Lily to the Rescue: The Not-So-Stinky Skunk

by W. Bruce Cameron

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  Copyright Page

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  Dedicated to Georgia Lee Cameron and all the other wonderful people saving lives at Life is Better Rescue in Denver, Colorado. I am very proud of all the work you do!

  1

  “Lily, Lily, Lily!” Maggie Rose said to me. “We’re going camping, Lily!”

  Maggie Rose is my girl, and I am her dog. When she is happy, I am very happy. When she is excited, I am very excited. She was obviously excited and happy at this moment, so I jumped up to put my feet on her knees and then dropped down to run in circles around the kitchen. Whatever was going on, it was the best!

  I looked up, wagging, when Mom came in the kitchen carrying a bag. I could smell something delicious in that bag!

  “We were out of dog food, so I brought some from the shelter,” Mom said. She set the bag down and I padded over to sniff it more carefully. “Would you put it in the pantry, Maggie Rose?”

  I was excited when Maggie Rose lifted the bag, grunting a little. “Can you get it?” Mom asked. “It’s heavy.”

  “I got it,” my girl replied. I followed her, my nose up, as she put the bag in a closet and shut the door. She skipped back into the kitchen, though I felt that a celebration could include opening the bag at that moment.

  “You are such a help with all the animals, Maggie Rose,” Mom said, praising her. “I really appreciate everything you do for our rescue operation.”

  “And Lily!” my girl replied. “Don’t forget, she’s a rescue, too!”

  “And Lily,” Mom agreed.

  My girl and I ran into the living room, where the floor is softer. We had a very good wrestle with an old towel because we were both so happy.

  “Dad’s taking us, Lily,” Maggie Rose whispered. “We’re going up to the mountains. I never get to spend time with just Dad!”

  I love it when my girl talks to me. I jumped into her lap and licked her ear and under her chin, where she tastes especially delicious.

  I didn’t know what she was telling me, but I knew it was good.

  Maggie Rose flopped down on her back so that I could lie down on top of her and pant in her face.

  “Dad says we’re going to take care of some prairie dogs first,” she told me. I heard the word “dogs” and licked her chin again. Obviously, whatever she was talking about was going to be very good, because she’d said “dogs.”

  “And then we’ll go and camp. You and me and Dad.” Maggie Rose hugged me. “Just us!”

  “Hey,” said a voice that was not as happy as Maggie Rose’s. “What do you mean, you’re going camping with Dad? Just you?”

  Maggie Rose’s older brother, Bryan, had come into the room. I ran to sniff Bryan.

  “If you’re going camping, I want to go, too,” Bryan said. “No fair if you get to go and I don’t.”

  “Bryan’s right,” said another voice. Maggie Rose’s oldest brother, Craig, was standing in the doorway, listening to them talk. I went to greet him, and then whipped my head around to stare at my girl.

  Something was wrong. Suddenly, just like that, Maggie Rose was not as happy as she’d been a moment ago!

  “But Dad said it was just going to be him and me,” she said. “You guys are always doing stuff with Dad, and I don’t get to go.”

  “Stuff like what?” Bryan demanded.

  I pounced on the old towel and shook it. This would make Maggie Rose happy again!

  “He goes to your games all the time,” she said, “and takes you to the park to practice soccer and baseball.”

  “Well, if you did a sport, he’d do that for you, too,” Craig pointed out. “You could join the soccer team at school. Or T-ball.”

  Bryan snorted. “She’s too much of a runt to be any good at soccer.”

  Maggie Rose’s back stiffened. I could tell this was some kind of wrestling match going on between her and her brothers. I used to live with my three brothers, before I came to live at Home with my girl, and I remembered wrestling with them.

  People sometimes wrestle with words instead of jumping on each other and rolling around in the dirt. I don’t really understand how it works, but I can tell when they are wrestling. I can also tell when somebody wins.

  Right now, Maggie Rose was wrestling back. But she hadn’t won.

  “Don’t call me a runt,” she said. “You’re supposed to stop that.”

  “Yeah, Bryan, knock it off,” Craig agreed.

  Bryan flopped down on the couch and snorted again.

  “And I don’t want to play soccer or T-ball. I’m busy most days after school helping Mom at the animal rescue,” Maggie Rose went on. “Anyway, I don’t see why I should have to play soccer just to spend time with Dad. That’s not fair.”

  “And I don’t see why you get some sort of special girl camping trip just for you,” Bryan said. “That’s not fair, either.”

  When a dog doesn’t understand what people are doing, sometimes the best thing to do is to hunt for treats. I jumped up on the couch to sniff at Bryan’s jeans. I could tell that he’d recently had a peanut butter sandwich in one of his pockets.

  I pushed my nose as deep into the pocket as it would go. There was no sandwich in there now, but if I kept sniffing, maybe one would appear.

  “Dad!” Bryan called. “Maggie Rose says she’s going camping with you.”

  I pulled my head out of Bryan’s pocket to see Dad join us in the living room. I wagged. Mom followed as well, standing just behind Craig in the doorway. She didn’t say anything, probably because she was holding a towel. When I have a towel, it pretty much takes all my concentration.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Dad agreed.

  I could tell that Dad didn’t have any peanut butter sandwiches, so I stuck my nose back into Bryan’s pocket.

  “We want to go, too,” Bryan said.

  “Yeah, come on, Dad,” Craig said. “We haven’t been camping since last spring, when it rained the whole time. We should get to go, too. It’s not fair if Maggie Rose is the only one.”

  “But Dad, you said it would just be you and me,” Maggie Rose protested.

  Her voice sounded so worried that I pulled my head out of Bryan’s pocket. I realized I had let her down. To be a good dog, I needed to comfort her, especially since no sandwich had shown up in Bryan’s jeans. Something was really bothering her. I jumped to the floor, the peanut butter scent forgotten. Maggie Rose was sitting with her legs crossed. I leaped into her lap and gazed up into her face. What was happening?

  “Well,” Dad said thoughtfully. “I can see what you boys mean.”

  “No,” my girl moaned. I could see Maggie Rose slu
mp in on herself.

  She had lost the wrestling match.

  2

  “Do you mind if your brothers come too, Maggie Rose?” Dad asked.

  “But Dad,” Maggie Rose said in a sad, soft voice. “I was hoping it would be a father-daughter camping trip.”

  Dad frowned. Now something was bothering him. “Oh,” he said.

  Maggie Rose turned her face away. A good dog right there in the room, and everyone was unhappy. No one said anything; they were probably waiting for me to come up with something cheerful. I should have brought in a stick from the yard!

  “I’m sorry, Maggie Rose,” Dad said.

  My girl sighed. “It’s okay,” she muttered.

  Inspired, I flopped on my back and exposed my tummy. A belly rub makes everyone happy!

  Craig stirred. I glanced at him. He was watching Maggie Rose carefully. “You know what?” he said suddenly. “Maybe Maggie Rose is right. She can do a father-daughter trip, and then next time, we can do a father-sons camping trip.”

  “What?” Bryan demanded.

  “Sure. We can go to a movie with Mom or something,” Craig continued.

  “That could work,” Mom agreed. “I have a stray cat coming into the rescue with an eye infection I need to treat, but the rest of my day is free. A movie sounds fun.”

  Maggie Rose brightened, a small grin on her face. I had done it—I had cheered her up!

  “I want to go camping,” Bryan insisted stubbornly.

  “Come on, Bryan,” Craig urged.

  “No,” Bryan said.

  “Let’s vote,” Maggie Rose suggested.

  Dad smiled. “Good idea, Maggie Rose.”

  I had even made Dad happy!

  “Who says this time it’s father-daughter?” Craig asked.

  Everyone held their hand up in the air, except Bryan. He was the only person I hadn’t yet managed to make happy. I went to him and put my nose right in his peanut butter pants.

  “And who says it’s all of us?” Craig asked.

  Bryan lifted his hand in the air, and I gazed up at it curiously. If he thought he was going to throw a ball or something, he was going to be disappointed; his hand was empty.

  “All right then, Maggie Rose,” Dad said. “Just you and me.”

  “Yay!” Maggie Rose cheered.

  I wagged. What a fun day!

  “Let’s go do something outside, Bryan,” Craig suggested. The two of them left the room. Dad leaned down to pet my head, because I was such a good dog who made everyone happy except Bryan, who maybe just needed a sandwich that I would be willing to help him eat.

  “I liked how they handled that themselves,” Mom observed.

  “Me, too,” Dad replied. Mom turned and went back toward the kitchen, where all the food is, which I thought was a promising development.

  “We have a stop to make along the way,” Dad told Maggie Rose. “There’s a colony of prairie dogs up near the campground that needs relocating. Someone’s putting in a housing development, and the prairie dogs are too close to the new construction. They could get hurt.”

  My ears perked up and I wagged. There was that word “dogs” again.

  “Then we’ll head up and pitch a tent, just you and me,” Dad concluded.

  “And Lily!” Maggie Rose said.

  We rolled on the floor and wrestled with the towel some more, and I let her pull it right out of my mouth a few times, so that she’d keep on being that happy.

  * * *

  A few days later, Maggie Rose was very busy putting things into a box made of cloth. She stuffed clothes in there, and her pajamas, and a pair of shoes.

  She picked up one of my favorite toys—two old socks that used to belong to Craig before they were mine. They were knotted together to make a long rope.

  I lunged. Hooray! We were going to play Pull-on-the-Socks!

  I got my teeth into one end of the socks and tugged. Maggie Rose tugged back.

  “No, Lily, no!” she kept saying, but she was giggling, so I knew she was as happy to be playing with me as I was to be playing with her. Finally, she whisked the toy out of my mouth.

  “No, Lily—I’m trying to pack it in the suitcase, so we’ll have something for you to play with!” she told me, and she stuffed the socks into the cloth box along with all the other things.

  I sat and stared in confusion. How could we tug on a sock if she was going to put it in that box?

  But I soon forgot about it, because Maggie Rose called me out for a car ride in the truck. Rides with my girl are one of my favorite things. Dad sat in the front of the truck. In the back, Maggie Rose rolled the window down a little, so that I could put my nose to the crack and sniff and sniff and sniff.

  At first I smelled the city—cars and trucks, with their sour odors of smoke and metal and hot oil; pavement; and all sorts of people living close together, lots with food smells on them. There were dogs, too, and many other animals. The city packed all of these scents into one thick, dense smell.

  We drove for a while, and the houses started to be spaced farther and farther apart. There were more trees and wider stretches of grass. There were more animals out here, too, not just dogs. Sometimes we passed horses or cows in fields, who just stared in jealousy that there was a dog in a car staring back; and sometimes there were other animals that I could not see but only smell, faint on the air.

  “I can’t wait to see the prairie dogs. They’re so cute!” Maggie Rose said eagerly.

  Dad nodded. “I think so, too. But they can be a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?” Maggie Rose asked. “They’re so little. It’s not like they can hurt somebody.”

  “Actually, they can,” Dad said. “They carry fleas, and fleas can carry diseases. So you and Lily should both stay in the truck.”

  I put my head in Maggie Rose’s lap with a long sigh of contentment.

  I love my girl.

  “Prairie dogs live in family groups—coteries—so there can be a lot of them. And they’re rodents. They eat seeds and grasses, mostly. They dig tunnels underground. Most people don’t want a prairie dog tunnel under their lawn. Or under a field. Sometimes a horse will slip into a prairie dog hole and break a leg.”

  “Well, maybe people shouldn’t build houses where prairie dogs live, then!” Maggie Rose declared, a little fiercely.

  Dad shook his head. “Well, people want houses, Maggie. We live in a house, don’t we? And horses and cows need fields. What we’ve got to do—what it’s my job to do—is balance out the needs. Try and find a safe place for animals, where they’re not going to create a problem for people.”

  “So we’re going to catch them and set them free somewhere else?” Maggie Rose asked.

  Dad nodded. “That’s the idea. The problem, though, is that prairie dogs are really hard to round up. Today we’re going to try something new. If it works, we’ll have a safe way to catch them.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” Maggie Rose asked anxiously. I wagged, thinking that if she was worried about something, we should get Craig’s socks out of the cloth box.

  Dad didn’t answer right away. Then he gave Maggie Rose a serious look. “If this doesn’t work, I am not sure we can save the prairie dogs.”

  3

  Maggie Rose’s body tightened in a way I knew was a mixture of angry and afraid. I nosed her hand. Dad glanced at her again. “Oh, sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to upset you. I think we’re going to be fine. Basically, we’re going to catch the prairie dogs by vacuum suction.”

  “What?” Maggie Rose spluttered. She sounded so surprised that I cocked my head at her, staring into her face. “You’re going to vacuum up the prairie dogs?” she asked. “Like with a vacuum cleaner?”

  I could tell from Dad’s voice that he was amused. “Sort of. It’s a new technology. It used to be there was no safe way to get rid of a prairie dog coterie. People would have to shoot them or poison them—”

  “No!” Maggie Rose cried out.

 
“Right. No good,” Dad agreed. “So someone came up with this idea. It really is a lot like a giant vacuum cleaner. There’s a hose that goes into the tunnel and just sucks the prairie dogs right out and into a padded cage.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt them?” Maggie Rose asked. She sounded a little anxious, and I licked her hands to reassure her. “I wouldn’t like it if someone pulled the roof off my house and sucked me up!”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s scary for them,” Dad said. “That’s partly why I’m going, to make sure no animals get hurt. If it seems too rough, I’ll put a stop to it. But if it works, it’s really the best thing. Getting the prairie dogs away from humans means everybody can live in peace. So let’s cross our fingers.”

  Maggie Rose still seemed worried. I could not understand it at all. Both of them kept saying “dog,” so we must have been going somewhere fun. Probably a dog park! What was there to be worried about in a dog park?

  But when the truck came to a stop and Dad climbed out, Maggie Rose and I stayed in the back seat. So clearly, we were not at a dog park at all. I never have to stay in the car at a dog park.

  At least Maggie Rose opened the windows so I could see and smell. She clicked my leash on my collar, though, and held it so that I could not jump out.

  There were several people walking around outside, and I wanted to sniff them all and make new friends. Also, there was a fascinating smell drifting toward me on the breeze. Somewhere close by was a completely new animal I had never met before.

  I wanted to meet that animal very much. I am very good at meeting animals! I have met a crow named Casey and two pigs and a squirrel, plus so many dogs and cats I have lost count. And a ferret named Freddie, of course. They are all my friends.

  When was I going to get a chance to make friends with this new animal?

  The people gathered together in groups and talked, and then they walked around and talked some more. I looked up at Maggie Rose and whined so that she’d know to let me out.