“It’s too weak to hunt. If we don’t feed it soon, it’s going to starve to death.”
“Yeah,” said Travis, “starve to death from, you know, not enough food. For a cat. To eat.”
Ugh, what a terrible liar. I cut him off before he could say anything even more stupid. “And if questions ever came up from, um, anyone, the fact is that Travis is a growing boy, and you know how growing boys get hungry. An extra sandwich at lunch would tide him over, you know.”
Viola cast another fond glance at her feline friend. “All right, starting tomorrow. Maybe sardines, maybe roast beef, we’ll see. Now, scoot.”
We scooted while we were ahead of the game.
The next day, Travis found an additional wax paper parcel in his lunch. Good thing it was roast beef instead of supremely smelly sardines, or no one would have sat next to him at lunch, probably not even Lula.
We stopped at the gin on the way home from school and climbed down the bank. Travis called softly, “Here, doggy, good doggy,” and to our great satisfaction, the dog stuck its head out. I pitched the food, and it withdrew for a moment, then reappeared. It limped to the sandwich and wolfed it down.
Thus began Travis’s new routine. I left him to it, with strict instructions to save the creature only until it got back on its feet, but otherwise leave it alone. Occasionally he ran into Father coming or going but Travis pretended he was exploring and playing along the bank; Father waved at him and went about his business. Most of the time, Travis spied the dog, although occasionally it was missing, causing him to worry that it had sickened and died. But it always showed up the next day. It slowly gained weight and recognized Travis’s soft call of “Here, doggy, good doggy.”
Then because I had so many other things to do, I stopped paying much attention. Honestly, you would think I’d have known better, given Travis’s history with animals.
CHAPTER 17
THE TRAVAILS OF IDABELLE AND OTHER CREATURES
The Gauchos differ in their opinion, whether the Jaguar is good eating, but are unanimous in saying that cat is excellent.
I FOUND VIOLA stirring a pot of venison stew and frowning at Idabelle the Inside Cat, who was crouched in her basket next to the stove.
Viola said, “Take a look at that cat. You see anything wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s hungry all the time, but she’s losing flesh. I think she’s poorly.”
Viola doted on Idabelle, who subsisted on mice and was generally a dab hand at catching more than enough to keep herself fat and happy.
Viola added, “I worry about that cat. She cries all the time.” As if on cue, Idabelle rose, stretched, and began shuttling around my ankles in figure eights, yowling dolefully.
I picked her up to comfort her, and she felt lighter than expected. Oh no, not another sick animal. “I do think she’s thinner,” I said, feeling the ribs through the fur, which admittedly seemed to have lost some of its luster.
Viola looked distressed. “You think that animal doctor can help?”
Now, here was a novel idea. Veterinarians looked after the large animals and livestock that produced income. I’d never heard of a sick dog or cat getting professional attention; I doubted that anyone in the county would have dreamed of spending one thin dime on a pet. The animal would either get better on its own or die, and that was that.
I said, “I’ll ask him. Maybe he will.”
“You tell him I don’t have no money but I can cook for him. You tell him I’m the best cook in town. Your momma will vouch for me. So will Samuel.”
I retrieved the rabbit hutch from the barn that had housed Armand/Dilly. Travis was nowhere to be seen. I wondered if he had gone to the dog’s den without me.
Trusting and placid, Idabelle had no idea what lay in store, and I was able to push her into the hutch and latch it before she could react. She sniffed delicately at the floor of her cage, no doubt picking up traces of its former inhabitant. Then she hunkered down and glared at me. I picked up the hutch, and she howled.
And kept on howling all the way to Dr. Pritzker’s office, a good ten minutes away. Together, the hutch and cat were heavy, and I was sweating by the time I arrived at his door to find a note affixed: Gone to McCarthy’s farm. Back at noon.
So I could wait a whole hour or trudge back with my unhappy burden. I tried the door, not expecting it to open but it did. The room was clean and furnished simply with a desk covered with papers, two straight-back chairs, a filing cabinet, and a glass-front cabinet filled with jars labeled with intriguing names: Nux Vomica, Blue Vitriol, Hemlock Water, Tartarized Antimony. There were a wooden exam table and a zinc counter where he apparently mixed and measured his drenches and elixirs and purgatives. And there was also a shelf full of fat books bound in worn leather.
I put the cage on the floor and sat down to wait. Idabelle’s howling subsided to an occasional soft mew of hopelessness. There was nothing for me to do except speak soothingly to her and twiddle my thumbs for a whole hour. I kept this up for a good five minutes, staring hungrily at the books all the while. Then, well, the hard wooden seat got the better of me, and I had to get up to stretch my hindquarters. And then, well, the thick inviting books whispered to me, Come over here and take a look, Calpurnia. Just a look. Nothing more. Really. So I got up and examined the titles: Diseases of Cattle, The Complete Guide to the Domestic Sheep, Hog Fundamentals, Advanced Equine Husbandry. But nothing about cats or dogs, and certainly nothing about coydogs. Maybe Dr. Pritzker didn’t know anything about felines or canines.
An hour later, I had learned that baby lambs often arrived in twos and sometimes even threes, and frequently got mixed up together in the birth canal, and it was the vet’s job to sort out the tangle of three heads and twelve hooves all jumbled together. This required a gentle touch to avoid killing the ewe in the process. I was deep in the discussion of breech deliveries when the door opened, the bell clanged, and I jumped about two feet straight in the air, almost dropping the precious book.
Dr. Pritzker, covered in dust and manure, said with amusement, “So, Miss Calpurnia, are you learning something useful?”
“Uh, sorry, Dr. Pritzker, I—”
“No need to apologize. Your grandfather tells me you have a positive thirst for knowledge.” He glanced at the rabbit hutch and said, “What have you got there? It looks like some new breed of rabbit I’m not familiar with.”
“This is Idabelle, our Inside Cat. She’s losing weight, and she cries a lot. Will you take a look at her? I can pay,” I added hastily. “But if it’s more than forty-two cents, I’ll have to go on the installment plan.”
“Don’t you worry about that. The trouble is, I sent Samuel off for his lunch. We’ll have to wait until he gets back.”
“I don’t see why,” I said. “I can help. She’s only little.”
He hesitated. “What would your parents say?”
“It’s fine, really it is. I look after our animals all the time,” I said stoutly, stretching the truth but only a tad.
“All right, but don’t blame me if you get scratched.”
“She’d never do that,” I said. But looking at the normally calm and affectionate cat crouched miserably in her cage, a gleam of desperation burning in her eye, I felt a pang of doubt.
“What are her symptoms? Runny eyes? Runny nose? Vomiting? Diarrhea?”
“None of those, but she’s losing weight, and she cries a lot.”
“Right,” he said. “Put her on the table and we’ll take a look.”
Now that the time of reckoning had come, Idabelle decided she didn’t want to be dislodged from the hutch; she clung to it like a limpet, her claws firmly hooked in the wire. Unhooking all four limbs and keeping them unhooked simultaneously proved to be a major operation in itself.
I placed her on the edge of the table and held her by the scruff. Dr. Pritzker started up at the head. He looked in both ears, which she didn’t like, and I feared for his good hand. But she di
d me proud and did not hiss or bite or scratch. Then he pulled down each of her lower lids.
“What are you looking for?” I said. “You have to tell me what you’re doing.”
“Right. First you check in the ears for sores or any black material, which is a sign of ear mites. Then you check the eyelids to see if they are pale or not. See, she has a pink color to the conjunctiva, which is this membrane here. If it were pale, that would indicate internal bleeding or anemia. And the pupils are of equal size, so that’s good.”
“What if they were different? What would that mean?”
“It’s a sign of being struck on the head, of damage to the brain. Also, the third eyelid, the nictitating membrane, is retracted. If it were visible now when she’s fully awake, it would usually be a sign of ill health. You typically only see it in a sleepy cat. Now for the mouth. Pull her head back for me and hold it so.”
I did as he told me while he pulled up Idabelle’s lip on each side. She liked that even less.
“See here,” he said, “the gums are pink and healthy. No abscess, no broken teeth. So far there’s no reason she shouldn’t be eating. Now we’ll check the glands in the neck.”
He ran his good hand under the cat’s jaw. “Nothing there. If her glands were big, it would be a sign of infection.” Then he felt her belly and pronounced it free of tumors. He ran his hand up and down each limb and the tail and pronounced her free of fractures.
“Hold up the tail,” he said, and peered closely at her backside. “No diarrhea. No visible parasites. Now open that drawer and get me the stethoscope. It’s the instrument with the black tubing.”
“I know what it is,” I said, slightly offended. “Dr. Walker comes to the house and listens to our lungs with it when we have a cough. But that’s only if the cod-liver oil doesn’t work.” I shuddered at the thought of Mother’s favorite nostrum.
I pulled the instrument from the drawer and handed it to him. It smelled of rubber.
He struggled to put it in his ears, and I reached up to help him. He smiled his thanks, then pressed the scope to Idabelle’s chest and listened intently. After a moment, he tried to pull the earpieces out, and I helped him again. He handed me the instrument, saying, “Her heart and lungs sound completely normal. There’s nothing there. You can put that back in the drawer.”
I took the stethoscope from him and hesitated. I had often laid my ear against Idabelle’s warm fur and heard the rapid faint pitter-patter of her heart, far-off and practically inaudible. Here was my chance for a real listen with a real instrument.
“Can I please try it?” I said. “Please?”
He apparently found this amusing but said, “All right. Put the bell right here.” He pointed to a spot behind the left foreleg. It seemed a funny place to listen to a heart, but then he was the expert, right?
I put the earpieces in and pressed the bell to her fur, not expecting much. To my surprise, a thunderous tympany filled my ears, almost too loud to bear, and so rapid that it seemed like a rolling kettledrum. Idabelle’s valiant little heart beat like mad, and I listened for a good long time before I could make some sense of it. What sounded like a continuous thrumming was actually two distinct sounds (that I later learned were the “lub” and the “dub,” the sounds made by the closing of various valves in the heart). I could also hear a loud, whistling wind and realized that it had to be air moving through her lungs.
“Gosh, that’s amazing,” I said.
He smiled and said, “Do you know what’s wrong with this cat?”
“What?” I said with trepidation.
“Absolutely nothing. She’s fine. And now we’ll do the final test.” He went into the back room and returned with a small flat tin of sardines, saying, “You’ll have to open this. I can’t manage it.”
I opened the tin with the key, and the reek of oily fish filled the room, all too reminiscent of cod-liver oil.
“Try her with that,” he said.
I placed it in front of Idabelle. She sniffed it once and then grabbed a sardine and bolted it as fast as she could, then attacked the others, tearing through them at great speed. She finished up by licking the can dry and looking around for more. Her belly bulged comically.
Dr. Pritzker said, “See? She’s hungry, that’s all.”
“Really?” I was incredulous. “That’s it?”
“Nothing wrong with her. How often do you feed her?”
I had to think about this. “I don’t really know. We keep her inside for the mice, but I don’t know if Viola gives her other food or not.”
“It looks like your mouse population has decreased for some reason. You don’t have traps set out in the house, do you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“No poison?”
“No, sir.”
“And she’s not competing with any other cats?”
“No, the other cats are all Outside Cats.”
“Well, you’ll have to supplement her food until the mice come back. Give her some sardines every day but not so much that she stops hunting.”
I thanked him profusely and stuffed her back into her cage, anxious to get home and give Viola the good news. Idabelle immediately started howling again, at even greater volume. Although it nearly killed me to say it, I said it anyway, speaking up over the heart-rending noise. “Will you please send me your bill, Dr. Pritzker?”
He looked amused and gestured at the mass of papers on his desk. “I might, if I can ever catch up on my accounting. Or, I tell you what—you can run a few errands for me, deliver a message or two. Sometimes I’m stuck sending Samuel, which is a great inconvenience. Deal?”
“Deal! Oh, and do you ever look after dogs? I didn’t see any dog books on your shelf.”
“I have doctored a few cattle dogs and hunting dogs in my time. The principles of care are essentially the same. Do you have a sick dog?”
“Uh … no. But I might. One day.”
He gave me a peculiar look but I figured there was no point in explaining. Even if I could somehow bring the coydog to Dr. Pritzker, I knew that he would recommend the standard treatment for such a beast: a quick and merciful bullet through the brain. And even if not, the bill to fix such a wreck would probably come to the huge sum of twenty dollars.
I cast one last longing glance at his books and turned to go. He said, “I leave my door open during business hours. You can come and read whenever you like.”
“Gosh, thanks!” This was turning into my lucky day.
“Although, come to think of it, some of that material is not appropriate for young ladies, so you’d better get your mother’s permission.”
Well, maybe not so lucky after all.
I carried Idabelle home with a light heart and pondered where the mice had gone. And then it came to me in a thunderclap. How could I have been such an idiot not to see it sooner? Poor Idabelle. She was losing out to the king snake.
I took the cage into the kitchen, where Viola jumped up, tears welling in her eyes. “What’s wrong with her? Is she dying?”
I’d never seen Viola so upset. The tide of our family affairs ebbed and flowed around her while she maintained, on the whole, a perfect state of equilibrium (albeit a low-grade grumpy one that applied to everybody and everything with the exception of Idabelle). I’d never seen her shed a tear before. And although she had scores of nieces and nephews, including Samuel, she had no children of her own, so I guess that made Idabelle her baby.
“She’s fine,” I said. “She’s hungry because there aren’t enough mice about.”
“Hungry? That’s all? Praise Jesus!”
“Dr. Pritzker said you should feed her sardines every day until she gains some weight and the mice come back.”
She wiped her eyes on her apron, saying, “I’ll get her a can right now.”
“No, no, she just ate a whole tin. Wait until tomorrow or I swear she’ll pop.”
“Praise Jesus,” Viola whispered, and clasped the cat to her bony chest. “My
baby girl’s home,” she crooned. Idabelle kneaded at her apron and purred at full volume.
Viola said, “What’s wrong with the mice?”
Without thinking, I said, “It’s the sn—oops.”
“The snoops? What’s that?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s just, uh, the natural fluctuation in the population.”
“I never knowed this to happen before.”
“Got to go,” I said, and left them to their joyful reunion.
Question for the Notebook: It sure is nice that Felis domesticus purrs, but what about lions and tigers, do they purr, too? And how would you ever find out?
That night “the snoops” reappeared in a most unpleasant way. Sir Isaac Newton had once again escaped from his dish, but this time had the bad luck to run into the snake, a primeval foe. I walked into my room to discover an epic battle taking place in the middle of the floor: newt versus snake, with the newt losing fast, being halfway down the snake’s gullet at that point. Now, a fair fight doesn’t offend me, but this? Newts being retiring and soft-bodied, the whole thing was a pretty one-sided affair that really got my dander up.
I leaped forward and grabbed Sir Isaac Newton’s hind half and pulled. The snake pulled back. I yelled, “Gimme my newt, you rotten snake!” The snake refused and kept pulling, so I did the only thing I could think of: I reached over and flicked it on the snout. It recoiled and spat out its limp victim, then hightailed it for the baseboards. Sir Isaac stirred groggily as I wiped the snake spittle from him with my handkerchief. I spoke encouraging words to him and stroked him under his chin. He shook himself and, after a moment, looked none the worse for wear, so I slid him back into his dish and secured the lid. Good thing Aggie was at the general store getting a soda. If she’d been there she’d have croaked. Completely croaked.
Honestly, the drama in my life.
CHAPTER 18
GRASSHOPPER GUTS
[W]e observed to the south a ragged cloud of dark reddish-brown colour. At first we thought that it was smoke from some great fire on the plains; but we soon found that it was a swarm of locusts.… [T]hey overtook us at a rate of ten or fifteen miles an hour. The main body filled the air … “and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle:” or rather, I should say, like a strong breeze passing through the rigging of a ship.