17

UNLIKELY FRIENDS

Wendy found her gloves and marched back into the kitchen. The bobcat still lay on the bottom shelf in a space that previously had been filled with food. As Wendy approached, he flattened his ears and let out a horrible growl that made her jump back. Then, bravely and quickly, she grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. He struggled in her grasp, but by then she had him out, and kicked the fridge shut with her foot. The instant the food in the refrigerator disappeared behind the closed door he dropped his fierce attitude and became the same friendly cat he had been when he arrived.

“Where’d he come from?” Danny asked.

“From Dr. Singh,” Wendy said angrily. “And is he going to get an earful from me! He told me his wife didn’t want this cat living in the house, but he didn’t say why.”

Danny continued to stand there, holding his backpack in his arms, looking bewildered. “What was he doing in the fridge?”

“They obviously gave him snacks out of the refrigerator, and he identifies it with food. Not our food — his food. Once a bobcat decides that a particular bit of food is his, look out! I learned that from the one they have at Red River Ranch. It was only the size of a big tomcat, but anytime he thought somebody was about to mess with his food, he was like a flying blender!”

“That one sounded more like a buzz saw,” Danny observed.

Wendy dropped the bobcat onto the floor. He batted playfully at a tomato, then sniffed at a package of cheese. Deciding the cheese was edible, he picked it up and carried it under the table. Growling like a cougar, he proceeded to rip the wrapper off.

Arms folded, Wendy watched him chow down on the cheese. “I just hate it when people dump animals on me like this when I haven’t had time to fix a proper place to keep them!”

“Please don’t be mad,” Danny said in a small voice.

Wendy glanced at the boy in surprise. He stood in the kitchen door, clutching his backpack to his chest, looking truly fearful.

“Why would I be mad at you? It’s not your fault bobcats are the way they are.”

“I know,” Danny said in a small voice. “But if bobcats are so bad, and …” His voice trailed off miserably.

“What, Danny?” Wendy stripped off her gloves, wondering what was wrong with the boy. She suspected his parents got violent when they were angry. Had seeing her annoyance with the bobcat scared him?

“And I brought you another one …” Danny’s voice faded to a whisper.

Suddenly Wendy realized that he wasn’t wearing his backpack, as he usually was when he came in. He was holding it, in a very tender, protective way.

“Danny?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“What do you have in that backpack?”

“A kitten,” he said in a small voice.

“What kind of kitten?”

He jerked his chin toward the bobcat who, having eaten the whole block of cheese, was now calmly washing his face. “That kind,” he said. “But littler.”

For a minute Wendy couldn’t believe it. Then she thought, Why not? It’s been that kind of day. She crossed the room and put an arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Well now, that sounds interesting. What do you say we go up to my office where we can have a little privacy?”

“What about …?” Danny indicated the food that had been pushed out of the refrigerator and still lay scattered about on the floor.

“I’ll put it away later,” Wendy said. “By then maybe Buzzsaw Bob will have figured out that tomatoes and canned pop and leftover pasta are not bobcat food.”

Once inside Wendy’s office, she shut the door so there would be no chance of the bobcat following them in. Then she turned to Danny. “Okay, let’s see this whatever you’ve got.”

Danny reached into the book bag and brought out a kitten, all hiss, claws, and flailing legs. Oh yeah, Wendy thought. That sounds like a bobcat. Once she got a good look at the greyish kitten with black markings, she saw that Danny was right; it was the same species as the one downstairs, but much smaller.

“Looks like it hasn’t had its eyes open for more than a day or two.” She took the kitten from Danny and held it against her chest. It struggled for a moment, then grew quiet. The warmth of a body and a heartbeat, even a human heartbeat, calmed most baby animals. “Where did you get it?”

“By the road,” Danny said, still looking as if he expected her to yell at him.

“The mother must’ve been nearby. You didn’t see her?”

“I did. She ran across the road. A car coming really fast, from the other direction, hit her. I was a good ways back. When I got up there on my bike, I stopped to see if maybe she was just hurt and I could help her. But she was dead.”

“And the kitten was following her?” Even as she asked the question, Wendy didn’t think that was possible. The kitten seemed too young to be out hunting with its mother.

Danny shook his head. “She was carrying it in her mouth. When the car hit her she went flying through the air. The kitten, too. When I saw she was dead, I walked back and forth in the grass by the road till I found it.” He touched the kitten’s fur tentatively. “I didn’t see any blood on it. Do you think it’s hurt?”

Wendy tried to pull the kitten away from her chest, but already it had its twenty tiny claws latched onto her shirt. So she let it stay there and felt around its body as best she could. She didn’t feel any broken bones. “Seems okay. I wonder if we can get it to eat.” Wendy pried the kitten off her shirt and handed it to Danny. “You hold it while I go downstairs and fix a bottle for it. If I can get past Buzzsaw Bob into my own fridge.”

When Wendy reached the living room she found Bob sprawled on the sofa like a cat that had been living in this house and sleeping in that particular spot all his life. She slipped into the kitchen and, very quietly, opened the refrigerator door, grabbed the milk, and slammed it shut.

Just in time! Even that slight noise had been enough to wake the young bobcat, who came flying into the kitchen. When the refrigerator door slammed shut, he screeched to a stop, sat down on the linoleum floor, and started at her with a disappointed expression.

“No!” Wendy pointed to the refrigerator. “No!” Then burst out laughing. After all, this wasn’t a dog. Maybe cats understood “no” as well as dogs did, but where most dogs wanted to please their owner, a cat, especially this cat, only wanted to please itself.

She chose one of the smaller bottles and mixed the kitten formula. Then she carried it back to her office and showed Danny how to feed the baby bobcat. “When she finishes eating she’ll want to sleep,” Wendy told him. “I’ll go downstairs and fix up a place for her.”

“Let’s see,” Wendy mumbled to herself. “Not on the back porch, because of all the other animals out there. Not in the main part of the house because of Buzzsaw Bob. Not in one of the bedrooms, because of the carpets.”

She could put the kitten in the upstairs bathroom, but Kyle would really complain if she used both bathrooms as holding pens for wildlife.

She pushed open the door to the downstairs bathroom and looked at the fawn, curled up quietly on its pile of towels. It occurred to her that the fawn couldn’t get into the bathtub, so she could make a bed for the kitten in the tub. “That way,” she told the fawn, “whatever mess you babies make, it’ll be easy to clean up in the morning.”

By the time Danny had finished feeding the baby bobcat, Wendy had a soft nest of towels for it in the bathtub. They tucked the kitten into it, then took the fawn out for a walk. When they returned, the kitten was sleeping. Buzzsaw Bob was wide awake, though, so Danny took him out for a walk while Wendy went into the kitchen to prepare meals for all the animals. After that, Danny had to go home.

Later, as she was getting ready to go to bed, Wendy went around checking all the animals to make sure they were okay. The ones on the back porch were quiet, and Buzzsaw Bob was asleep on the sofa.

She peeked into the bathroom, and saw that the fawn was again curled up on the pile of towels. Next to the fawn was the tiny bobcat kitten. Their small bodies were entwined, as close together as they could get. Somehow the kitten had got out of the tub, probably by climbing the shower curtain. No doubt it had gone all around the bathroom, and when it couldn’t find its mother it had snuggled in next to the sleeping fawn — the only warm body available.

Oh poor babies, Wendy thought. You don’t know how politically incorrect you are! If the rehab people heard about this, they’d probably take my license away from me!

But even knowing that a fawn should not learn to trust a bobcat, any more than it should learn to trust humans, Wendy could not bring herself to separate the two little orphans. Of course they couldn’t be raised together, because within three or four months this tiny bobcat would be as big as the one out in the kitchen, and could easily hurt the fawn just playing with it. After all, how would a young bobcat know that fawns don’t play chase, pounce, and chew games? But for this one night, why not let them have each other’s warm body for comfort?