Ivy Takes Care (4 page)

The next day, Ivy put the ring into its box and the box into an envelope she swiped from the Red Star Ranch office. She addressed it to Annie at Camp Allegro, Crawford Notch, New Hampshire.

The moment it went into the mailbox, Ivy was hit with the thought that if Camp Allegro forbade its campers from getting hair curlers and nail polish and candy bars in the mail, it would surely confiscate jewelry. Her heart sank, but it was too late. There was nothing she could do except wait for Annie’s reply.

Each day brought new flowers to Mule Canyon and new weather to the sky. Ivy lost herself in the smells of horse and leather, and the memory of the turtle day faded. Along the stony Mule Canyon trail, bright claret-cup cacti opened their flowers. One day, Ivy found mule deer antlers behind a stretch of pines.

“A four-point rack!” said Ivy. “Dad’ll like that for sure.” She strapped the antlers to the back of her saddle. Mr. Coleman collected them for ranch guests.

Each evening, Ivy mucked out Chestnut’s stall. She cleaned his hooves, treated his fly bites, and gave him his sweet feed. Chestnut nuzzled her shoulder when she brushed him and talked to her in little horse grunts and sighs.

One night, just before she turned on Chestnut’s radio, Ivy heard a squeak coming from an unused stall in the back of the stable. The mountains were full of critters of one kind or another, and Ivy knew that any number of them could creep into the barn if they liked and raid the sweet feed bin. Some creatures, like rattlers, were dangerous. Some, like skunks, were a nuisance, especially if your dog messed with them. Some, like coyotes, who stole lambs and anything else they could get their teeth into, were threats. Most other critters, like jackrabbits, raccoons, and prairie dogs, were just out there, harmless and making a living like everyone else.

Quietly, Ivy edged down the sluiceway to the unused stall. She peered over its wall. On a heap of hay in the corner lay a red fox — a vixen — and six kits. A hole in one of the boards at the base of the stall must have been her way in, and there she had had her babies.

The fox’s coat was the color of fire. She studied Ivy and showed her sharp teeth. Ivy studied her back and sensed the fear in her.

“What’s wrong with that front foot, Mama Fox?” she asked.

On the floor, Ivy could see drops of blackened blood. She looked back at the fox’s foot and spotted a blood-caked mass between the swollen pads.

Ivy looked deep into the fox’s bright brown eyes. She longed to lay a hand, for one second, on the snow-white hair in the creature’s ears. This little red mother was needy, but she was also determined to take care of her kits.

Caring for wild critters was not something Ivy had been raised to do. Coyotes and foxes preyed on chickens and lambs. There was an Agriculture Department bounty paid to anyone who brought in a pair of ears and a tail. Still, Ivy believed the little fox family had a right to live, too.

“You beauty!” she whispered to the mother fox. “You beauty with your little kits, you’ll have trouble finding food with that bad leg. I’ll bring you something to eat and drink and get you through this.” Ivy hoped her voice carried the same kind of comfort to the fox that it had for Chestnut. This time, the fox did not bare her teeth.

Ivy left the stable and went to a pine tree behind the Pratts’ house. Out of a knot in the curled and prickly bark she took the spare house key off a rusty nail, where it was hidden.

The key worked perfectly in the kitchen door. Ivy found the icebox with no trouble. She held her breath and, joy of joys, there was a box of eggs with half a dozen still left. They’d go bad by the time the Pratts came home. She grabbed the box.

Ivy locked up and double-checked the door before she headed out to the stable. Without showing her face to the fox or making any noise she could help, she squatted down and rolled each egg into the stall so it ended up near the fox’s tail. She followed this up with a dish of water, then left the stable. As she straddled her bike, Ivy paused to listen. She thought she could hear the crunch of an eggshell. All the while, the loopy, jazzy
Music from the Stars
serenaded both Chestnut and the stranger from the mountains with her tiny, hungry family.

The Red Star Ranch was not a fancy dude ranch like some of the big spreads in Nevada. It was just a workaday ranch that took on four guests at one time. All of the guests spent exactly six weeks on the ranch in their own little wooden cottage. Each had a bedroom with a single cot, an easy chair, a bathroom with a tin shower stall, and a front porch with a light that collected moths of all varieties. There were screens on the windows, and the towels were changed by Cora Butterworth once a week.

After six weeks, the guests went home, each of them with a Carson City judge’s signed affidavit saying they had lived in Nevada for the required time. By the time they were home, they were no longer married to the person they’d been married to before they came. In 1949, Nevada, alone in the other forty-seven states, was the Divorce State.

But Ivy didn’t know any classmates whose parents were divorced or who gambled good money down the drain in the slot machines. She noticed that the divorcing guests all seemed to come from places like New York City or Dallas or Miami. Ivy didn’t think they were bad people. A lot of them were funny and nice. She guessed they had just made mistakes, and so they came to Nevada to unmake them. And while they were at the ranch, there wasn’t a whole lot for them to do except go to the casinos, enjoy the mountain scenery from a saddle, and eat Ivy’s mother’s good cooking.

The guests seemed not to be members of the Clean Plate Club like Ivy and Billy Joe’s families. At dinnertime, they left drumsticks uneaten, steak half-finished, beans in a pile at the edge of the plate. Almost all of these leavings went to the two ranch dogs, Hoover and Coover, who waited out on the porch, thumping their tails, anticipating their treats.

“You have to share now!” Ivy told Hoover and Coover the night she’d discovered the fox. She took some bones and chicken wings and baked potatoes from the dogs’ dishes, wrapping the best bits of meat in waxed paper. All for a wild creature and six furry red babies in a horse stall, a couple of miles over the mountain.

Then she looked up inflammation in
The Home Vet
and saw that the remedy for most pets was a baby aspirin. There were plenty of aspirin in the medicine closet. She started slipping one quarter of an aspirin a day into a steak rind or a chicken morsel for the fox, so the swelling in her foot would heal.

One afternoon, Billy Joe saw Ivy putting some waxed-paper-wrapped meat in her bike basket. She had wrapped the T-bone in the paper, sealing it with Scotch tape, neat as a butcher’s package.

“Where are you taking that meat?” he asked from behind one of the wooden pillars on the porch.

“Trouble trouble, and trouble will trouble you, Billy Joe,” said Ivy.

Billy Joe paused a beat. Ivy knew that he knew that she would never answer him. So he got more personal.

“Where’s that fancy ring of yours, Miss Climbing Vine?”

“I took it back to the store because I decided I didn’t like it,” she said in what she hoped was a bored grown-up voice.

Billy Joe sashayed backward into his house with a knowing laugh. “I bet it was for your buddy back East at that camp of hers! I haven’t seen any postcards from Camp Pellagra yet this summer, and I pick up all the mail every day!” he teased.

That hurt because it was true. Ivy had not heard from Annie yet. “Shut up, Billy Joe,” said Ivy. “And it’s
Allegro,
not Pellagra!” Was there no limit to his busybodyness?

Ivy biked to the Pratts’ place with the small sting still inside her. It started to thunderstorm, so first Ivy brought Chestnut in from the rain. Then she tossed the leftover T-bone to the fox mother, whose foot looked worse today. She limped over to the piece of meat, and her eyes did not look bright. The kits cried around her.

“I’m worried about you, Mama Fox,” said Ivy. “We can’t have you leaving those kits hungry!”

Suddenly Ivy heard truck tires crunch into the stable yard, then the slam of a door. Dashing into the barn, rain pouring from the rim of his ten-gallon hat as if it were a gutter spout, was Dr. Rinaldi. Dr. Rinaldi had known Ivy from his visits to the Red Star Ranch since she was knee-high. The vet shook off the rainwater, smiled, and put a hand on Ivy’s shoulder.

“I promised Martha Pratt I’d look in on you now and then,” he said. “Make sure everything was running smoothly.”

“Chestnut’s fine,” said Ivy. She did and didn’t want to tell him about the foxes. Most people did not believe in nursing wild creatures.

The vet pulled Chestnut’s ear affectionately and gave him a once-over. “Everything looks shipshape,” he said, eyes on the clean stall and the neat stable.

“Since you’re here, Dr. Rinaldi,” said Ivy, “could you look at Chestnut’s front right leg? He’s had a festering horsefly bite there all week.”

Dr. Rinaldi scrambled around in his bag and pulled out some ointment. He applied it, grumbling about horseflies being like a plague of locusts. Chestnut stamped and snorted at him.

“You bike over here?” the vet asked.

Ivy nodded. Then she looked up at the doctor. It was now or never. “Dr. Rinaldi, can I ask you something?”

As if on cue, a soft cry came from the spare stall at the back of the barn. Dr. Rinaldi cocked his head and looked at Ivy. Then he sauntered over to the spare stall and took a long look inside.

“Oh, my stars,” he said.

“It’s wild critters,” said Ivy. “I know I shouldn’t feed ’em, but she’s doing poorly and the kits are hungry.”

Dr. Rinaldi’s eyes flickered from Ivy to the foxes and back again, taking it all in. “Mama’s got an infected front pad,” he said. “She won’t make it without help.”

“I know,” said Ivy. “I’ve been giving her aspirins in scrap food.”

Dr. Rinaldi strolled thoughtfully to the tack room and took down a three-inch-wide saddle girth from a peg. Then he opened his medical bag. “First we’ll need a tranquilizer,” he said. He prepared a needle and gave it to Ivy. “Want to give the injection?” he asked. Ivy had never held a shot needle in her life.

“Now, you gotta move quick while I hold her down,” he said. He opened the stall to the harsh, scratching growl of the mother fox. Lightning fast, he drove the kits into a corner and threw himself over the fox’s body, pinning her down across the head and shoulders with the hard leather girth. The kits mewed and scattered.

“Shoot her in the rump!” he instructed Ivy. “Right there on the larger muscle. Quick, now!”

Ivy felt a rush of blood to her head. With his legs, Dr. Rinaldi protected Ivy against the fox’s flailing rear paws with their razor-sharp nails. Aiming at the silky haunch, she plunged the needle, releasing its contents into the fox’s body. Within seconds, the animal relaxed and went quiet.

Dr. Rinaldi examined the fox’s front paw. With a tweezer, he pincered out a spike of rusty barbed wire. Then he cleaned the foot and took out another hypodermic. “Antibiotic. You want to do another?” he asked Ivy.

She nodded.

This time Dr. Rinaldi showed Ivy how to prick the needle into the rubber top of the medicine vial and draw the medicine into the glass. Then he showed her how to check the full needle for air bubbles and get rid of them by popping it with her finger.

“Here is the muscle,” he said, placing Ivy’s fingers on the correct place on the fox’s withers to inject. “Here. Right here. Just shoot it in.”

She did exactly as he instructed. The red liquid flowed easily into the sleeping fox.

Ivy laughed. “I didn’t think I could do it,” she said. “But it was easy. I thought I was afraid of needles, but I’m not!”

“You know something, Ivy?” said Dr. Rinaldi. “You’re good at this.”

“Good at it?” asked Ivy.

“You’ve got instinctive hands and a way with animals,” said Dr. Rinaldi. “Those are things a person is born with. You can’t learn them. Ever since you brought that half-dead rabbit for me to fix when you were four years old, I said to myself, that girl’s got good hands, nerves of steel, heart of gold. That’s what makes a vet. Ever think about it?”

“Being a vet, like you?”

“Why not?” Dr. Rinaldi asked. There was no joke in his eyes. “I have no doubt in my mind that you could. Most people are driven by what other people expect. You’ve got a purpose of your own.”

For one moment, Ivy felt everything small in her life fall away, as if she were already a vet, just like Dr. Rinaldi. Then she took a deep breath of reality.

“If I could ever afford to go to college,” she said. “But that’s a lot of money. My folks just get by.”

Dr. Rinaldi smiled. He began packing his medical bag, capping the glass syringes carefully so they could be sterilized and reused.

“You’ll make it. With a little spit ’n chicken wire, same as me,” he said.

“And you have to be smart,” added Ivy.

The doctor laughed. “You were born bright as a tree full of owls, girl,” he said, running his hand over the silky red coat of the mother fox. She was already beginning to stir. Ivy placed the kits on the vixen’s belly, where they squirmed and drank gratefully.