merry, but often thoughtful, which looked so straight at you from under brows and lashes of black. Her golden-brown hair curled about her temples, but it was brushed back quite simply and braided down her back where it was well out of her way. A person riding could not bother about her hair. She sat her horse as though he were a part of her, holding her reins loosely in her brown left hand, her right hanging idly at her side. The wind blew back the loosened hair about her face, and the ends of the red handkerchief, knotted cow-boy fashion, under the collar of her khaki shirt. She, like the boy, seemed a part of the country—free, natural, wholesome—and she shared its charm.They had been comrades for years—these two—for, in the ranch country, homes are often widely separated, and the frequent society of many persons rare. Virginia’s home lay up the Valley, beyond the first range of the foot-hills, while the Keith ranch was situated on the prairie, west beyond the Gap. Three miles apart across country, four by the road; but three or four miles in Wyoming are like so many squares in Boston, and the Keiths and Hunters considered themselves near neighbors. This afternoon Virginia had ridden over to say good-by to all the dear Keiths—Mr. David, Mother Mary, Donald’s older brother Malcolm, and his younger, Kenneth, the farm-hands busy with the threshing, and the men in from the range to help with the wheat; for they were all her friends, and now that she was going so far away to school, they seemed nearer and dearer—indeed, next to her father and those upon their own ranch, the dearest of her world.They had been quite as sad as she to say good-by. “The country won’t be the same without you, my lass,” Mr. David had said in his genial Scotch way; and Donald’s mother, whom Virginia had called “Mother Mary,” since the death of her own dear mother six years ago, had kissed her quite as though she were her own daughter. Even Malcolm had come in from the wheat field to shake her by the hand and wish her good luck, and little Kenneth’s feelings had been quite wounded because Virginia felt she must decline to carry one of his pet foxes away with her to boarding-school. Then Donald’s father had granted the request in the boy’s eyes that he might be excused from threshing to ride up the Valley and home with Virginia. So now their horses, good friends, too, stood side by side on the brow of the Mine, while their riders looked down the Valley, beyond the cottonwood-bordered creek, and across the wide, rolling prairie to the far away mountains; and then, turning in their saddles, to those ranges and peaks towering above them.Virginia drew a long breath.“We’re like Moses on Mount Nebo, looking away into the Promised Land, aren’t we, Don?” Then, as he laughed, “Do you suppose there’s any country so lovely as ours? Is there anything in the East like this? Do you think I’ll be homesick, Don?”He laughed again, used to her questions.The Girl from the Big Horn Country, THE "BROADENING EXPERIENCE" BEGINS, "PERTAINING ESPECIALLY TO DECORUM", THE LAST STRAW, VESPER SERVICE, THE SENIOR PAGEANT