скачать книгу бесплатно
The Dog Who Healed A Family
Jo Coudert
In this charming collection of nineteen stories, you can't help but fall in love with the unlucky fawn who is saved by a nursing home, the troublesome rabbit who warms her way into a new family and the good (German) shepherd who comforts the sick.These are stories of hope, humor, triumph, loyalty, compassion, life and even death—but most of all, these are stories of love and the extraordinary animals who make our lives the richer for it.
the
dog who
healed
a family
And Other True Animal
Stories That Warm the
Heart & Touch the Soul
Jo Coudert
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Preface
All the stories in this book are about animals, and all are true. What the stories have in common is the love and caring that can exist between animals and people. Nancy Topp struggled for weeks to get a seventeen-year-old dog home across fifteen hundred miles. Gene Fleming fashioned shoes for a goose born without feet and supported the goose in a harness until he learned to walk. Months after their javelina disappeared, Patsy and Buddy Thorne were still roaming ranch lands in Texas, Bubba’s favorite chocolate in their pockets, searching for their wild pig.
The Thornes recently sent a clipping from their local newspaper describing how a group of men out hunting with bows and arrows came upon a javelina. The animal stood still, gazing at the men, while they shot at it three times. When all three arrows failed to strike home, one of the men ventured close enough to pet the animal and found it was tame and welcomed the attention.
What is amazing about the report is not that the animal was Bubba—it was not—but that the hunters shot three times at a creature that was not big enough or wild enough to be a threat to them and that did not provide sport by running. And because the meat of a javelina is too strong-tasting to be palatable, they were not interested in it for food.
The hunters shot at the javelina because it was there, which is the same reason a neighbor who lives downriver from me catches all the trout within hours of the time the state fish and wildlife service stocks the stream. An amiable man who loves his grandchildren, the neighbor has built the children a tree platform where they can sit silently and shoot at the deer who come to the river to drink at twilight. He also sets muskrat traps in the river and runs over woodchucks and possums on the road.
The family doesn’t eat the deer; the frozen body of a doe has been lying all winter in the field in back of my woods. Nor does anyone eat the trout the man catches; he tosses them into a little pond on his property where they stay until they become too numerous and die from lack of oxygen. When I once asked this ordinary, pleasant fellow why he’d gone out of his way to run over a raccoon crossing the road, he looked at me in surprise. “It’s an animal!” he said as though that quite explained it.
To many people it is sufficient explanation. After all, did not Jehovah tell Noah and his sons that all the beasts of the earth and fish of the sea were delivered into the hands of man? Surely this is a license to destroy them even if we have no better reason at the time than the fact that they exist and we wish to.
Or is it? Belatedly we are beginning to realize that the duality of people and animals, us and them, is false, just as we have discovered that there is no split between us and the world. The world is us and we are the world. We cannot simply exploit and destroy, either the world or the animals in it, if we are not at the same time to do ourselves irreparable harm.
Consider what a Native American, Chief Seattle, said in 1854: “What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected. This we know: The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth. This we know: All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth. Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”
The world belongs to the animals just as much as to us. Let us be unselfish enough to share it with them openly and generously. Which is to say, when you come upon a lost dog or an orphaned fawn or a goose born without feet, give it nothing to fear from you, grant it safety, offer to help if you can, be kind. In return, as the stories here show, you will sometimes find a welcome companionship, and surprisingly often love.
Jo Coudert
Califon, New Jersey
The Puppy Express
Curled nose to tail, the little dog was drowsing in Nancy Topp’s lap as the truck rolled along the interstate. Suddenly Nancy felt her stiffen into alertness. “What’s the matter, old girl?” Nancy asked. At seventeen, Snoopy had a bit of a heart condition and some kidney problems, and the family was concerned about her.
Struggling to her feet, the dog stared straight ahead. She was a small dog, with a dachshund body but a beagle head, and she almost seemed to be pointing. Nancy followed the dog’s intent gaze, and then she saw it, too. A wisp of smoke was curling out of a crack in the dashboard. “Joe!” she shouted at her husband at the wheel. “Joe, the engine’s on fire!”
Within seconds the cab of the ancient truck was seething with smoke. Nancy and Joe and their two children—Jodi, twelve, and Matthew, fifteen—leaped to the shoulder of the road and ran. When they were well clear, they turned and waited for the explosion that would blow everything they owned sky-high. Instead, the engine coughed its way into silence, gave a last convulsive shudder and died.
Joe was the first to speak. “Snoopy,” he said to the little brown and white dog, “you may not hear or see so good, but there’s nothing wrong with your nose.”
“Now if you could just tell us how we’re going to get home,” Matthew joked. Except it wasn’t much of a joke. Here they were, fifteen hundred miles from home, stranded on a highway in Wyoming, with the truck clearly beyond even Joe’s gift for repairs. The little dog, peering with cataract-dimmed eyes around the circle of faces, seemed to reflect their anxiety.
The Topps were on the road because five months earlier a nephew had told Joe there was work to be had in the Napa Valley and Joe and Nancy decided to take a gamble on moving out there. Breaking up their home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, they packed up the kids and Snoopy and set out for California. But once there, the warehousing job Joe hoped for did not materialize, Nancy and the kids were sharply homesick and their funds melted away. Now it was January and, the gamble lost, they were on their way back home to Fort Wayne.
The truck had gotten them as far as Rock Springs, Wyoming, but now there was nothing to do but sell it to a junk dealer for $25 and hitch a ride to the bus station. Two pieces of bad news greeted them there. Four tickets to Fort Wayne came to more money than they had, much more, and dogs were not allowed on the bus.
“But we’ve got to take Snoopy with us,” Nancy pleaded with the ticket seller, tears welling in her eyes. It had been a disastrous day, but this was the worst news of all.
Joe drew her away from the window. It was no use getting upset about Snoopy, he told her, until they figured out how to get themselves on the bus. With no choice but to ask for help, they called Travelers Aid, and with kind efficiency the local representative arranged for a motel room for them for the night. There, with their boxes and bags piled in a corner, they put in a call to relatives back home, who promised to get together money for the fare and wire it the next day.
“But what about Snoopy?” Matthew said as soon as his father hung up the phone.
“We can’t go without Snoopy,” Jodi stated flatly.
Joe picked up the little dog. “Snoopy,” he said, tugging her floppy ears in the way she liked, “I think you’re going to have to hitchhike.”
“Don’t tease, Joe,” Nancy said curtly.
“I’m not teasing, honey,” he assured her, and tucked Snoopy into the crook of his arm. “I’m going to try to find an eastbound truck to take the old girl back for us.”
At the local truck stop, Joe sat Snoopy on a stool beside him while he fell into conversation with drivers who stopped to pet her. “Gee, I’d like to help you out,” one after another said. “She’s awful cute and I wouldn’t mind the company, but I’m not going through Fort Wayne this trip.” The only driver who might have taken her picked Snoopy up and looked at her closely. “Naw,” the man growled, “with an old dog like her, there’d be too many pit stops. I got to make time.” Still hopeful, Joe tacked up a sign asking for a ride for Snoopy and giving the motel’s phone number.
“Somebody’ll call before bus time tomorrow,” he predicted to the kids when he and Snoopy got back to the motel.
“But suppose nobody does?” Jodi said.
“Sweetie, we’ve got to be on that bus. The Travelers Aid can only pay for us to stay here one night.”
The next day Joe went off to collect the wired funds while Nancy and the kids sorted through their possessions, trying to decide what could be crammed into the six pieces of luggage they were allowed on the bus and what had to be left behind. Ordinarily Snoopy would have napped while they worked, but now her eyes followed every move Nancy and the children made. If one of them paused to think, even for a minute, Snoopy nosed at the idle hand, asking to be touched, to be held.
“She knows,” Jodi said, cradling her. “She knows something awful is going to happen.”
The Travelers Aid representative arrived to take the belongings they could not pack, for donation to the local thrift shop. A nice man, he was caught between being sympathetic and being practical when he looked at Snoopy. “Seventeen is really old for a dog,” he said gently. “Maybe you just have to figure she’s had a long life and a good one.” When nobody spoke, he took a deep breath. “If you want, you can leave her with me and I’ll have her put to sleep after you’ve gone.”
The children looked at Nancy but said nothing; they understood there wasn’t any choice, and they didn’t want to make it harder on their mother by protesting. Nancy bowed her head. She thought of all the walks, all the romps, all the picnics, all the times she’d gone in to kiss the children good-night and Snoopy had lifted her head to be kissed, too.
“Thank you,” she told the man. “It’s kind of you to offer. But no. No,” she repeated firmly. “Snoopy’s part of the family, and families don’t give up on each other.” She reached for the telephone book, looked up kennels in the yellow pages and began dialing. Scrupulously she started each call with the explanation that the family was down on their luck. “But,” she begged, “if you’ll just keep our little dog until we can find a way to get her to Fort Wayne, I give you my word we’ll pay. Please trust me. Please.”
A veterinarian with boarding facilities agreed finally to take her, and the Travelers Aid representative drove them to her office. Nancy was the last to say goodbye. She knelt to take Snoopy’s frosted muzzle in her hands. “You know we’d never leave you if we could help it,” she whispered, “so don’t give up. Don’t you dare give up. We’ll get you back somehow, I promise.”
Once back in Fort Wayne, the Topps found a mobile home to rent, one of Joe’s brothers gave them his old car, sisters-in-law provided pots and pans and bed linens, the children returned to their old schools and Nancy and Joe found jobs. Bit by bit the family got itself together. But the circle had a painful gap in it. Snoopy was missing. Every day Nancy telephoned a different moving company, a different trucking company, begging for a ride for Snoopy. Every day Jodi and Matthew came through the door asking if she’d had any luck and she had to say no.
By March they’d been back in Fort Wayne six weeks and Nancy was in despair. She dreaded hearing from Wyoming that Snoopy had died out there, never knowing how hard they’d tried to get her back. One day a friend suggested she call the Humane Society. “What good would that do?” Nancy said. “Aren’t they only concerned about abandoned animals?” But she had tried everything else, so she telephoned Rod Hale, the director of the Fort Wayne Department of Animal Control, and told him the story.
“I don’t know what I can do to help,” Rod Hale said when she finished. “But I’ll tell you this. I’m sure going to try.” A week later, he had exhausted the obvious approaches. Snoopy was too frail to be shipped in the unheated baggage compartment of a plane. A professional animal transporting company wanted $655 to bring her east. Shipping companies refused to be responsible for her. Rod hung up from his latest call and shook his head. “I wish the old-time Pony Express was still in existence,” he remarked to his assistant, Skip Cochrane. “They’d have passed the dog along from one driver to another and delivered her back home.”
“It’d have been a Puppy Express,” Skip joked.
Rod thought for a minute. “By golly, that may be the answer.” He got out a map and a list of animal shelters in Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana, and picked up the phone. Could he enlist enough volunteers to put together a Puppy Express to transport Snoopy by stages across five states? Would people believe it mattered enough for a seventeen-year-old dog to be reunited with her family that they’d drive a hundred or so miles west to pick her up and another hundred or so miles east to deliver her to the next driver?
In a week he had his answer, and on Sunday, March 11, he called the Topps. “How are you?” he asked Nancy.
“I’d feel a lot better if you had some news for me.”
“Then you can begin feeling better right now,” Rod told her jubilantly. “The Puppy Express starts tomorrow. Snoopy’s coming home!”
Monday morning, in Rock Springs, Dr. Pam McLaughlin checked Snoopy worriedly. The dog had been sneezing the day before. “Look here, old girl,” the vet lectured as she took her temperature, “you’ve kept your courage up until now. This is no time to get sick just when a lot of people are about to go to a lot of trouble to get you back to your family.”
Jim Storey, the animal control officer in Rock Springs, had volunteered to be Snoopy’s first driver. When he pulled up outside the clinic, Dr. McLaughlin bundled Snoopy in a sweater and carried her to the car. “She’s got a cold, Jim,” the vet said, “so keep her warm. Medicine and instructions and the special food for her kidney condition are in the shopping bag.”
“She’s got a long way to go,” Jim said. “Is she going to make it?”
“I wish I could be sure of it,” the doctor admitted. She put the little dog on the seat beside Jim and held out her hand. Snoopy placed her paw in it. “You’re welcome, old girl,” the vet said, squeezing it. “It’s been a pleasure taking care of you. The best of luck. Get home safely.”
Jim and Snoopy drove 108 miles to Rawlings, Wyoming. There they rendezvoused with Cathy English, who had come 118 miles from Casper to meet them. Cathy laughed when she saw Snoopy. “What a funny-looking, serious little creature you are to be traveling in such style,” she teased. “Imagine, private chauffeurs across five states.” But that evening, when she phoned Rod Hale to report that Snoopy had arrived safely in Casper, she called her “a dear old girl” and admitted that “If she were mine, I’d go to a lot of trouble to get her back, too.”
Snoopy went to bed at Cathy’s house—a nondescript little brown and white animal very long in the tooth—and woke the next morning a celebrity. Word of the seventeen-year-old dog with a bad cold who was being shuttled across mid-America to rejoin her family had gotten to the news media. After breakfast, dazed by the camera and lights but, as always, polite, Snoopy sat on a desk at the Casper Humane Society and obligingly cocked her head to show off the new leash that was a gift from Cathy. And that night, in Fort Wayne, the Topps were caught between laughter and tears as they saw their old girl peer out at them from the television set.
With the interview behind her, Snoopy set out for North Platte, 350 miles away, in the company of Myrtie Bain, a Humane Society official in Casper who had volunteered for the longest single hop on Snoopy’s journey. The two of them stopped overnight in Alliance, and Snoopy, taking a stroll before turning in, got a thorn in her paw. Having come to rely on the kindness of strangers, she held quite still while Myrtie removed it, and then continued to limp until Myrtie accused her of doing it just to get sympathy. Her sneezes, however, were genuine, and Myrtie put her to bed early, covering her with towels to keep off drafts.
In North Platte at noon the next day, more reporters and cameramen awaited them, but as soon as she’d been interviewed, Snoopy was back on the road for a 138-mile trip to Grand Island. Twice more that day she was passed along, arriving in Lincoln, Nebraska, after dark and so tired that she curled up in the first doggie bed she spotted despite the growls of its rightful owner.
In the morning her sneezing was worse and she refused to drink any water. Word of this was sent along with her, and as soon as she arrived in Omaha on the next leg, she was checked over by the Humane Society vet, who found her fever had dropped but she was dehydrated. A messenger was dispatched to the nearest store for Gatorade, to the fascination of reporters, who from then on headlined her as “Snoopy, the Gatorade Dog.”
With a gift of a new wicker sleeping basket and a note in the log being kept of her journey—“Happy to be part of the chain reuniting Snoopy with her family”—Nebraska passed the little dog on to Iowa. After a change of car and driver in Des Moines, Snoopy sped on and by nightfall was in Cedar Rapids. Pat Hubbard, in whose home she spent the night, was sufficiently concerned about her to set an alarm and get up three times in the night to force-feed her Gatorade. Snoopy seemed stronger in the morning, and the Puppy Express rolled on.
As happens to travelers, Snoopy’s outfit grew baggy and wrinkled, her sweater stretching so much that she tripped on it with almost every step. This did not go unnoticed, and by the time she reached Davenport, she was sporting a new sweater, as well as a collection of toys, food and water dishes and her own traveling bag to carry them in. The log, in addition to noting when she had been fed and walked, began to fill with comments in the margin: “Fantastic little dog!” “What a luv!” “Insists on sitting in the front seat, preferably in a lap.” “Likes the radio on.” “Hate to give her up! Great companion!”
At nightfall of her fifth and last full day on the road, Snoopy was in Chicago, her next-to-last stop. Whether it was that she was getting close to home or just because her cold had run its course, she was clearly feeling better. Indeed, the vet who examined her told the reporters, “For an old lady who’s been traveling all week and has come more than thirteen hundred miles, she’s in grand shape. She’s going to make it home tomorrow just fine.” The Topps, watching the nightly update of Snoopy’s journey on the Fort Wayne TV stations, broke into cheers.
The next day was Saturday, March 17. In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, the little dog sported a new green coat with a green derby pinned to the collar. The Chicago press did one last interview with her, and then Snoopy had nothing to do but nap until Skip Cochrane arrived from Fort Wayne to drive her the 160 miles home.
Hours before Snoopy and Skip were expected in Fort Wayne, the Topps were waiting excitedly at the Humane Society. Jodi and Matthew worked on a room-sized banner that read “Welcome Home, Snoopy! From Rock Springs, Wyoming, to Fort Wayne, Indiana, via the Puppy Express,” with her route outlined across the bottom and their signatures in the corner. Reporters from the Fort Wayne TV stations and newspapers, on hand to report the happy ending to Snoopy’s story, interviewed the Topps and the shelter’s staff, in particular Rod Hale, whose idea the Puppy Express had been. One interviewer asked him why the volunteers had done it. Why had thirteen staff members of ten Humane Societies and animal shelters gone to so much trouble for one little dog?
Rod told him what one volunteer had said to him on the phone. “It would have been so easy to tell Nancy Topp that nothing could be done. Instead, you gave all of us a chance to make a loving, caring gesture. Thank you for that.”
Somewhere amid the fuss and confusion, Rod found time to draw Nancy aside and give her word that Snoopy would be arriving home with her boarding bill marked “Paid.” An anonymous friend of the Humane Society in Casper had taken care of it.
“I thought I was through with crying,” Nancy said as the warm tears bathed her eyes. “Maybe it was worth our little dog and us going through all this just so we’d find out how kind people can be.”
The CB radio crackled and Skip Cochrane’s voice filled the crowded room. “Coming in! The Puppy Express is coming in!”
Nancy and Joe and the children rushed out in the subfreezing air, the reporters on their heels. Around the corner came the pickup truck, lights flashing, siren sounding. “Snoopy’s here!” shouted the children. “Snoopy’s home!”
And there the little dog was, sitting up on the front seat in her St. Patrick’s Day outfit, peering nearsightedly out of the window at all the commotion. After two months of separation from her family, after a week on the road, after traveling across five states for fifteen hundred miles in the company of strangers, Snoopy had reached the end of her odyssey.
Nancy got to the truck first. In the instant before she snatched the door open, Snoopy recognized her. Barking wildly, she scrambled into Nancy’s arms. Then Joe was there, and the children. Laughing, crying, they hugged Snoopy and each other. The family that didn’t give up on even its smallest member was back together again.
Sweet Elizabeth
Jane Bartlett first saw the white rabbit in a pet shop window at Easter time. The other rabbits were jostling for places at a bowl of chow, but this one was sitting up on her haunches, gazing solemnly back at the faces pressed against the glass staring at her. One ear stood up stiff and straight, as a proper rabbit’s ear should, but the other flopped forward over one eye, making her look as raffish as a little old lady who has taken a drop too much and knocked her hat askew.
An executive of the company in which Jane was a trainee came by, stopped to say hello and chuckled at the sight of the rabbit. Mr. Corwin was a friendly, fatherly man, and as they stood there smiling at the funny-looking creature, Jane found herself telling him stories about Dumb Bunny, the white rabbit she’d had as a small child who drank coffee from her father’s breakfast cup and once leaped after a crumb in the toaster, singeing his whiskers into tight little black corkscrews. Some of the homesickness Jane was feeling at being new in New York City must have been in her voice, for on Easter morning her doorbell rang and a deliveryman handed her a box.
She set it on the floor while she read the card, and Robert, her tomcat, always curious about packages, strolled over to sniff it. Suddenly he crouched, tail twitching, ready to spring. Jane cautiously raised the lid of the box and up popped the rabbit with the tipsy ear. The cat hissed fiercely. Peering nearsightedly at him, the rabbit shook her head, giving herself a resounding thwack in the nose with her floppy ear, hopped out of the box and made straight for the cat. He retreated. She pressed pleasantly forward. He turned and fled. She pursued. He jumped up on a table. She looked dazedly around, baffled by the disappearance of her newfound friend.
Jane picked her up to console her, and the rabbit began nuzzling her arm affectionately. “Don’t try to butter me up,” Jane told her sternly. “A city apartment is no place for a rabbit. You’re going straight back to the pet shop tomorrow.” The rabbit was a tiny creature, her bones fragile under her skin, her fur as white as a snowfield and soft as eiderdown. Gently Jane tugged the floppy ear upright, then let it slip like velvet through her fingers. How endearing the white rabbit was. Could she possibly … Jane shifted her arm and discovered a hole as big as a half-dollar chewed in the sleeve of her sweater. “That does it,” Jane said, hastily putting the rabbit down. “You’ve spoiled your chances.” With a mournful shake of her head, the rabbit hopped off in search of the cat.
Jane had a careful speech planned when she arrived at her office the next morning, but the kind executive looked so pleased with himself that the words went out of her head. “What have you named her?” he asked, beaming. She said the first thing that came to mind: “Elizabeth.”
“Sweet Elizabeth,” he said. “Wonderful!”
Sweet Elizabeth, indeed. Jane was tempted to tell him that Sweet Elizabeth had dined on her best sweater and spent the night in the bathroom, where she had pulled the towels off the racks and unraveled the toilet paper to make a nest for herself. Instead, she began to describe the rabbit’s crush on Robert the cat, and soon half the office had gathered around, listening and laughing. It was the first time anyone had paid the least bit of attention to her, and Jane began to wonder whether she wasn’t being too hasty about getting rid of Elizabeth. She did go to the pet shop on her lunch hour, however, just to sound them out. Their no-return policy was firm. The best they would do was sell Jane a wooden cage painted to look like a country cottage to keep the rabbit in.
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” she told Elizabeth that evening as she settled her into it. “It’s just temporary until I find a home for you.”
In the night it wasn’t the sound of the rabbit butting off the roof of the cottage that awakened Jane. She slept through that. It was the crash of the ficus tree going over when Sweet Elizabeth, having nibbled away the tasty lower leaves, went after the higher ones. The next day Jane bought a latch for the cottage. That night Elizabeth worked it loose and ate the begonias on the windowsill. The following day Jane bought a lock. That night Elizabeth gnawed a new front door in her cottage.
It was not hunger or boredom that fueled Elizabeth’s determination to get loose; it was her passion for Robert. The minute Jane let her out, she hopped to him and flung herself down between his paws. He, of course, boxed her soundly for her impertinence, but her adoration wore him down, and one day he pretended to be asleep when she lay down near enough to touch him with one tiny white paw. Soon, as though absentmindedly, he was including her in his washups, with particular attention paid to the floppy ear where it had dusted along the floor.
All of this made marvelous stories for Jane to tell in the office, and she discovered it wasn’t so hard to make friends after all. She even began to gain something of a reputation for wit when she described how Robert, finding that Elizabeth did not understand games involving catnip mice, invented a new one for the two of them.
Since Elizabeth followed him about as tenaciously as a pesky kid sister, he could easily lure her out onto Jane’s tiny terrace. Then he dashed back inside and hid behind a wastebasket. Slowly Elizabeth would hop to the doorway and peer cautiously about. Not seeing the cat anywhere, she’d jump down the single step, whereupon Robert would pounce, rolling them both over and over across the living room rug until Elizabeth kicked free with her strong hind legs. Punch-drunk from the tumbling about, she’d stagger to her feet, shake herself so that her tipsy ear whirled about her head, then scramble off and happily follow the cat outside again.
This game was not all that Elizabeth learned from Robert. He taught her something far more important, at least from Jane’s point of view. Out on the terrace were flower boxes that were much more to Robert’s liking than his indoor litter box. Time after time, while Robert scratched in the dirt, Elizabeth watched, her head cocked, her ear swinging gently. She was not a swift thinker, but one day light dawned. Robert stepped out of the flower box and she climbed in, which is how Elizabeth, with a little help from her friend, came to be housebroken.
With that problematic matter taken care of and all the plants eaten to nubbins anyway, Jane gave up trying to confine Elizabeth to her cottage and let her stay free. She met Jane at the door in the evening, just as Robert did, and sat up to have her head patted. She learned her name; she learned what “no” meant if said loudly and accompanied by a finger shaken under her nose; she learned what time meals were served and that food arrived at the apartment in paper bags. When Jane came home with groceries and set a bag even momentarily on the floor, Elizabeth’s strong teeth quickly ripped a hole in it. That is, unless she smelled carrots, in which case she tugged the bag onto its side and scrambled into it. If Jane got to the carrots before Elizabeth did and put them away on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, the rabbit bided her time until Jane opened the door again, then she stood up on her hind legs and yanked the carrots back out. It got so that Jane never dared slam the refrigerator door without first making sure Elizabeth’s head was not inside it.
But then dinner would be over, the food put away, and Jane settled down to read in her easy chair. First Robert would come, big and purring and kneading with his paws to make a satisfactory spot for himself in her lap. Then Elizabeth would amble over, sit up on her haunches, her little paws folded primly on her chest, and study the situation to decide where there was room for her. With a flying leap, she’d land on top of Robert, throw herself over and push with her hind legs until she’d managed to wedge herself in between the cat and Jane. Soon the twitching of her nose would slow, then cease, and she would be asleep.
At such times, it was easy for Jane to let her hand stray over the soft fur, to call her Sweet Elizabeth, to forgive her all her many transgressions—the sock chewed into fragments, the gnawed handle on a pocketbook, the magazine torn into scraps. But one day Elizabeth went too far; she chewed the heels off Jane’s best pair of shoes. Jane decided she had to go. And she had a prospective family to adopt her: a young couple with three small children. She invited the parents, along with two other couples, to dinner.
All that rolling around on the rug with Robert had turned the white rabbit rather gray, and, wanting Elizabeth to look her most beguiling, Jane decided to give her a bath. She filled a dishpan with warm water and plopped Elizabeth into it. The rabbit sprang out. Jane hustled her back in and this time got a firm grip on her ears. Elizabeth kicked and Jane let go. On the third try, Jane got her thoroughly soaped on the back but Elizabeth’s powerful hind legs would not let her near her stomach. Persuading herself that no one would look at the rabbit’s underside, Jane rinsed her off as best she could and tried to dry her with a towel. Wet, the rabbit’s silky fur matted into intricate knots. Jane brushed; Elizabeth licked. Jane combed; Elizabeth licked. Hours later, Elizabeth’s fur was still sticking out in every direction and it was obvious that a soggy mass on her stomach was never going to dry. Afraid Elizabeth would get pneumonia, Jane decided to cut out the worst of the knots. With manicure scissors, she began carefully to snip. To her horror, a hole suddenly appeared. Elizabeth’s skin was as thin as tissue paper and the scissors had cut right through it. Jane rushed to get Mercurochrome and dab it on the spot. In the rabbit’s wet fur, the Mercurochrome spread like ink on blotting paper. Now Jane had a damp rabbit with a dirty-gray stomach dyed red.
The sight of her sitting up at the door to greet each new arrival sent Jane’s guests into gales of laughter, which Elizabeth seemed to enjoy. She hopped busily about to have her ears scratched. Jane was keeping a wary eye on her, of course, and saw the moment Elizabeth spotted the stuffed celery on the hors d’oeuvres tray. But Jane wasn’t quite quick enough. Elizabeth leaped and landed in the middle of the tray. Even that simply occasioned more laughter, and there were cries of protest when Jane banished Elizabeth to her cottage.
After dinner, Jane yielded and released her. Quite as though Elizabeth had used the time in her cottage to think up what she might do to entertain the party, she hopped into the exact center of the living room floor and gazed seriously around the circle of faces. When silence had fallen and she had everyone’s full attention, she leaped straight into the air, whirled like a dervish and crash-landed in a sprawl of legs and flying ears. The applause was prolonged. Peeping shyly from behind her ear, Elizabeth accepted it, looking quite pleased with herself.
The children’s father adored her, and when in the course of the evening he saw that Elizabeth went to the terrace door and scratched to be let out, he couldn’t wait to take her home. “She’s housebroken,” he reminded his wife, who was hesitating, “and the kids’ll love her.” Elizabeth, returning, climbed into his lap, and it was settled: Elizabeth was to go to her new family. Until the end of the evening. “What have you spilled on yourself?” the man’s wife asked. The edge of his suit jacket, from lapel to bottom button, was white. Elizabeth had nibbled it down to the backing.
“You rat,” Jane scolded her when the guests had gone. “I found a good home for you, and you blew it.” Elizabeth shook her head remorsefully, beating herself with her floppy ear, and wandered away. After Jane had cleaned up the kitchen and was ready for bed, she went looking for Elizabeth to put her in her cottage. She hunted high, low and in between. Where was she? Beginning to be frantic, she went through the apartment a second time. She even looked over the terrace railing, wondering for one wild moment if Elizabeth had been so contrite she’d thrown herself off. Only because there was nowhere else to search did Jane open the refrigerator door. There Elizabeth was, on the bottom shelf, having a late-night snack of carrot sticks and parsley.
For quite a while after that, nothing untoward happened, and Elizabeth, Robert and Jane settled into a peaceful and loving coexistence. When Jane watched Elizabeth sunbathing on the terrace beside Robert or sitting on her haunches to wash her face with her dainty paws or jumping into her lap to be petted, she found herself wondering how she could have imagined giving Elizabeth up. Until the day she did a thorough housecleaning and moved the couch. The rug had been grazed down to the backing.
