Wild Spirits Page 2

  “Do you have a towel?” Wendy asked. “Never mind, this feed sack will do.”

  Wendy wrapped the cloth feed sack around the animal’s head and body so she could hold it without getting bitten while Mrs. Armstrong figured out how to open the jaws of the trap. But before she could do that, the jerking motion the animal made trying to get away caused the trap to cut through the last bit of muscle and bone. The leg fell off, leaving a bleeding stump.

  “Look at that!” Mrs. Armstrong exclaimed, holding up the small, amputated foot. “It wasn’t even this little fellow raiding my henhouse. I saw the tracks before, and it was something a lot bigger. Probably a raccoon.”

  “An animal this small was probably after mice, not chickens,” Wendy agreed. Holding the wounded creature, she asked, “What do you want to do with it? Take it to the vet, or …?”

  Wendy wondered what the veterinarian could do at this point, given that the leg had already been lopped off by the steel jaws of the trap.

  “I guess the first thing is to stop the bleeding,” Wendy decided. “Then, well, whatever this animal is — it’s not one I’ve ever seen around here — it’s never going to be fit to go back to the wild. Not with just three legs.”

  Wendy knew that when you came across a wild animal that wasn’t likely to survive in the wild if set free, the kindest thing to do was kill it. She understood why it was sometimes better to kill an injured animal than let it go on suffering, but couldn’t bear to do that herself. If that was what Mrs. Armstrong wanted, she would have to get somebody else to do it.

  “People get by with one leg, some of ’em with none,” Mrs. Armstrong said thoughtfully. “Seems to me that with a little help, this critter might manage with three. “But with that rusty old trap, I reckon it might get blood poisoning from that.” She hesitated. “You think a veterinarian will charge a lot? My pension is, well, not much.”

  “Let’s go back to my house,” Wendy suggested. “I’ve got medical supplies there, and some antibiotics. We can at least sterilize the wound, and if it doesn’t get infected …”

  Wendy wondered whether she was making the right decision, especially since she wasn’t sure what she was dealing with. From pictures she had seen, she thought it might be a ferret, but it would be strange if it was, because ferrets were not native to this area.

  They walked back to her house with the animal cuddled close to Wendy’s chest. It was not struggling. It might be so weak from loss of blood that it couldn’t struggle, in which case its chances of survival were poor. Or else it was — what?

  As it turned out, the animal was a ferret. Wendy guessed it had been somebody’s pet because it was quite tame. She thought it must have belonged to somebody passing through, maybe staying at the campground outside town, because if a local person had had a pet as exotic as a ferret, she would have heard about it. Also, a local owner would have put up a notice asking people to be on the lookout for it. But the whole time Wendy nursed the animal, she never heard of anyone who had lost a ferret.

  The ferret responded well to Wendy’s care, and Mrs. Armstrong soon insisted on taking him home. She named him Tripod because, like a camera tripod her late husband used to use, the ferret had only three legs. Wendy could see why Mrs. Armstrong, who was very active for an old lady, liked the very active Tripod. With him romping around, exploring every crack and crevice in the house, Mrs. Armstrong didn’t feel so alone. And he made her laugh, especially when he went headfirst into an empty vase, leaving only his fat little rear end sticking out.

  Mrs. Armstrong believed she had taught Tripod to ride in one of the large pockets of the safari vest that had hung unused in the closet for years. But Wendy suspected it was something the animal had learned from its previous owner, when it was much younger. As far as Wendy knew, she was the only person who knew Mrs. Armstrong carried Tripod around with her — always in the vest except on Sunday, when she had a special handbag she used to sneak him into church.

  Mrs. Armstrong sometimes petted Tripod during prayer. When Wendy teased her about it, she said, “God knows, and He doesn’t care. I pet Tripod so he and God both know how thankful I am for him.”

  Mrs. Armstrong gave Wendy an “I hope you can keep a secret” look, and said, “I’d just as soon folks don’t know about Tripod. You know how quick some are to accuse old people of being senile. Can you imagine what they’d say about me if they knew my best friend was a ferret?”

  3

  LOVER BOY

  Mrs. Armstrong waited until Wendy was back behind the teller window, then deposited her social security check, taking out only what she needed to buy food for herself and Tripod. She was halfway back across the bank lobby when she encountered Kyle, who had just come in.

  “Afternoon, Mrs. Armstrong,” Kyle said politely to the old lady who had been his first-grade teacher.

  “Kyle Collins!” Mrs. Armstrong stopped short and peered up at him. Lifting her cane to tap him on the chest, she said in the voice teachers use with disruptive children, “I’ve been wanting to have a word with you, Lover Boy.”

  Mrs. Armstrong had spent too many years yelling at unruly first graders to have a soft voice. Standing in the middle of the lobby, tapping one of the police department’s newest recruits on the chest with her cane, there was probably not a person in the bank who couldn’t hear her. Their smiles turned to chuckles when Mrs. Armstrong said, in her strong schoolteacher voice, “I know you’re stepping out with our Wendy. Nearly a year now, isn’t it?”

  “Uh, about that,” mumbled Kyle, casting a helpless glance in Wendy’s direction.

  “Well? When are you going to ask her to marry you?” the old lady demanded.

  Ellen tittered and whispered to Wendy, “That’s what you’d like to know.”

  Wendy scowled at her, and whispered back, “Shut up!”

  “It’s Mrs. Armstrong you want to shut up,” Ellen snickered. “But maybe by her asking, you’ll find out something.”

  Kyle, red-faced, tried to inch away without seeming rude. “Gee, Mrs. Armstrong, I don’t know. I just finished college, and I’ve only been on the force a few months, and … uh, ’scuse me, ma’am, but my partner’s waiting outside in the patrol car. I only got a minute to tend to business”

  “Monkey business, if you ask me,” Mrs. Armstrong said, and called back to Wendy. “Honey, don’t you put up with him giving you the runaround. Men’ll do that if you let them.” And off she hobbled, one hand wielding her cane, the other stroking the pocket of her safari vest.

  “Sorry,” Wendy sympathized, when Kyle reached her window. “Looks like you picked the wrong time to do your banking.”

  “I’ll say.” Kyle rubbed the palm of his hand across his sweaty forehead. “I’d rather be grilled by the toughest cop at the station than Mrs. Armstrong. She makes me feel like I’m back in first grade.” Then he smiled. “But it’s worth it, I guess, to see you for a minute.”

  “Worth it, you guess?” Wendy teased.

  “Worth it for sure if you’re up for going to the movies Friday night,” Kyle grinned.

  Wendy smiled. “Given what you had to go through to get here, I just about have to say yes, don’t I?”

  4

  THE ORPHANS

  For Wendy, the best time of the day was when she went home to her apartment, the one she’d rented after she got the job at the bank. It was a duplex on the ground floor, with a back porch and small back yard. The porch and yard were important to Wendy, because she needed a place to put the cages of any wild animal she had rescued, or ones somebody else had brought to her for care.

  Looking after injured wildlife was something Wendy had been doing since she was seven or eight years old. The first were ones her father brought home from his hunting trips — baby squirrels that had fallen out of the nest, or a burrow of baby rabbits whose mother had been ki
lled by dogs. Knowing they’d die if he left them, he would take them home to Wendy. He figured she would play with the harmless babies the way other girls played with stuffed animals and dolls. When they died, as they probably would, she could put them in a matchbox and bury them in the backyard with a little funeral service. In his view, it was a good way for a child to learn about the harsh realities of life, and the harsher realities of death — the fact that nothing lives forever, especially not frail baby animals with no mother.

  Surprisingly, most of the animals he brought home didn’t die. “It’s her patience,” Wendy’s mother said. “She’ll spend a flat hour trying to get a few drops of milk into one of those baby squirrels. I just wish she’d be half as patient with her little brother!”

  Patiently caring for orphaned baby animals, getting up every few hours all through the night to feed the youngest ones, was the easy part. The hard part was recognizing which ones she could not hope to save. Even if she had an animal in her care for only an hour, she often cried when it died. But as she gained more experience, it got to where she hardly ever lost one unless it was terribly injured. Uninjured orphans usually survived, and as soon as they were old enough, she would release them back into the wild.

  Wendy’s neighbours soon heard about what they called her “hobby,” and started bringing her broken-winged birds or animals that had been hit by a car and looked as if they might live. And then, when she was eleven, she discovered a whole new source of wildlife in need of care: the local animal shelter.

  Like most animal shelters, the one in Wendy’s town dealt mostly with cats and dogs. People did bring in wildlife, but none of the employees knew anything about wild animal care, and the place was not equipped to do the kind of every-three-hours feeding that something like a baby bunny might need. In poking around the shelter, which Wendy often did just to visit the animals confined there, she discovered, to her horror, that wild animals were often killed rather than cared for. Shelter employees gently explained that this was more humane than letting them die a lingering death from not getting the right kind of care.

  One day, when Wendy happened to be at the shelter when someone came in with a possum that had been chewed up, but not killed, by dogs, she persuaded the director of the shelter to let her take it home.

  “This is probably totally against the rules,” he muttered. “But I do hate putting animals down.”

  A month later, Wendy dropped by the shelter to let the director know the possum had survived, and been released back into the wild. From that time on, when someone came in with a wild animal that needed special care, the director advised the person to take it to Wendy.

  By the time she was thirteen, she was known around town as someone who had a healing touch with wild animals. Even though she was now nineteen and working in a bank, people still thought of her when they came across a wild animal that had been orphaned or injured.

  That was why it was no surprise when Danny Ryan came into the bank one day lugging a cardboard box taped shut with duct tape. The air holes punched in the top told Wendy that he had something alive inside. She looked around in dismay. In her previous job as receptionist in a doctor’s office she had often smuggled baby animals to work and kept them in her desk drawer or in the broom closet, so she could feed them every few hours, as the very young ones often required. But here at the bank there was no place she could stash an animal — certainly not when Mr. Smart was watching her, as he was now.

  “What have you got there?” she asked Danny.

  “’Coons,” he said. “Little ones.”

  “You didn’t take them away from their mama, did you?”

  Danny shook his head. “Mama’s dead. She got in our garbage last night, and Butch — that’s my stepdad — he set the dogs on her.”

  “Oh dear!” It upset Wendy that some people put their garbage out at night. If a raccoon smelled something it liked coming from the garbage, it would overturn the can and scatter garbage all around. It wasn’t the animal’s fault — how could it know that it wasn’t supposed to have the thrown-away food? But that didn’t stop people from getting mad when they saw the mess. “How is it that the dogs didn’t get the little ones?”

  “The garage door was open,” Danny explained. “They hid in there. I found them this morning. They couldn’t stay there. When Butch gets home …” He didn’t finish the sentence, trusting Wendy to understand what his stepfather would do if he came home and found the raccoons he hated in his garage. “They’re too little to be on their own.”

  Wendy cast an anxious glance toward Mr. Smart, whose stare had turned to a frown. “Listen, Danny,” she said hurriedly. “I can’t help you right now. But I’ll be off work in an hour and a half. If you want to come back then — in fact, why don’t you ask your mom if you can ride out to my house when I get off work, and help me fix a place for them?”

  As Danny left the bank, Kyle came in. He walked quickly, looking harassed.

  “What’s up?” Wendy asked.

  “Can’t do the movies tonight,” Kyle told her brusquely. Lowering his voice, he said, “They’ve put me on a stakeout. Drug bust, we hope.”

  “Oh well,” Wendy said. “Business before pleasure.”

  “You’re not mad?” he asked anxiously.

  “If I was going to get mad because you had to work overtime and break dates, would we still be going out?” She grinned ruefully. “It’s not like this is the first time.”

  “Guess not,” Kyle said sheepishly. “See you later, then. Maybe tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” Wendy said, and looked past him so he’d know another customer had got in line behind him.

  Wendy waited on the customer, then called over to Ellen, “About ATM time?”

  “So it is,” Ellen responded, as she stuffed thousands of dollars in various-sized bills into the bag. “Getting it ready right now.”

  5

  THE HOLDUP

  They walked out into the blazing afternoon, the sun so hot it was causing heat waves to rise from the blacktop. Wendy saw Danny squatting in a strip of shade at the side of the building. She turned to smile at him, then snapped her head around as she heard the sound of a car turning into the parking lot. It wasn’t the fact that it was turning in, but that it was moving much too fast. And coming straight at her!

  “Oh God!” Ellen cried, in a voice that sounded like a prayer.

  Before Wendy could open her mouth to scream, the car was next to them, and a gun with a barrel big enough to stick her thumb into was inches from her nose.

  “The money, Blondie! Now!” snarled the man with the gun.

  She couldn’t see his face because it was covered with a black ski mask. But his eyes were cold and crazy. Wendy knew without even thinking about it — because she had thought about it before — that she was not going to die trying to protect money that the bank’s insurance covered, anyway. She shoved the canvas bag of money at the man and ran, Ellen pounding along beside her.

  Once safely back inside, of course the police were called. Wendy and Ellen had to explain what happened over and over, first at the bank, then several more times down at the police station.

  “No,” Wendy repeated for the fifth time, “I didn’t see what they looked like. I don’t even know what race they were. Just that they were men wearing ski masks.”

  And, “Yes, I am certain it was a .40 calibre handgun. It was the same as my boyfriend’s police-issue weapon.”

  And, “No, I didn’t see what kind of car it was. As soon as I saw the gun, I shoved the money bag at him and ran.”

  And, “Why didn’t I get the license number? I told you! I was running away! If I had looked back and they saw me getting the license number, they might have shot me!”

  Wendy paused and looked accusingly at the two policemen who kept asking the same questions over and over.
“You all carry .40 calibre handguns. You know what damage they can do to a human body. Would I be sitting here now if they’d shot me at such close range?”

  • • •

  It was nearly dark when one of the policemen, Sergeant Taggart, was assigned to take Wendy and Ellen home. After dropping Ellen off, Wendy told him she could drive herself home if he would take her back to the bank to pick up her car. She wished Kyle were around and could come over this evening, but of course he wasn’t. He was off somewhere on that stupid stakeout. Wendy did ask Sergeant Taggart to stay with her until she was in her car, because she didn’t feel like being in the bank parking lot alone.

  The first thing she saw when they pulled into the parking lot was Danny Ryan, sitting on the ground near her car, with the box next to him. He didn’t say a word, just stared up at her with big brown eyes

  “Oh, Danny!” she exclaimed. “I’m sorry! I forgot!”

  Wendy wanted nothing more than to go home, get inside her apartment, make sure every door and window was locked, then lock herself in the bathroom and climb into a warm bath. But the way the boy looked at her reminded her of the hopeless look she had seen in the eyes of some injured animals. “Have you been here waiting all this time?” she asked guiltily.

  Danny shook his head. “I went home and asked my mom.”

  “Asked your mom?” Wendy tried to remember what she might have told him to ask his mother, but drew a complete blank. “Asked her what?”

  “If I could go to your house, so you could show me what to do.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Look, sonny,” said Officer Taggart, “this lady’s had a pretty tough day. Why don’t you run on home, and go visit her some other time?”

  Danny did not move. He didn’t even seem to hear the policeman. He just sat there, looking up at Wendy.

  “No, that’s okay, Sergeant Taggart,” she said to the policeman who had tried to help by getting rid of the boy. “I, that is, Danny and I have a date. Something important we need to do together.”