RANDOLPH CAME INTO MEG’S room when he heard her push back her desk chair and fall upon Poley, weeping.
“It is so sad!” Meg clung to Poley, then complained to Randolph, “What a terrible ending! I don’t want to believe it. How could anyone write that? And just leave it at that!”
“Annie was a plain-speaking woman,” said Randolph, sitting down with Meg and Poley. “An indelicate woman, one might say. If she’s alive, I expect she has written more, but this is all Annie left with me.”
“I like her,” said Meg. “I’m grateful she gave us this much. I’m afraid it’s the truest story I’ll ever have about the origins of dogs. I must see these dogs that are so like wolves. Will you come with me, Randolph? Someday?”
Randolph gave an exaggerated shiver and nodded towards the snow gathered round the window panes. “Isn’t it cold enough for you here?”
Ike came out of his own story feeling more tortured. To live it all again! And yet those good times were very good. He missed Piji. Missed her as much as he missed the wolves. They were all of a family. It was a pity his spirit couldn’t find rest where hers did.
But I won’t give up, he told himself. I’ve never been one to do that. And if this Meg can follow through … If my story can keep her on track …
Meg received a letter from the Faculty of Comparative Medicine and Veterinary Science at McGill University asking her to come for an interview in mid-March. She wanted Randolph to go with her but travelling alone with him was out of the question.
“Completely improper,” Randolph declared. “It is your father’s happy duty to accompany you to Montreal and conduct you through the college. Take every opportunity you can, my dear, to appear proper, conventional, and normal, when embarking on something so unconventional as becoming their first woman graduate. Offer them no grounds but your God-given sex to dismiss you.”
“Proper, conventional, and normal?” Meg smiled at Randolph. “How unattractive.”
“Oh no it isn’t!” he responded sharply. “Though I thought as you do when I was your age. Now I would do anything, anything to turn myself into a normal, proper man.” He turned away from her. “For you.”
“Randolph,” Meg said quietly. “I heard that.”
“You should not have. You must forget it. It is an impossibility. And I must say good night to you now.” He turned his back to her and walked to the doorway. “Good night, my dearest.”
“It’s very rude,” said Meg running to take him by the elbow and turn him around, “not to face the lady you are addressing.”
He put one arm and then the other around her, hugging her tightly. “I have been so good. We have been so good. You are about to graduate. Let us not spoil it now. My darling girl.” He hugged her silently then took her by the waist and steered her into the hallway pointing her in the direction of her bedroom. “Go! Quickly. Please.”
Herbert was pleased to be asked to accompany Meg for her interview and tour of the college. He hoped she would be accepted and find there a husband who would set up the vet practice that so interested her, let her dabble in it, but mainly provide for her to be a good wife and mother. “You do want to have a family some day, don’t you?” he asked when they were settled into the plush velvet seats on the train.
“Oh yes!” she answered firmly. “Not quite so many children as you and Mom, but at least four.”
It was Meg’s first train trip and she was thrilled by it. “Such speed!” she said, “The view of our nation literally flying past the window! You can’t even see what’s propelling us. Doesn’t it feel like we’re flying right into the future!”
“That’s my little Meggie,” Herbert patted her knee. “Still looking for tomorrow, aren’t you? Ever the optimist.”
“Not entirely, Dad.” She patted his knee. “I have my doubts at times. But I certainly am curious about what tomorrow will bring.”
It’s right to call this machine “the iron horse,” she thought to herself. It has replaced horses for long distances. Next will be machines for short distances. And then what will the horses do? And horse doctors? Maybe there is no great future for horse doctors.
She thought of Black Beauty, the novel she had been given by Mrs. Atkins, two summers ago, about a horse who experienced every miserable, as well as every comfortable job, horses were ever put to. It hadn’t moved her the way “Ike’s Working Wolves” had, but it did make those who read it empathize with horses and more knowledgeable about how to treat them. It used the word veterinary and veterinary surgeon, as opposed to the common term: “horse doctor.”
In going for an interview at McGill’s vet college, Meg would have her first look at what a veterinary surgeon does. She had never seen an animal operated on. If their farm animals got sick and did not recover through rest and the application of a poultice, liniment, or mash, the animal would be put out of its misery with a bullet in the head. Meg didn’t ever want to have to do that. She focused on becoming a surgeon of animals, learning how to relieve, cure, prevent their suffering. She looked forward to seeing the surgical facilities and practices at the college. She expected that the hard part for her would be the interview, being interrogated about her abilities with big animals, the issue of handling and shooting horses.
I was raised with horses, she would tell them. I can ride, drive, and handle them. Shoot them, if necessary. Though she told herself, I could always get a man to do that part.
But it was the tour of the surgical facilities, not the interview, that shocked and threw her into doubt at the veterinary college.
There was little overt derision of her applying to become a veterinarian. Everyone she met was male, beginning with the registrar, who looked at her with curiosity when she showed up for her appointment accompanied by her father. “Ah, Miss Wilkinson,” he said. “The applicant, I presume. And Mr. Wilkinson?”
“Yes,” said Herbert, pulling his shoulders back, “the father.” He extended his hand.
“Pleased to meet you,” The registrar shook hands. “Parents do not usually accompany the applicants but this is an unusual case from the start, isn’t it?” “Pleased to meet you,” Meg held out her hand.
The registrar shook it. “Indeed. May I congratulate you on your marks at Dalhousie, so far.” He stepped back and nodded, holding his hand out in the direction of the door leading back onto campus. “Shall we begin our tour with a look at the lecture hall?”
Back home with Randolph, in the calm and privacy of his library, Meg still felt her stomach cramp at what she had seen that day in the college.
“Of course the lecture hall was fine,” she said. “Not much different from what I’m used to at Dalhousie. McGill’s campus is just bigger and more imposing. Some very grand, new, grey stone buildings. The grounds slope down to a good view of Montreal. Male students and male staff everywhere, except for the odd woman student passing amongst them, giving me a look of appraisal and solidarity. But absolutely no women to be seen in the veterinary college, apart from me.
“The faculty and students were clearly prepared for my arrival that afternoon. I think my case had been well discussed in the common rooms and whispered about in the classes. You know how universities pride themselves on being open–minded, and students are on the lookout for what’s new and maybe ground breaking. I felt like a welcome curiosity. And I had a distinct impression that the authorities at the vet college had concluded that if women were allowed into medical school, it was logical they should not be refused application to vet college. Vets not to be outdone by meds. But …” Meg had to take in her breath. “It’s as if they wanted to show me that animal doctoring is ever so much harder than human doctoring. The books, the lectures, the diagrams on the chalkboards in the lecture halls, I had no trouble with. But the labs … oh Randolph!” Meg hugged her stomach. “They were gruesome.”
Randolph sat closer, pried his arm through hers and took hold of her hand. “Tell me.”
“It was like a slaughterhouse. Dogs and cats strung up by their hind legs, like pigs at the slaughter. And of course, there were pigs. And rabbits. Strung up to be operated on. Dissected for study. It was nothing like dissecting frogs in biology. We don’t string up frogs. They’re laid out mercifully, like humans, on an operating table. It was so gruesome!”
Randolph paused, then said carefully. “They were dead, weren’t they? Cadavers?”
“Some were. And some weren’t. There was a lab where they were neutering, and performing intestinal operations on dogs and …” Meg winced. “Thank God, Ike and Piji didn’t live to see that done to their dogs!”
“Strung up live, by the hind quarters?”
“Yes. From hooks on a wall.”
“Good Christ! Why?”
“They’re easier to keep still that way.” “
Do they pour some brandy or something into them first?”
“No.” Meg had to smile at that but in the lab she had been so upset she couldn’t speak and had to put all her fortitude into not shrieking and pleading to cut the animals down. She had watched in silence. “It was like a torture chamber,” she said to Randolph. “Or so I thought. But the surgeons and students had become used to it. I guess the way soldiers get used to what they see on the battlefield. That lab was the last place they showed me.
“‘This is not for the faint hearted,’ they had warned me. I think they were prepared for me to faint. But apparently I surprised them, from the start.
“At the end of the day, the principal invited me into his office. He was a good-humoured man who complimented me on my looks.”
“Did he!” interrupted Randolph. “Of course it’s warranted. You are surely the prettiest thing he has seen come into his office. But I’m not sure I like it that he did.”
“He said he had expected their first female applicant to be a bit of a Calamity Jane.”
“Calamity Jane!”
“Yes. You know. She was big and tough. Talked and dressed like a man. Rode around out west with Wild Bill Hickock. Dad was quite incensed that I should be compared to her. But I was complimented. I told the principal I was prepared to dress like a man if that would make my presence more acceptable. At which point, Dad rose from his seat in anger. But the principal calmed him with saying that would not be necessary, or desirable.”
“I would do it.” Meg looked Randolph in the eye. “I don’t see anything wrong with it. I have thought seriously about it, you know.”
Randolph squeezed Meg’s shoulder. “On with your story, my girl.”
“Not much more to report. A Dr. Osler from the medical faculty came in and explained that McGill has exceptionally high standards, that I would be taking some of the same classes as the medical students and if I changed my mind on becoming a veterinarian, I could, with further studies, become a medical doctor. “I think he expects that I will end up doing that, even though I said, ‘Thank you but I prefer to work with animals.’
“The principal smiled at that and asked if there were any questions arising from my tour, any conclusions reached. I complimented him on the college, said it was a far cry from the days when an animal with an ailment was just shot. The research being done on worming and inoculations is going to lead to big changes in animal medicine. Great progress has been made. But we still have a long way to go in treating animals as well as we do human beings.”
“You mean the same as human beings?” said Randolph.
“That’s exactly how Dr. Osler responded. And Dad was twitching to correct me, starting to mumble that I didn’t mean quite that, when Dr. Osler stated, slightly tongue in cheek I think, ‘The argument is that animals are “dumb beasts” created to serve, not rival human beings.’
“I said I don’t think of them like that. I knew I was getting on shaky ground intellectually but I ended up blurting out, what about wolves? Or skunks? They don’t serve human beings. Not in any direct way. But I think they should have a place in the world.”
“‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ the principal piped in. ‘But we’re not clear as to what you might mean by treating animals as well as human beings.’
“Give them some gas or chloroform and lay them down on a table for operations,” I said.
“Oh my!” Randolph drew in his breath in exaggerated askance. “Were you shown the door?”
“The principal and Dr. Osler looked at each other. Dr. Osler gave the nod as if to say, this is your office, not mine. The principal wrapped his fingers on the edge of his desk. Pondered. Then turned to Dad. ‘Mr. Wilkinson, sir. Do we have a trouble maker here before us? Or a proper pioneer?’”
Randolph clapped his hands high in the air. “That is good. That is very good. And your father’s response?”
“Dad grinned and slapped his knee. ‘A proper pioneer, sir,’ he said. ‘Like her parents before her.’” “I’m proud of you.” Randolph picked her up and swung her around. “Even more so than your father.”
She clasped him tightly. “But it’s three years. Another three years. Far away from you. I don’t think I can bear it. There’s another way.” She stood back and faced him squarely. “After graduation in June, I could apprentice myself to a vet, one of the horse doctors in Halifax. Learn all there is to learn from him, except surgery. I’ll be like the doctors who prescribe but do not perform surgery.”
“No, you will not. Not under my tutelage.” Randolph pointed his finger at her. “You will be a proper pioneer.”
Ike landed firmly on Randolph’s shoulder, folding his arms tightly across the front of his parka. “Yes!” he said to Meg, loudly as his spirit could. “You must!”