Valerie the Veterinarian's Arc

Chapter 9 of 9

Valerie crossed the back lot to the shed after lunch. The bear cub's line sat unfinished on her inventory list. She could not write his weight, his diet, or his safe housing, because none of it was true. The shed was dust and stacked soil bags. The cub, Honeypaw, slept behind them on a folded blanket. She had four days left. If his healing paw split open in that cramped dark, the inspector would call it neglect. She opened the door. Honeypaw lifted his head. His red scarf had slipped to one shoulder. He limped toward her, favoring the paw she had stitched. "It's small in here," Honeypaw said. "I want to move." "I know," Valerie said. "So do I." She knelt and unwound the bandage. The stitches held. The pad was pink, not red, but the concrete floor was hard and the corners were tight. He could not stretch or climb. A cub who could not move would stiffen and tear the wound again. She needed him in the back lot shelter, the legal one, the three-sided shelter with the concrete pad. But a bear cub loose there could climb the pulley ropes and reopen his paw in a fall. A small voice spoke from the doorway. "You need a rope guard." Valerie turned. A tiger cub sat in the light, no bigger than Honeypaw, tail curled around his feet. She had never met him. He watched her hands, not her face. "I'm Tigger Too," the cub said. "I chew ropes. I freed the elder's cub from a snare. I know knots." "You climbed my fence," Valerie said. "Yes. I saw the ropes hanging. A bear will pull them. Then he falls." He nodded at Honeypaw's paw. "That opens again." He was right. Valerie looked from the tiger cub to the pulley she had strung herself. The danger was the loose rope, not the shelter. "Show me," she said. They worked through the afternoon. Valerie coiled the pulley rope high and tied it off. Tigger Too tugged each knot with his teeth to test it, then dropped to all fours and shook his head at two of them. She retied those. When the ropes hung out of reach, she carried Honeypaw across the lot and set him on the shelter's clean pad. The cub took three slow steps, then a fourth. He stretched his back legs on the flat concrete. The paw held. Valerie went inside and picked up her pen. She wrote Honeypaw's line at last: a real weight, a real diet, a real address in the legal shelter. The shed problem was closed. Then she stopped. The inventory listed one wild cub. Now a second sat on her pad, uninvited, unregistered, watching Honeypaw eat. Tigger Too had nowhere to go. Four days left, and her list was already wrong.