by Rosa Jordan
“That’s about the only animal we don’t have,” Kyle retorted.
“Oh, there’s lots we don’t have … yet,” Wendy assured him. “So why were you chasing this poor baby?”
“I was trying to put her in the bathroom,” Kyle said. “At least till morning. But I fell over something in the hallway.”
“The cage with the baby foxes,” Wendy said. “I didn’t want to put them on the back porch because I thought that since foxes are predators, the bunnies out there would smell them and be frightened.”
“Good thing we’ve got two bathrooms,” Kyle said. “Seems like you’ve had some kind of animal in the one downstairs ever since we moved in.”
“Only when they first arrive, so I can check on them during the night.” She gently stroked the fawn, who was nuzzling her as if she were its mother and it was expecting to find a place to nurse. She was pleased to see that it had calmed down.
She glanced over at Kyle, who seemed to be on the verge of dozing off. “We should build this one an enclosure over on the back side, well away from the house. Right away, so it doesn’t get attached to us.”
“Now?” Kyle asked in a half-awake voice. “In the middle of the night?”
“Of course not!” Wendy rose and kissed him lightly on the lips. “What I want you to do right now is feed those little foxes. While I bed down the fawn and feed the baby bunnies.”
Wendy took the fawn into the bathroom and left a pile of towels on the floor where it could curl up when it wanted. She then went into the kitchen and from a row of various-sized bottles, chose one of the larger ones, the size normally used for a human baby. In it she put a special milk formula she used for fawns, plus vitamins.
The fawn took the bottle eagerly. As it suckled, Wendy stroked the soft tan coat, still speckled with white spots. “Like velvet,” Wendy murmured, and at that, Velvet became the fawn’s name.
Wendy finished feeding the fawn and shut her into the bathroom. Then she returned to the living room carrying the bunny babies, along with a cup of warm milk and an eyedropper to feed them. Kyle was sitting on the couch giving one of the fox cubs its bottle.
Although Kyle often came home tired and irritated by the lowlifes he had to deal with as a policeman, Wendy didn’t feel guilty asking him to take ten minutes to feed an orphan animal. Already he had begun to relax, just as she did when she held a small helpless creature in her arms and did what she could to help it survive.
Wendy finished feeding the baby rabbits and put them back in their nest box. She checked on the fawn and saw that it had lain down on the towels. Then she went back into the living room to see how Kyle was doing with the baby foxes.
He had fallen asleep. The little foxes had, too. Kyle barely stirred when she lifted them out of his lap and carried them back to the nest box. Then she caught Kyle by the hand and pulled him to his feet. “Come on, Lover Boy. Bedtime.”
Kyle trudged up the stairs behind her and tiredly stripped off his police uniform. As he climbed in next her, Wendy said, “Thanks, honey. That little fawn was the best birthday present you could have got me.”
“Oh my gosh!” Kyle jerked wide awake. “Is this your birthday?”
“It wasn’t when you left for work. But it’s after midnight, so now it is.”
“Oh.” Kyle was silent for a moment, and then asked, “Is that really all you wanted? Another animal?”
“As long as I can have all the animals I want, I’ll be happy,” Wendy murmured.
Kyle sighed deeply. “To think, all the girls I could have married who would have been satisfied with a piece of jewellery for their birthday.”
Wendy kissed him on the neck. “You missed your chance, didn’t you, darling? Or else you got really, really lucky.”
16
FULL HOUSE
“This fawn is totally imprinted on humans,” Wendy complained the next day, as she grabbed Velvet to prevent her from following Kyle out the door. “I wish people wouldn’t hand-raise wild animals unless they’re prepared to take care of them for life. But no. They only want them as pets when they’re little and cute!”
“Yep,” Kyle agreed. “Then the owner says, ‘This beast has got to be a real nuisance. Why don’t we give it to that Collins woman. She’ll take anything.’”
“Very funny.” Wendy pushed Velvet away from the door and followed Kyle out to the car. “If you handle wild animals right, they’re not such a problem. Once their injuries are healed or they’re grown up, they can go right back to the wild. And if you take good care of domestic animals, they’re no trouble, either.”
“Oh, you mean like your llamas, who almost caused us to lose our mail service?”
“It’s Velvet I’m worried about,” Wendy said, preferring not to discuss the unfriendly way her llamas had treated the postman. “Whoever had Velvet before must have babied her to the point that she thinks she’s a human. When I took her for a walk across the pasture today, she stuck so close I practically tripped over her every step. Like I was her mama and might disappear any minute.”
“I guess she’s got reason to feel that way, since her real mother did. But you can’t keep her in the house much longer. Better get that new pen built this weekend. Unless you think it would be okay to put her in with the llamas.”
Wendy shook her head. “I don’t entirely trust them. Besides, she’s so little. In the wild, a fawn would stay with its mother for at least a year.”
Kyle rolled his eyes. “I can see it now. A yearling deer clumping up and down the stairs, following a certain blonde woman it thinks is its mama.”
Wendy playfully rolled her eyes at Kyle and waved goodbye before heading back into the house. The instant she stepped inside, there was Velvet, her little nose against the back of Wendy’s knee as if maybe, by some miracle, it would suddenly give milk. Wendy stood there for a minute, trying to decide whether she should go out and clean the llama pen, go upstairs and put in some time on her home-based accounting business, or drive to town and get some wire to build a pen for Velvet. She glanced down at the fawn nuzzling her leg. “You are so little!” she repeated. “How can I put you outside in a pen all by yourself?”
Just then she heard a vehicle turn off at their road. Although she no longer panicked every time she saw strange men in town, she still felt a tingle of fear when strangers showed up at the farm, especially when she was there alone. She moved to the living-room window where she could she see the long driveway leading from the highway to the house. She recognized the pickup. It was the veterinarian, Dr. Singh.
As Wendy stepped out onto the porch to greet him, he called, “Glad you’re home, girl. I brought you something.” The doctor lifted a pet carrier out of the truck and set it on the porch.
“You ever had one of these?” he asked.
Wendy knelt next to the carrier and looked in. A pair of gold eyes looked out at her. “A bobcat!” she exclaimed. “I sometimes fed the one at Red River Ranch, but I’ve never taken care of a wild one.”
“This one’s not exactly wild,” Dr. Singh explained. “A hiker brought him to me when he was about a month old. Found him lying on a trail, more dead than alive. I don’t know much about wild cats so I gave him to my wife to look after. She treated him like an ordinary housecat. Then she decided she didn’t want him in the house so I moved him out to the barn. But the cows don’t like having him around either, and his smell drives the horses crazy.”
The bobcat butted his head against the cage door. When Wendy stroked his fur through the wire, he purred like a small motor. “He didn’t try to leave?”
“I figured he would, since there is that patch of woods right behind my place. But he didn’t. Oh, sometimes he gets as far as the neighbours, and I can tell you, they don’t like that. But mostly he hangs around the farm.” The vet shrugged. “You know how it is, Wendy.
You get a wild animal so young it has to be hand-fed and then it doesn’t develop a fear of humans. This one will walk right up to anybody.”
As he spoke, Dr. Singh opened the carrier door and lifted the little bobcat out. Although it was only a kitten, it was as big as an extra-large tomcat. As soon as it was in the vet’s arms, the purr grew louder.
“What a fat little rascal!” Wendy exclaimed.
“He should be fat. My wife feeds him constantly, and he doesn’t hesitate to clean up whatever kibble the neighbours set out for their cats and dogs. He hunts, too. I haven’t seen a rat or a mouse around the barn since I put him out there.” Dr. Singh passed the bobcat to Wendy. “Eleven pounds, eight ounces. And he’s not even six months old.”
“You want me to take him?” Wendy asked, although she already knew the answer. Here was another creature neither wild nor tame, being brought to her “animal farm” because it had no place else to go. How could she refuse? Dr. Singh had treated a number of animals for her, often not even charging a fee. She certainly didn’t want to offend the only veterinarian for miles around. “What’s his name?”
“We just called him ‘the bobcat.’ Doesn’t really matter what you call him, because he’s not a come-here cat. Pretty much does as he pleases.”
“I’ll do what I can for him,” Wendy said.
“Thanks, Wendy. I knew I could count on you.” Dr. Singh put the pet carrier back in his pickup and drove off, leaving her on the porch with an armful of purring bobcat.
“What am I going to do with you?” Wendy asked the bobcat, but the question was really for herself. All the small cages and nest boxes on the back porch were filled, and besides, putting a predator like a bobcat back there would upset the smaller animals. If she let him wander around loose outside, he might go into the llama pen. They’d know he was a predator, too. Only instead of being frightened, like Dr. Singh’s cows and horses, they would probably stomp him to death.
And then there was Velvet, who now had the run of in the house. A bobcat is a fawn’s natural enemy, so Velvet should have been afraid of the bobcat, too. But this fawn had not learned that from its mother. When Wendy stepped back inside the house, Velvet ignored the bobcat and began nuzzling Wendy’s leg, as if she was mommy and had been gone all day instead of just out on the porch for fifteen minutes.
The bobcat showed no interest in the fawn, either. It wanted to do what all cats do when they come into a strange place: move freely about and explore its surroundings. Wendy walked into the bathroom. Velvet followed. Then Wendy slipped quickly out, leaving the fawn shut up inside. “Sorry, Velvet,” she apologized. “But you’re going to have to stay in there for a day or two, until I can get a pen built for this little bobcat.”
Wendy then let the bobcat loose to explore the house. She felt bad about confining Velvet, but it was only temporary. Soon she would have a proper enclosure ready for her newest charge. Then she would build a pen where Velvet could live until she was old enough to be released — if it turned out that she could be released.
Wendy went into the kitchen to prepare Velvet’s afternoon bottle, her mind busy with plans for the enclosures she would build for the fawn and the bobcat. She opened the refrigerator to get the milk and —
What happened next was so fast that for a moment Wendy wasn’t sure what had happened. All of a sudden there were food containers, fruit, and cans of soda rolling all over the floor. And in the refrigerator, on the bottom shelf where that stuff had been, was a bobcat.
Wendy stared down at it in amazement. She had heard of animals choosing a special place in the house and laying claim to that spot. But the refrigerator?
“Bob!” she said sternly. “Get out of the fridge!”
The little bobcat gazed up at her in what seemed like a friendly way, and didn’t move. When she reached down to lift him out, he took a bare-clawed swing at her hand. Wendy jerked her hand back and stared at the bloody scratches. “Why you little …!”
She stopped herself from name-calling, because that wasn’t going to get him out of the refrigerator. She went to the living-room closet, where she kept a pair of heavy leather gloves. Just as she opened the closet door, Danny dashed up onto the porch.
“Wendy, Wendy!” he yelled through the screen door. “I’ve got a —”
“Danny, stop!” she shouted. “I mean, come in, but be careful. There’s a bobcat loose in the house! Don’t let him get out!”
“Oh!” Danny exclaimed. He looked in both directions, and seeing nothing, slipped inside and slammed the door shut behind him. “Where is he?”
“In the refrigerator.”
17
UNLIKELY FRIENDS
Wendy found her gloves and marched back into the kitchen. The bobcat still lay on the bottom shelf in a space that previously had been filled with food. As Wendy approached, he flattened his ears and let out a horrible growl that made her jump back. Then, bravely and quickly, she grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. He struggled in her grasp, but by then she had him out, and kicked the fridge shut with her foot. The instant the food in the refrigerator disappeared behind the closed door he dropped his fierce attitude and became the same friendly cat he had been when he arrived.
“Where’d he come from?” Danny asked.
“From Dr. Singh,” Wendy said angrily. “And is he going to get an earful from me! He told me his wife didn’t want this cat living in the house, but he didn’t say why.”
Danny continued to stand there, holding his backpack in his arms, looking bewildered. “What was he doing in the fridge?”
“They obviously gave him snacks out of the refrigerator, and he identifies it with food. Not our food — his food. Once a bobcat decides that a particular bit of food is his, look out! I learned that from the one they have at Red River Ranch. It was only the size of a big tomcat, but anytime he thought somebody was about to mess with his food, he was like a flying blender!”
“That one sounded more like a buzz saw,” Danny observed.
Wendy dropped the bobcat onto the floor. He batted playfully at a tomato, then sniffed at a package of cheese. Deciding the cheese was edible, he picked it up and carried it under the table. Growling like a cougar, he proceeded to rip the wrapper off.
Arms folded, Wendy watched him chow down on the cheese. “I just hate it when people dump animals on me like this when I haven’t had time to fix a proper place to keep them!”
“Please don’t be mad,” Danny said in a small voice.
Wendy glanced at the boy in surprise. He stood in the kitchen door, clutching his backpack to his chest, looking truly fearful.
“Why would I be mad at you? It’s not your fault bobcats are the way they are.”
“I know,” Danny said in a small voice. “But if bobcats are so bad, and …” His voice trailed off miserably.
“What, Danny?” Wendy stripped off her gloves, wondering what was wrong with the boy. She suspected his parents got violent when they were angry. Had seeing her annoyance with the bobcat scared him?
“And I brought you another one …” Danny’s voice faded to a whisper.
Suddenly Wendy realized that he wasn’t wearing his backpack, as he usually was when he came in. He was holding it, in a very tender, protective way.
“Danny?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“What do you have in that backpack?”
“A kitten,” he said in a small voice.
“What kind of kitten?”
He jerked his chin toward the bobcat who, having eaten the whole block of cheese, was now calmly washing his face. “That kind,” he said. “But littler.”
For a minute Wendy couldn’t believe it. Then she thought, Why not? It’s been that kind of day. She crossed the room and put an arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Well now, that sounds interesting. What
do you say we go up to my office where we can have a little privacy?”
“What about …?” Danny indicated the food that had been pushed out of the refrigerator and still lay scattered about on the floor.
“I’ll put it away later,” Wendy said. “By then maybe Buzzsaw Bob will have figured out that tomatoes and canned pop and leftover pasta are not bobcat food.”
Once inside Wendy’s office, she shut the door so there would be no chance of the bobcat following them in. Then she turned to Danny. “Okay, let’s see this whatever you’ve got.”
Danny reached into the book bag and brought out a kitten, all hiss, claws, and flailing legs. Oh yeah, Wendy thought. That sounds like a bobcat. Once she got a good look at the greyish kitten with black markings, she saw that Danny was right; it was the same species as the one downstairs, but much smaller.
“Looks like it hasn’t had its eyes open for more than a day or two.” She took the kitten from Danny and held it against her chest. It struggled for a moment, then grew quiet. The warmth of a body and a heartbeat, even a human heartbeat, calmed most baby animals. “Where did you get it?”
“By the road,” Danny said, still looking as if he expected her to yell at him.
“The mother must’ve been nearby. You didn’t see her?”
“I did. She ran across the road. A car coming really fast, from the other direction, hit her. I was a good ways back. When I got up there on my bike, I stopped to see if maybe she was just hurt and I could help her. But she was dead.”
“And the kitten was following her?” Even as she asked the question, Wendy didn’t think that was possible. The kitten seemed too young to be out hunting with its mother.
Danny shook his head. “She was carrying it in her mouth. When the car hit her she went flying through the air. The kitten, too. When I saw she was dead, I walked back and forth in the grass by the road till I found it.” He touched the kitten’s fur tentatively. “I didn’t see any blood on it. Do you think it’s hurt?”