A Grizzly Discovery

15

I ended up spending the night at Jason’s place; I woke up the next day and texted Sophie that I’d meet her at the vet clinic.

I’ll make sure to make fun of you for still wearing the same clothes as yesterday Sophie texted back, and I made a mental note to ask Jason if I could keep a change of clothes at his place in the future just in case.

Oh yeah, like you can talk, I texted back, mentally shaking my head at my own weak retort. In my defense, it was pretty early in the morning.

Getting out of bed, I made my way to the kitchen, where Jason was making coffee and toast.

“Mmmmm, don’t tell Betty, but that coffee smells amazing,” I said, closing my eyes.

“I definitely won’t tell Betty, that lady scares me.”

I laughed. “She’s like, sixty-something years old and weighs half what you do.”

“And she’s the center of this town. Seriously, I think Betty MacMahon has more power in Willow Bay than even the mayor or Chief Gary.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said, nabbing a piece of toast from the plate and spreading butter on it. “Thanks for breakfast.”

“Hey, it’s the least I could do for you after last night,” Jason said with a grin, and I felt a blush crawling up my face. “Want some eggs?”

I shook my head. “No. I have to get going; I know Karen got everything set up yesterday but I still want to get in a bit early to make sure everything is fine with the new setup. I have a dog coming in for his yearly checkup first thing.”

“Cool,” Jason said, grabbing a piece of toast for himself. “Text me later?”

“Yeah,” I said, giving him a quick kiss, then grabbing my purse and heading for the door. Jason lived a little ways out from downtown, but this being Willow Bay, that meant it was still only a fifteen-minute walk from the vet clinic. I figured the fresh air would do me good; if I’d asked for a ride I knew Jason would have given me one.

I was walking along the edge of Main Street when suddenly I saw a familiar black cat darting away behind one of the buildings. I shook my head. This time, I was sure of things. It was Bee. I was going to find out once and for all what on earth my cat was up to. How had she gotten out of the house? Had she been out all night? And what was she doing?

I knew calling out to her would only scare her away more, so instead I simply tried to be as quiet as possible as I made my way behind the Japanese restaurant I’d been standing in front of. If it turned out Bee was stealing sushi from one of the Willow Bay businesses, she was in so much trouble.

As I got to the back of the building, I peeked carefully around the corner. I couldn’t see anything. No Bee, nothing. I frowned, then slowly walked along the back of the building. Still nothing.

Suddenly, I heard a cry. It was absolutely tiny, and very high pitched, but I knew that cry.

“Traitor,” I suddenly heard Bee’s voice say. I moved back about three feet and suddenly noticed a small hole in the ground, just below where the HVAC system from the restaurant blasted out warm air. Peering into it, my mouth dropped open.

Bee was lying in the hole, with three—no, four—kittens nestled against her, nursing.

“Bee! Oh my God!” I exclaimed.

“Well, fancy seeing you here,” Bee said nonchalantly.

“Why do you have kittens? Where did they come from?”

“I’m training them in the war against the dogs,” Bee replied. “I’ve decided to get started on them young.”

Immediately my vet instincts took over. I bent down and picked up one of the kittens, who started squirming. At a guess, I’d say he had to be a week old, at the most. There was no umbilical cord, but the kitten’s eyes hadn’t begun to open and her ears hadn’t begun to unfold yet.

“Bee, we need to get these kittens to the vet clinic.”

Bee scowled at me. “Fine. But I get all the credit for keeping them alive.”

“Fine,” I said, rolling my eyes scooping up the kittens into my hands. They were so small, I could carry them all easily. “But we’re going to talk about this later.”

“Talk about what?”

“Seriously?”

“I haven’t done anything wrong!” Bee protested.

“You’ve escaped the house and the vet clinic multiple times, you’re taking care of strange kittens that come from goodness knows where, and most importantly, you didn’t tell me, a veterinarian, that you had some high risk kittens to take care of.”

“Unlike you, I’ve had kittens before,” Bee told me.

“Unlike you, I’ve got years of animal medical training to help keep kittens alive.”

“Oh, well, since you’ve read about it in a book, that must make you an expert,” Bee replied as we made our way back onto Main Street. I glared at her.

“We’re getting these kittens to the vet clinic, and you’re going to tell me everything you know about them,” I said in my best no-nonsense voice.

“Fine, but I want to continue feeding them.”

“How are you even feeding them at all?” I asked Bee as I fumbled to grab my keys out of my purse and hold onto the kittens at the same time. Eventually I gave up, made sure no one on the street was watching, and used a quick spell to open the door instead.

“Remember that time a couple of years ago when you had an orphaned squirrel, and you completely humiliated me by making me feed it?”

“Oh yeah!” I said. “I had to cast a special spell on you so you’d produce milk, since you’d already been spayed for a while by then.”

Bee had been a street cat early in her life before being taken in by a shelter where I volunteered when I was a vet student. She had been so difficult that they were going to transfer her to a high-kill shelter, but I took pity on Bee and adopted her myself.

“Well you never turned off the spell,” Bee said. “When the squirrel went back into the woods so it could live a life of taunting me in front of the window my milk dried up, but I never lost the ability to produce it.”

I immediately took the kittens into the exam room and grabbed four blank patient vital information sheets, Bee following close behind me like a protective mother. I quickly grabbed a handful of towels and an old cardboard box, along with a heat lamp, and placed the kittens inside the box, with the lamp.

“It was good that you found the heat source behind the restaurant,” I told Bee.

“I told you, I knew what I was doing,” Bee replied, pacing around the box and looking inside.

“I still don’t know why you didn’t tell me what you were doing,” I told her. “I could have helped right away. It must have been a big effort for you to keep those kittens alive.”

“I wasn’t alone,” Bee said. “Buster helped, and there was another cat as well. She would help feed the little ones when I couldn’t get away.”

“I never took you as the mothering type,” I smiled as I picked up a second kitten and lifted her tail, sexing her as female, then gently placing her on the scale and marking down her weight on the form.

Bee sniffed at me, raising her nose. “I most certainly do not care for these kittens. It is simply that in the war against the dogs, we must have as many soldiers as possible. Therefore, I ensure their survival for the army.”

Suddenly, I realized what all this was about and grinned.

“I know why you didn’t tell me! You didn’t want me to think you have emotions, that you can care for other cats.”

“Of course I don’t care for other cats!” Bee argued vehemently, but I could see straight through her. I grinned.

“You care for Buster.” Bee began to nonchalantly lick a paw.

“Buster is ok, for a cat. I don’t care about him though. He’s just another cat, like all the others.”

“All right, sure, Bee,” I told her. “Whatever you say.” I picked up the little female kitten and looked at my form. “I have to give her a name. How about ‘Sparkles’?”

Bee hissed at me. “No. Absolutely not. That’s too close a name to the dog that lives in my house, you’re not calling my daughter that.”

“I thought you didn’t care about the cats. Wouldn’t that extend to their names as well?”

Bee hissed at me in reply. “You think you’re so clever. I don’t care about the cats. But I don’t want them humiliated. Call her something else. Like Butters.”

“Butters it is, then,” I said, writing the name down on the form. Butters was a good name for the little girl; her fur wasn’t exactly yellow, but it was a nice cream color, and the name suited her well.

Fifteen minutes later, the kittens had all been looked over, and I determined that as far as one week old orphaned kittens went, things weren’t that bad. There were two boys and two girls, now named Boo, Bilbo, Butters and Boop. For kittens that Bee “didn’t care about” she sure had already given them matching names.

A minute later, Sophie came into the room. “Ooooh, kittens!” she exclaimed, when suddenly Bee hissed at her threateningly.

“Go away, dog-lover,” Bee said, standing in front of the box of kittens.

“Bee!” I scolded. “It’s Sophie. She can look at the kittens. Sorry,” I said to Sophie apologetically. “Bee’s been taking care of them, but she doesn’t care about them at all, she swears.”

“I can see that,” Sophie laughed. “It’s ok, Bee. I just want to have a look. I won’t touch them,” she promised, and Bee tentatively moved aside to let Sophie have a look. After a couple minutes of aww-ing over how cute the kittens were—Bee standing over to the side preening like a proud mother was not lost on me—we decided to bring the kittens and the heat lamp into the back room of the vet clinic, where Bee could nurse them all day without any other animal interruptions, before taking them back home that night.

“So that explains where Bee’s been sneaking off to,” Sophie said to me when we were in the reception area a few minutes later. I nodded.

“Yeah. She didn’t tell me about them because she didn’t want me to realize that she actually cared about anything other than herself.” Sophie barked out a laugh.

“That does sound like Bee.”

“I have to admit; she did take good care of them though. She found a heated vent to keep them under which was not only warm, but pretty protected from any predators out there. And apparently there was another cat or two involved in the care of the kittens.”

“Where did they come from, anyway?”

“Bee won’t tell me who the mother is, but according to the cat grapevine, which I’ve only just learned is a thing, a local cat got pregnant, but she overheard her owner saying he didn’t want kittens and was going to drown them all when they were born. So she snuck out and gave birth on Main Street, so he’d never find them, and went back home like nothing had happened, leaving the kittens. Buster went out for a while the morning he came to the clinic and found them, so when he got here he told Bee and they made up a reason to get out of the clinic and started taking care of them.”

Sophie shook her head. “That’s insane. I’m so glad they managed to keep all four kittens alive.”

“Me too.” I had to admit, I was actually pretty proud of my little cat. The kittens were in great shape considering what their lives had been like for their short time on this earth so far; Bee had taken really good care of them.

“Did you hear that another tourist was killed?” Sophie asked me, and I forgot that I hadn’t seen her since Jason and I had left the clinic the day before.

“Yeah,” I said. “Actually, I have a whole bunch of stuff to tell you about that.”