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The passengers around us all craned their necks to see what she was carrying on about. Chester blinked his big green eyes and purred.

  During the flight, Carl and I finally had time to talk, and we decided we wanted to keep Chester ourselves. “He’s so mellow,” I said. “He won’t be a threat to Pete and Molly.” We liked the idea that, by giving his cat a good home, we would be doing one final favor for Herman.

  When we got home, we put Chester in the guest bedroom with a litter box and food. We wanted to introduce him to Pete and Molly gradually, to make sure that the first meeting went smoothly. I wish I could report that our efforts were successful, but here’s what really happened.

  Molly and Pete took one look at Chester and decided they hated him. I believe it was because he looked so much like Buddy, and they remembered the fighting that had taken place with him. For all I know, they thought Buddy had returned. Chester never had a chance to act friendly to Pete and Molly. They growled and spit while he backed away from them.

  We stuck it out for three weeks, during which time we had to supervise Chester whenever he was let out of the guest room. If we didn’t, he was likely to be attacked. Even when he was inside the guest room, Molly often sat in the hallway beside the closed door, glaring and hissing. I reminded her that she had once been the newcomer and that Pete had welcomed her, but she did not listen. We began searching for a good home for Chester.

  One day when I picked up my mail at the post office, I asked the postmistress if she knew anyone who wanted a nice cat. “It needs to be a quiet home,” I said, and I told her Chester’s background.

  She had a friend who resided in an assisted-living apartment. “She wants a cat so badly,” Merrie Lou said. “Her daughter got her a kitten but it was too rambunctious and scratched her, and they had to find a new home for it. An older cat would be ideal.”

  It sounded like the perfect spot for Chester. I talked to the woman, and to her daughter, and we arranged to take Chester to her apartment for a visit.

  I optimistically took along Chester’s bed, food, and medical records, in case she loved him immediately and wanted him to stay.

  I have never seen anyone so thrilled to see an animal. Her face lit up and she began talking to Chester and petting him. “He’s so handsome,” she said. “What a fine big boy.” He sat on her lap and purred. When we went home that day, Chester stayed behind.

  I called the next morning to see how he was adjusting. “You didn’t need to bring that cat bed,” the woman’s daughter told me. “He slept with Mom last night.”

  Periodically, Merrie Lou reported that she’d seen Chester when she visited her friend. “That is one lucky cat,” she said.

  We had never talked to Herman about what should happen to Chester if Herman couldn’t take care of him any longer, but I know that by making sure Chester was loved and happy, we honored Herman’s wishes.

  It had been a hassle to fly a cat home with us, but it was worth it.

  I Didn’t Want His Owner

  to Find Him

  Carl and I were driving on a two-lane highway, about seven miles from our cabin. As we approached a busy intersection, the driver in front of us suddenly slammed on his brakes. We skidded to a stop, too.

  A beagle, his head drooping down, plodded across the road, oblivious to the danger. Luckily, the cars coming from the other direction also saw him in time to stop. When the beagle made it safely to the far side, the car in front of us drove on. Then the dog turned around and headed back the way he had just come, crossing the highway again!

  Horns honked. Brakes squealed. The dog trudged toward us, his long brown ears dragging on the pavement. Carl pulled to the side of the road while I opened the glove compartment and took out the leash we kept there. We both got out, calling, “Here, dog,” coaxing the dog to come to us. The driver behind us gave us a thumbs-up as he drove past.

  The leash wasn’t necessary. As soon as we began talking to him, the beagle came to us. I opened the back door and the dog climbed in and settled down on the seat. He wore no collar.

  An espresso stand stood on one side of the intersection and a gas station/mini-mart served the other. We went into both of them, described the dog we had picked up, and left our telephone number, in case anyone came looking for a lost dog. Then we continued toward home, making plans to take his picture and print FOUND DOG flyers to post in the area.

  We’d gone only a few blocks when we heard snoring from the backseat.

  The beagle, curled in a tight circle, was sound asleep.

  “The poor thing is exhausted,” I said. “I wonder how long he’s been wandering around.”

  “I’m glad we don’t have far to go,” Carl said. “He stinks!”

  I agreed, and we both cracked our windows.

  At home, we put the leash on him and stood in the driveway for a closer look. “He’s filthy,” Carl said. “No wonder he smells bad.”

  “He probably has fleas, too,” I said.

  The beagle wagged his tail.

  I got out dog shampoo and towels while Carl carried the beagle into the bathroom and put him in the tub. We poured clear water on him, and water the color of coffee ran off. We shampooed, rinsed, then shampooed and rinsed him again.

  “Let’s call him Willie,” I suggested. I like to give animals a name quickly. Years earlier we had adopted a cat and agreed to live with her awhile before we named her. We wanted to learn her true personality so that we could choose a name that fit her character. Of course, we had to call her something in the meantime, so we called her Kitty. By the time we were ready to select a better name, she was used to Kitty and so were we. That poor cat ended up being Kitty for her whole life, a name that embarrassed me because I felt a writer ought to be more original than that.

  Once Willie was clean he smelled a lot better, but the bath revealed a terrible skin condition. Large patches on his back had no fur. There were scabs where he’d scratched himself raw, and areas of flaking skin. “Maybe he has mange,” I said, “or some other kind of skin disease.”

  “Maybe he’s allergic to fleas,” Carl said. As soon as Willie was dry, we put flea prevention drops on him. Then Carl vacuumed the backseat of our car.

  After we saw how awful his skin was, we had second thoughts about printing up flyers to try to find Willie’s family. “Whoever owns him hasn’t taken very good care of him,” I said. “His skin didn’t get this way in only a few days.” We decided not to put up flyers after all. Instead, we would watch for LOST DOG signs and ads, to see if anyone was looking for him.

  Carl and Willie

  It was too late in the day to take him to our vet, but we didn’t want to expose our own animals to a potentially contagious problem, so we decided that Willie would spend the night in Carl’s workshop. The workshop, where Carl restored player pianos and other mechanical musical instruments, is attached to our house. The large space contained workbenches, supplies, shelves, cupboards, and several instruments in various stages of restoration. Windows on two sides made it bright and cheerful. That night we took Willie for a long walk and then put him in the workshop with a bowl of water, dog food, and a thick blanket to sleep on.

  Beagles make a loud, baying sound, and I was afraid Willie might howl in the night, distressed at being in a strange place, but we heard nothing, not even snoring.

  “He’s too tired to howl,” Carl said.

  The next morning, I opened the door to the workshop, expecting to be greeted by an eager dog. The room was still. The blanket had been pawed into a heap, and the food bowl was empty, but I didn’t see a beagle.

  “Willie?” I said. I looked around. He couldn’t possibly have gotten out, and he was too big to squeeze underneath one of the workbenches. “Here, Willie!” I called.

  The blanket moved. Then a head poked out from underneath it. Instead of sleeping on top of the soft blanket, Willie had spent the night on the concrete floor, with the blanket heaped on top of him. He slept that way every night that he was with us.
r />   When we found him we thought Willie was an elderly dog because of the way he trudged slowly across the road, but a bowl of dog food and a sound night’s sleep perked him up and we realized he wasn’t old after all.

  Willie proved to be a friendly, happy dog. He liked walking on the leash and loved having his long ears rubbed. We took him to our vet, who made sure there wasn’t a microchip identification. After looking at Willie’s teeth, he estimated Willie was four years old. He ran some tests to try to diagnose his skin condition. “Beagles are prone to skin and coat problems,” he told us, “but I think this dog has a food allergy. Let’s try him on a special diet.”

  He gave us a medicated ointment to help heal Willie’s skin and warned us not to let Willie roam free. “A beagle’s nose will lead him into trouble,” he said. “They’re great rabbit hunters.” I had a quick vision of Willie taking off into the woods after a rabbit, never to be seen again.

  We bought the recommended dog food and Willie gobbled it down. Within a few days, his skin began to clear up. Two weeks later he did not look like the same dog. The ointment had worked, and the new food agreed with him. The scabs and flaky skin were gone. Thick shiny fur was growing in where Willie’s bald patches had been. We bought him a stylish new collar.

  Every day, I read the newspaper and craigslist notices for lost dogs but I didn’t find anyone who was looking for a beagle. We returned to the gas station and espresso stand on the corner where we had found Willie. No one had inquired about a dog; there were no LOST DOG signs along the road.

  “I’m glad his owners aren’t looking for him,” I told Carl. “If I found a LOST BEAGLE notice, I’d be honor-bound to contact that person, but I really don’t want Willie to go back where he came from. He’s so much healthier now.”

  “I don’t want his previous people to have him, either,” said Carl, “but we need to find him a good home.”

  Although we’d grown fond of Willie, we knew we couldn’t keep him. We had a motor home, which we used to travel around the country while I spoke at schools, libraries, and conferences. Daisy, Pete, and Molly traveled with us. We couldn’t manage another animal on those trips.

  Willie needed a permanent, loving home. Our local Humane Society is a good facility but I was reluctant to take Willie there. Any animal is frightened when locked in a cage in a strange, noisy place, and it could take weeks before Willie was chosen. Still, no potential adopters were going to knock on my door unless they knew about Willie. Somehow, I needed to make that happen.

  I went online, found a beagle rescue group in our area, and contacted them. I learned that they screen potential adopters carefully, and keep the dogs in foster homes until they’re placed in a permanent home, no matter how long that takes. I gave them all the information I had about Willie, including his food allergy and where we had found him. I e-mailed a picture of him.

  “We’d love to have him,” I was told, “but we can’t take him directly from you. Since he was picked up as a stray, by law he has to go to the Humane Society for three days to give his owners a chance to claim him. At the end of that time, the Humane Society will release him to us and we’ll find a loving home for him. We’ve worked with them many times before.”

  I didn’t like the idea of making Willie sit in a cage at the shelter for three days, but it seemed the best option, since it did guarantee that he’d be placed in a good home. We took him there late in the afternoon on day one, and the rescue group said they’d pick him up early in the morning on day three, thus fulfilling the three-day requirement while minimizing the length of time he would be at the shelter.

  When we took him in, we also took the records from our veterinarian, with our names blacked out, and the bag of prescription food. I made sure the attendant understood that Willie needed a special diet. I had put all the instructions in writing so there would be no mistake.

  I rubbed his ears, gave him a tearful hug, and told him good-bye. The person from beagle rescue had promised to let me know the minute Willie was released to her. The rest of the afternoon and evening dragged by as I worried about Willie feeling abandoned in a cage at the Humane Society. The next day seemed a week long.

  Finally it was the morning when Willie was scheduled to be picked up by the beagle rescue folks—but my phone didn’t ring. I checked my e-mail every ten minutes. Nothing. Finally, at noon, I called my contact at the rescue group.

  “Did you pick up Willie?” I asked.

  “We don’t have him,” I was told. “His owner showed up at the Humane Society yesterday afternoon and claimed him.”

  My heart sank. Willie had thrived during the weeks he had lived with us. He was clean and healthy and happy—and now he was back with the owner who, I assumed, had neglected him, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I imagined Willie’s skin covered with sores again. I pictured his dirty fur, with bald patches.

  “We should have tried harder to find a home for him ourselves,” I said as I choked back tears. “We should never have left him at the shelter.”

  “We did the best we could,” Carl said. “Who would have dreamed his owners were still looking for him?”

  Every time we drove past the intersection where we’d found him, I felt sick inside. “I hope Willie’s okay,” I’d say, and Carl would nod.

  Four months later, I ordered a refill of a prescription for Daisy. When I stopped at the veterinary clinic to pick it up, I got out my wallet and waited to see how much it was. “You don’t owe anything,” the office person told me. “You have a credit on your account of seventy-two dollars.”

  “That isn’t right,” I said. “I’d know if I had a credit, especially one that large.”

  She double-checked my file. “It says here that you have the credit.”

  Just then the vet’s technician came out to the front desk. “Do you know anything about this credit on my account?” I asked.

  She looked at my file and thought for a moment. “Oh, I know what that is,” she said. “Remember that beagle you rescued?”

  “Yes. Willie.”

  “Well, his owners were here. They said they’d taken him to a different veterinarian for months trying to clear up his skin problem, but nothing had helped. They were thrilled to see him in such good shape. They had the paperwork on him from the Humane Society, and it showed that we’d treated him, so they came in. They asked who had brought him to us. They were so grateful to you for helping him that they wanted to reimburse you for what you spent on him.”

  I’m sure my jaw was hanging open as I listened.

  “We don’t give out names or phone numbers of our clients,” she went on, “so they asked if you were regular clients. I assured her that you bring your own animals, plus rescues, to us all the time, so they paid what you had spent on Willie and had it credited to your account.”

  By then I was not only grinning, I had goose bumps on my arms. “So they did care about Willie,” I said, “but they hadn’t found a vet who could solve his problem.”

  “Oh, they care,” she said. “He dug under their fence and he’d been lost for two months, but they still checked all the area shelters every day, looking for him.”

  “And they found him,” I said.

  She nodded. “They said he had on a collar and an ID tag when he got loose. Who knows what happened to those? Now he’s microchipped, in case he ever gets out again.”

  “I hope they kept him on the new food,” I said.

  “They did. In fact, they switched vets and they bring him to us now. He’s doing great.”

  I put what seemed like my free prescription in my purse and hurried home. I couldn’t wait to tell Carl that Willie was clean and healthy and loved.

  The Cats Who Had Been Shot

  The beautiful calico cat crouched at the bottom of the back porch steps, watching me as I watered the pansies in my planter boxes. “Hi there, kitty,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  When I started down the steps toward her, she backed away,
but she moved slowly. Most feral or stray cats will run when approached; I wondered if this cat was someone’s pet, or if she was sick or injured. I went inside and returned with a bowl of water and some cat food. She ate hungrily, lapped up some water, then walked off into the woods, still moving like an old person whose joints ached.

  About two hours later, she returned. This time she brought three kittens with her! Two kittens were brown and gold, with white chests, the same as Mama. Kitten Three was a black-and-white tuxedo. Baby Buddy? I did some mental arithmetic and knew Buddy was not the daddy. The kittens tumbled over one another, playing in the grass while Mama cat lay in the sun. Soon the kittens began nursing.

  I refilled Mama’s food and water bowls and set them where she had eaten earlier. As soon as the kittens saw me, they fled back into the woods. I sat on the porch steps and waited. Mama eyed me cautiously but came to eat and drink again.

  “You have beautiful babies,” I told her. “I’ll need to catch them and take them inside. They’ll be healthier and happier if they’re tame and adopted than they will be scrabbling for food in the forest. You will be, too.”

  Since my cats had always been spayed or neutered, I’d never raised kittens and wasn’t sure how old these were, but I guessed they were four or five weeks old. I knew they needed to be socialized as soon as possible if there was any hope of taming them enough to make them adoptable.

  After she ate, Mama cat stayed by the bowls, and when I slowly reached down to pet her, she let me. I stroked her thick, soft fur, and, although she didn’t purr, she seemed to like being touched. When my fingers moved across her shoulder, they hit something hard. I leaned over to look more closely, and rubbed my hand across that area again. There were small, hard lumps under her skin. Did Mama have tumors? Is that why she walked slowly?

  I called my vet and explained the situation. He said if I could catch her and bring her to the clinic, he’d fit her into the schedule. I went back outside, but Mama was gone, no doubt back into the woods to look after her babies.