"This is Idabelle, our Inside Cat. She's losing weight, and she cries a lot. Will you take a look at her? I can pay," I added hastily. "But if it's more than forty-two cents, I'll have to go on the installment plan."

"Don't you worry about that. The trouble is, I sent Samuel off for his lunch. We'll have to wait until he gets back."

"I don't see why," I said. "I can help. She's only little."

He hesitated. "What would your parents say?"

"It's fine, really it is. I look after our animals all the time," I said stoutly, stretching the truth but only a tad.

"All right, but don't blame me if you get scratched."

"She'd never do that," I said. But looking at the normally calm and affectionate cat crouched miserably in her cage, a gleam of desperation burning in her eye, I felt a pang of doubt.

"What are her symptoms? Runny eyes? Runny nose? Vomiting? Diarrhea?"

"None of those, but she's losing weight, and she cries a lot."

"Right," he said. "Put her on the table and we'll take a look."

Now that the time of reckoning had come, Idabelle decided she didn't want to be dislodged from the hutch; she clung to it like a limpet, her claws firmly hooked in the wire. Unhooking all four limbs and keeping them unhooked simultaneously proved to be a major operation in itself.

I placed her on the edge of the table and held her by the scruff. Dr. Pritzker started up at the head. He looked in both ears, which she didn't like, and I feared for his good hand. But she did me proud and did not hiss or bite or scratch. Then he pulled down each of her lower lids.

"What are you looking for?" I said. "You have to tell me what you're doing."

"Right. First you check in the ears for sores or any black material, which is a sign of ear mites. Then you check the eyelids to see if they are pale or not. See, she has a pink color to the conjunctiva, which is this membrane here. If it were pale, that would indicate internal bleeding or anemia. And the pupils are of equal size, so that's good."

"What if they were different? What would that mean?"

"It's a sign of being struck on the head, of damage to the brain. Also, the third eyelid, the nict.i.tating membrane, is retracted. If it were visible now when she's fully awake, it would usually be a sign of ill health. You typically only see it in a sleepy cat. Now for the mouth. Pull her head back for me and hold it so."

I did as he told me while he pulled up Idabelle's lip on each side. She liked that even less.

"See here," he said, "the gums are pink and healthy. No abscess, no broken teeth. So far there's no reason she shouldn't be eating. Now we'll check the glands in the neck."

He ran his good hand under the cat's jaw. "Nothing there. If her glands were big, it would be a sign of infection." Then he felt her belly and p.r.o.nounced it free of tumors. He ran his hand up and down each limb and the tail and p.r.o.nounced her free of fractures.

"Hold up the tail," he said, and peered closely at her backside. "No diarrhea. No visible parasites. Now open that drawer and get me the stethoscope. It's the instrument with the black tubing."

"I know what it is," I said, slightly offended. "Dr. Walker comes to the house and listens to our lungs with it when we have a cough. But that's only if the cod-liver oil doesn't work." I shuddered at the thought of Mother's favorite nostrum.

I pulled the instrument from the drawer and handed it to him. It smelled of rubber.

He struggled to put it in his ears, and I reached up to help him. He smiled his thanks, then pressed the scope to Idabelle's chest and listened intently. After a moment, he tried to pull the earpieces out, and I helped him again. He handed me the instrument, saying, "Her heart and lungs sound completely normal. There's nothing there. You can put that back in the drawer."

I took the stethoscope from him and hesitated. I had often laid my ear against Idabelle's warm fur and heard the rapid faint pitter-patter of her heart, far-off and practically inaudible. Here was my chance for a real listen with a real instrument.

"Can I please try it?" I said. "Please?"

He apparently found this amusing but said, "All right. Put the bell right here." He pointed to a spot behind the left foreleg. It seemed a funny place to listen to a heart, but then he was the expert, right?

I put the earpieces in and pressed the bell to her fur, not expecting much. To my surprise, a thunderous tympany filled my ears, almost too loud to bear, and so rapid that it seemed like a rolling kettledrum. Idabelle's valiant little heart beat like mad, and I listened for a good long time before I could make some sense of it. What sounded like a continuous thrumming was actually two distinct sounds (that I later learned were the "lub" and the "dub," the sounds made by the closing of various valves in the heart). I could also hear a loud, whistling wind and realized that it had to be air moving through her lungs.

"Gosh, that's amazing," I said.

He smiled and said, "Do you know what's wrong with this cat?"

"What?" I said with trepidation.

"Absolutely nothing. She's fine. And now we'll do the final test." He went into the back room and returned with a small flat tin of sardines, saying, "You'll have to open this. I can't manage it."

I opened the tin with the key, and the reek of oily fish filled the room, all too reminiscent of cod-liver oil.

"Try her with that," he said.

I placed it in front of Idabelle. She sniffed it once and then grabbed a sardine and bolted it as fast as she could, then attacked the others, tearing through them at great speed. She finished up by licking the can dry and looking around for more. Her belly bulged comically.

Dr. Pritzker said, "See? She's hungry, that's all."

"Really?" I was incredulous. "That's it?"

"Nothing wrong with her. How often do you feed her?"

I had to think about this. "I don't really know. We keep her inside for the mice, but I don't know if Viola gives her other food or not."

"It looks like your mouse population has decreased for some reason. You don't have traps set out in the house, do you?"

"I don't think so."

"No poison?"

"No, sir."

"And she's not competing with any other cats?"

"No, the other cats are all Outside Cats."

"Well, you'll have to supplement her food until the mice come back. Give her some sardines every day but not so much that she stops hunting."

I thanked him profusely and stuffed her back into her cage, anxious to get home and give Viola the good news. Idabelle immediately started howling again, at even greater volume. Although it nearly killed me to say it, I said it anyway, speaking up over the heart-rending noise. "Will you please send me your bill, Dr. Pritzker?"

He looked amused and gestured at the ma.s.s of papers on his desk. "I might, if I can ever catch up on my accounting. Or, I tell you what-you can run a few errands for me, deliver a message or two. Sometimes I'm stuck sending Samuel, which is a great inconvenience. Deal?"

"Deal! Oh, and do you ever look after dogs? I didn't see any dog books on your shelf."

"I have doctored a few cattle dogs and hunting dogs in my time. The principles of care are essentially the same. Do you have a sick dog?"

"Uh ... no. But I might. One day."

He gave me a peculiar look but I figured there was no point in explaining. Even if I could somehow bring the coydog to Dr. Pritzker, I knew that he would recommend the standard treatment for such a beast: a quick and merciful bullet through the brain. And even if not, the bill to fix such a wreck would probably come to the huge sum of twenty dollars.

I cast one last longing glance at his books and turned to go. He said, "I leave my door open during business hours. You can come and read whenever you like."

"Gosh, thanks!" This was turning into my lucky day.

"Although, come to think of it, some of that material is not appropriate for young ladies, so you'd better get your mother's permission."

Well, maybe not so lucky after all.

I carried Idabelle home with a light heart and pondered where the mice had gone. And then it came to me in a thunderclap. How could I have been such an idiot not to see it sooner? Poor Idabelle. She was losing out to the king snake.

I took the cage into the kitchen, where Viola jumped up, tears welling in her eyes. "What's wrong with her? Is she dying?"

I'd never seen Viola so upset. The tide of our family affairs ebbed and flowed around her while she maintained, on the whole, a perfect state of equilibrium (albeit a low-grade grumpy one that applied to everybody and everything with the exception of Idabelle). I'd never seen her shed a tear before. And although she had scores of nieces and nephews, including Samuel, she had no children of her own, so I guess that made Idabelle her baby.

"She's fine," I said. "She's hungry because there aren't enough mice about."

"Hungry? That's all? Praise Jesus!"

"Dr. Pritzker said you should feed her sardines every day until she gains some weight and the mice come back."

She wiped her eyes on her ap.r.o.n, saying, "I'll get her a can right now."

"No, no, she just ate a whole tin. Wait until tomorrow or I swear she'll pop."

"Praise Jesus," Viola whispered, and clasped the cat to her bony chest. "My baby girl's home," she crooned. Idabelle kneaded at her ap.r.o.n and purred at full volume.

Viola said, "What's wrong with the mice?"

Without thinking, I said, "It's the sn-oops."

"The snoops? What's that?"

"Oh, nothing. It's just, uh, the natural fluctuation in the population."

"I never knowed this to happen before."

"Got to go," I said, and left them to their joyful reunion.

Question for the Notebook: It sure is nice that Felis domesticus purrs, but what about lions and tigers, do they purr, too? And how would you ever find out?

That night "the snoops" reappeared in a most unpleasant way. Sir Isaac Newton had once again escaped from his dish, but this time had the bad luck to run into the snake, a primeval foe. I walked into my room to discover an epic battle taking place in the middle of the floor: newt versus snake, with the newt losing fast, being halfway down the snake's gullet at that point. Now, a fair fight doesn't offend me, but this? Newts being retiring and soft-bodied, the whole thing was a pretty one-sided affair that really got my dander up.

I leaped forward and grabbed Sir Isaac Newton's hind half and pulled. The snake pulled back. I yelled, "Gimme my newt, you rotten snake!" The snake refused and kept pulling, so I did the only thing I could think of: I reached over and flicked it on the snout. It recoiled and spat out its limp victim, then hightailed it for the baseboards. Sir Isaac stirred groggily as I wiped the snake spittle from him with my handkerchief. I spoke encouraging words to him and stroked him under his chin. He shook himself and, after a moment, looked none the worse for wear, so I slid him back into his dish and secured the lid. Good thing Aggie was at the general store getting a soda. If she'd been there she'd have croaked. Completely croaked.

Honestly, the drama in my life.

CHAPTER 18.

GRa.s.sHOPPER GUTS.

[W]e observed to the south a ragged cloud of dark reddish-brown colour. At first we thought that it was smoke from some great fire on the plains; but we soon found that it was a swarm of locusts.... [T]hey overtook us at a rate of ten or fifteen miles an hour. The main body filled the air ... "and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle:" or rather, I should say, like a strong breeze pa.s.sing through the rigging of a ship.

AND SPEAKING OF DRAMA, I gave a fair bit of thought to the "problem" of Travis's queasiness in the face of blood and guts, and how to fix it. I cornered Granddaddy in the library and posed Travis's dilemma to him.

"So, as I understand it," he said, "you want to help, uh ... Travis? Which one is he again?"

"You remember, Granddaddy. He's the one who raised the turkeys last year and got so upset about killing them."

"Ah, yes. Quite the charade, as I recall."

"Yep. I mean, yes."

Travis had been so wrought up about us eating his pets that the night before they'd met their doom, Granddaddy and I had altered their appearance with paint and scissors to convince him that we had traded with the neighbors for different birds. The turkeys had not been happy about their transformation, and I still bore a small scar on my left elbow as a souvenir. (The things we do for the brothers we love! I wouldn't have done it for Lamar in a million years.) "And you want to help him get over his, shall we say, squeamishness? Do I have that right?"

"Yessir."

"May I inquire exactly why?"

"He wants to be a veterinarian, so he needs to be able to work with innards and blood and things like that. But he's not at all tough like me. He got nauseated when I showed him my earthworm."

"Did he, now?"

"Yes, but it didn't bother me. I have a cast-iron stomach, you know."

"Indeed you do."

I practically glowed under this high praise.

He thought for a moment. "An interesting conundrum. I suggest we expose him to progressively more vivid and complex examples of dissection. In this way we can slowly accustom his nervous system to greater degrees of explicitness, so as not to cause too great a shock. At the same time, this will offer you a good opportunity to learn more about anatomy. We shall proceed upward through the invertebrates to the vertebrates and perhaps finish with some small mammal. I leave it to you to instruct him from there. Tomorrow we shall work on the American gra.s.shopper, Schistocerca americana."

The next day, I caught a big yellow gra.s.shopper in my net. I took it to Granddaddy in the laboratory, where we euthanized it humanely in a killing jar. As we began, he said, "We are dissecting an insect at the top of the invertebrate ladder. Observe. Describe. Note. a.n.a.lyze."

I did so, remarking on the two large compound eyes, the three minuscule simple eyes (so small as to be almost invisible), the two sets of wings, the three sets of legs. The large eyes gave the insect a wide field of vision that made it difficult to creep up on; without the long-handled net, I'd never have snagged it.

Under his instruction, I dissected and pinned the various parts. There were no lungs but rather spiracles, a set of tiny holes along the abdomen that acted as bellows to draw air directly into the body. There was also an open circulating system where blood flowed freely through open body cavities rather than a closed system with the blood contained in blood vessels. (As in, for example, man.) I made a few sketches and took careful notes.

When finished, I covered my dissecting tray with cheesecloth and carried it out to find Travis. I tracked him down at the pigpen, where he was scratching Petunia between the ears with a stick.

"Look," I said, pulling back the cloth and showing him the bright yellow shards strewn across the black wax. "This is the gra.s.shopper we did this morning."

"Uh," he said.