2

Twenty-five years earlier, in a cage in a trailer at the back of a circus, a lioness had rustled her straw into a soft bed.

Her sister lioness and the roaring, shaggy-maned lion were performing in the circus big top. Right this minute, the crowd was gasping as they leapt through fiery hoops.

This lioness was resting. She was tired, and her belly was huge. She was getting ready to have cubs.

On the other side of the country, eight-year-old Mona was packing her suitcase to visit her grandparents. For the first time ever, she was going to stay for the whole summer vacation while her mom and dad went to their busy jobs in the city. She was a little bit scared, and very, very excited.

Grammie and Grandpa McNeil lived on the edge of a town near the beach, in a small blue house on Rainbow Street.

“We saw a rainbow the very first time we came here,” Grammie explained. “Our house was right under the middle of the arch.”

“We knew it would be a place where dreams can come true,” said Grandpa.

Mona’s dream was that this year, since her birthday was in the first week of the vacation, her parents would let her have a pet of her own.

“You’ll have all the pets you want, all summer,” her mom said.

“But I want to bring one home,” said Mona.

“Our lives are just too busy for a pet,” said her dad.

Grammie and Grandpa sometimes said they were too busy to have any more pets too—but the next time they heard about a stray that needed a home, they always said it could come and live with them till it found somewhere better. Somehow the animals never found anywhere better.

That’s why they had five dogs. They had Goldie, the very old retriever who’d taught Mona to walk when she was a baby. Next was Patchy, a spotty little dog who’d just followed Grandpa home one day. Buck was a sort-of border collie, with a white face and a black patch over one eye; he’d turned up in a thunderstorm, and they never found out where he came from. Finally, there were two little wiener dogs, Frieda and Vicky, who’d needed a home when the old lady who owned them went to the hospital.

When Mona and her parents had visited the year before, Grammie and Grandpa had a brand-new baby goat named Heidi. Heidi was a twin, but she was smaller and weaker than her brother, and the mother goat hadn’t had enough milk to feed both of them. “The little one will die if someone doesn’t look after it,” the goats’ owner explained. “But I’m just too busy to give it a bottle every two hours!”

Grammie didn’t care about being too busy when there was a baby animal to save. She’d taken the tiny brown and white kid, snuggled it on her lap, and fed it special goat milk from a baby bottle. She’d put old towels in a box in the kitchen and tucked the baby goat into it.

Mona had loved the way Heidi snuggled against her, hungrily sucking her fingers. She’d loved feeding her the bottle, even though the kid sometimes nudged her so hard that the milk spurted all over both of them. And she’d loved taking the tiny goat out to the garden to run and play.

Sometimes in the evenings, if Grandpa fell asleep on the couch, Heidi had climbed on top of him and curled up to sleep on his chest.

But now Heidi was nearly grown up. She lived outside all the time and played tag games with Buck the sort-of border collie. All the McNeils’ animals lived happily together, even the ones who could have been enemies.

Back at the circus, while everyone was asleep, four tiny cubs were born in the trailer behind the tents. The mother lioness licked them clean and curled around them in the straw bed. Three of the cubs began to nurse, but the last one born, the tiniest of all, was too sleepy to try.