Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [15]
“I read one poem per day,” said Tess. She reached for her canvas bag over the edge of the tub. “I’ll read you the one I picked up today. It’s by Mary Oliver.” And she read a poem about following a river with rapids lurking in the distance. Rocky leaned her head back on the edge and saw herself tumbling over the edge of a watery precipice and shattering as she hit the bottom.
Rocky’s second call was a skunk emergency. She looked up skunks in the Peterson guide. Mephitis mephitis. Skunks were trash hounds and when tourists left behind their abundance of overflowing trash bins, the skunks became particularly brash until the cold weather set in, which would slow them into a drowsy trance. Mrs. Todd called to say that a skunk was in her garage and that she was unable to leave her house.
Skunks will spray only as a last resort. They will first stomp their feet, growl, spit, or clack their impressively sharp teeth. This should be warning enough for anyone, except dogs who blunder through and misread all those warnings. Rocky thought her chances were good of remaining scent free while relocating the skunk with the same Havahart trap and a hamburger patty.
“Mrs. Todd, don’t go out to the garage and absolutely don’t let your dog out of the house. What kind of dog do you have? Oh, a terrier. Don’t even open the door when you see me drive up because your little terrier thinks the skunk is a big rat and he wants to grab it by the neck. You don’t want that to happen. I’ll be there shortly.”
Rocky took her time loading the tarp and the trap into the truck. She dawdled in the grocery store after picking up the cheapest grade beef available. Her preference was to give the skunk a good head start and not deal with it at all. She sat in the truck and read in the Peterson guidebook about the skunk. If it was a female, it would be likely to burrow with another female for the winter. Males were more solitary. But they don’t hibernate. Their eyeshine was deep amber. That’s the reflected color of their eyes at night, when they peer at you from the darkness. With nothing left to do, Rocky drove out to Mrs. Todd’s house.
There was no sight of a skunk, but evidence of trash that was not tightly sealed. Rocky offered suggestions for a new garbage can and offered to pick one up the next time she was in Portland. Solutions in this job were easy.
For the remainder of October, she rounded up the discarded cats and took them to the shelter on the mainland. They had seven days to be located or rescued before they were euthanized. She pitied the person who had to kill the cats. Bob used to rage about people not neutering their animals.
He called his neutering clinics Nip and Tuck Day, neutering as many cats and dogs as he could from early morning until seven P.M. He’d said that for every pair of male and female cats that go unaltered, who lived uneventful lives, and if all their descendents lived for six years also unaltered, that would amount to 420,000 cats.
Rocky had at first scoffed at him. She suspected an urban myth. She wasn’t against neutering, but she saw no sense in exaggerating. Then one day he took her with him to the veterinary school where the cats and dogs were being euthanized in staggering numbers.
“Nobody wants these animals and they can’t all survive. And some dumb fuck was too stupid and too cheap to get them neutered. Even if two cats couldn’t produce a lineage of 420,000 babies, every one that gets set loose to fend for itself will either be killed by a car, a dog, a coyote, by illness like feline leukemia, or they get the terminator injection. It’s not right.”
Nip and Tuck Day was twice a year, when it was off with testicles and tucking at the bellies of the females, making them all the last of their line. Bob would call up all his vet school buddies weeks before to see