nine months they had been more or less going steady. He wasn’t exactly a hottie, but he was a fitness freak. His well-muscled body (which Wendy had seen quite a bit of by now) definitely put him in the “hunk” category. She smiled and waved, glad to know that the police weren’t far away as she and Ellen transferred $50,000 in cash from their bag into the ATM.
As they re-entered the bank, Wendy paused to hold the door open for an elderly lady climbing the steps with the aid of a cane. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Armstrong,” Wendy said politely. “Awfully hot to be out and about.”
“Oh, heat’s no problem for us pioneers,” Mrs. Armstrong assured her. “I lived most of my life before air conditioning was even invented.” She shivered as she stepped into the cool, air-conditioned bank. “I imagine I’d freeze to death if I were cooped up in a place like this.”
Mrs. Armstrong wore a summer dress that was stylish enough — except that over the dress she wore a sleeveless safari vest, the kind with a dozen pockets, inside and out. Wendy was probably the only person in town who knew why she always wore that vest.
“Tripod doesn’t like the cold, either,” Mrs. Armstrong confided to Wendy. “Want to say hi to him?”
Mrs. Armstrong held the front of her vest open enough for Wendy to look down and see a small furry face with two bright black eyes looking up at her. “Hi, Tripod,” she whispered. To Mrs. Armstrong, she said, “Better hold on to him. If he gets loose here in the bank, it’ll be total chaos.”
Mrs. Armstrong chuckled. “This bank could use a little chaos. I don’t know how you can stand being shut up in here all day.”
Wendy didn’t tell Mrs. Armstrong that being indoors all day was the hardest thing about a job which she otherwise liked. No point in remembering that she had been happiest when she was doing what she had been doing back when she and Mrs. Armstrong first met.
• • •
Wendy was only fourteen at the time, and already had a reputation as someone who liked caring for wild animals that had been orphaned or injured. In fact, that’s what she was doing — sitting on her parents’ front porch, feeding a baby flying squirrel that had fallen out of the nest — when Mrs. Armstrong came running up. Wendy knew her to say hello, but that was about all. Before she could wonder why a senior citizen would be running, Mrs. Armstrong called out breathlessly, “Honey, can you come with me right away? There’s this thing, this animal, in my henhouse. It’s hurt! Bad!”
Wendy immediately tucked the little squirrel into the box she had fixed up for it. Without even taking time to put on her shoes, she followed the old lady back to her house. As they hurried along, Mrs. Armstrong explained the situation.
“There’s a varmint that’s been raiding my henhouse. I wanted my son, Crawford, when he came from Montana to visit, to build me a new henhouse. Instead, he brought this trap, and, well, I should’ve gone out to the henhouse with him to see what he was doing, but I just didn’t think … you know, men around here hunt, but they don’t use traps. This one’s just awful. I had no idea a trap could be so nasty!”
“What has it caught?” Wendy asked.
Mrs. Armstrong didn’t answer because she was busy opening the gate into her yard and hurrying around back to where the chicken pen was.
“Just awful!” Mrs. Armstrong muttered. “When I went out to gather eggs this morning, and saw that thing, I just about died.”
When Mrs. Armstrong opened the door to her henhouse, Wendy saw a leg-hold trap, the kind normally used out West to trap animals for their fur. A small animal, of a type she had never seen, had one front leg clamped in the jaws of the trap. The creature was dark brown, about the size of a squirrel, but definitely not a squirrel. It looked up at her with black eyes so full of pain that it nearly broke her heart. The leg was almost completely severed. It looked like the little animal might have been trying to chew off its own leg to free itself.
“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
