Hi Hank-fans, 

You won't want to miss this excellent article about the March 2017 mega-fires. It includes an interview with John R. Erickson, and a lot of other stories: 

http://features.texasmonthly.com/editorial/the-day-the-fire-came/

From the article: 

"Around 2:30 p.m., there was a report of another Texas fire, this one near the town of Perryton, in the northeast corner of the Panhandle. John Erickson—a 73-year-old rancher who also writes the best-selling Hank the Cowdog children’s book series about a smelly but lovable cowdog that lives on a Panhandle ranch—drove his pickup to the top of a bluff to get a look at it. Over the years, Erickson had seen his share of prairie fires. In The Case of the Blazing Sky, his fifty-first Hank book (Erickson has published 69 of them since 1983), he has Hank tell his young readers, “I guess you know what strong wind does to a fire. In dry weather, it will turn a little fire into a roaring monster . . . a roaring, leaping, hissing monster.” That afternoon, standing on the bluff, Erickson realized a monster was on its way. He watched the fire triple in size. The smoke, he would later say, looked like a cloud from an atom bomb explosion. He drove back to his ranch house and told his wife, Kris, to pack some clothes in a suitcase. They needed to get out of there as soon as they could."