Valerie the Veterinarian's Arc

Chapter 1 of 8

Valerie opened the clinic door at six in the morning and found an alligator on her step. He stood upright in blue overalls, eight feet tall, one front toe swollen purple and leaking. She knew his face from the news. Alligator Sam had pulled three hikers out of a sinking bog last spring, and two more the summer before. Alligators do not live in Canada. He had walked a long way to find her. "They said you take the strange ones," Sam said. His voice was low and tired. He held the bad foot off the ground. Valerie waved him inside. The clinic was small and clean, a green building with flower boxes under the windows and a paw print sign above the door. In six weeks it would open as a free service for strays and wild animals, if the last permit came through. She had built it for cases like this. Years ago she drove two hours to find one vet willing to treat a fox named Rudy, who lived four good years in a wheelchair cart after losing the use of his back legs. She had promised herself no animal would have to travel that far again. She got Sam onto the exam table and looked at the toe. A splinter of cypress wood sat deep under the scale, and the skin around it was hot. She numbed the foot, cut a small slit, and pulled the splinter out with forceps. Pus came after it. She flushed the wound three times, packed it with ointment, and reached for a fresh roll of pale bandage. She wound the gauze around the toe in slow, even layers until the foot looked like a small white club. Sam watched the whole time without flinching. "Stay off it a week," she said. "Keep it dry. Come back Friday." Sam slid off the table and tested the foot. He nodded once. Then he reached into the bib pocket of his overalls and set a clump of wet reeds and black mud on her counter, a piece of the swamp's edge he had carried north with him. "For proof," he said. "In case the permit people ask who you treated." He pushed the door open with his shoulder and walked off into the gray morning. Valerie stood at the counter and looked at the muddy clump, then at the half-used roll of bandage beside it. Her hands smelled like iodine. The clinic was not open yet. She had just treated a patient no inspector would believe, and she had nothing on paper to show for it but a smear of swamp and a roll of gauze. She picked up her phone to call the permit office. The line was already ringing when she remembered Sam had not told her how he planned to get home.