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 out.
Mrs. Armstrong believed she had taught Tripod to ride in one of the large pockets of the safari vest that had hung unused in the closet for years. But Wendy suspected it was something the animal had learned from its previous owner, when it was much younger. As far as Wendy knew, she was the only person who knew Mrs. Armstrong carried Tripod around with her — always in the vest except on Sunday, when she had a special handbag she used to sneak him into church.
Mrs. Armstrong sometimes petted Tripod during prayer. When Wendy teased her about it, she said, “God knows, and He doesn’t care. I pet Tripod so he and God both know how thankful I am for him.”
Mrs. Armstrong gave Wendy an “I hope you can keep a secret” look, and said, “I’d just as soon folks don’t know about Tripod. You know how quick some are to accuse old people of being senile. Can you imagine what they’d say about me if they knew my best friend was a ferret?”
3
LOVER BOY
Mrs. Armstrong waited until Wendy was back behind the teller window, then deposited her social security check, taking out only what she needed to buy food for herself and Tripod. She was halfway back across the bank lobby when she encountered Kyle, who had just come in.
“Afternoon, Mrs. Armstrong,” Kyle said politely to the old lady who had been his first-grade teacher.
“Kyle Collins!” Mrs. Armstrong stopped short and peered up at him. Lifting her cane to tap him on the chest, she said in the voice teachers use with disruptive children, “I’ve been wanting to have a word with you, Lover Boy.”
Mrs. Armstrong had spent too many years yelling at unruly first graders to have a soft voice. Standing in the middle of the lobby, tapping one of the police department’s newest recruits on the chest with her cane, there was probably not a person in the bank who couldn’t hear her. Their smiles turned to chuckles when Mrs. Armstrong said, in her strong schoolteacher voice, “I know you’re stepping out with our Wendy. Nearly a year now, isn’t it?”
“Uh, about that,” mumbled Kyle, casting a helpless glance in Wendy’s direction.
“Well?