Part 4
The handwriting was Walt’s, from before his hands went. It was the square, slanted printing he had used on every feed invoice and every check he’d ever written her.
Boone goes to Jo Pruitt if she will have him. If she won’t, Dale knows what to do.
Jo read it standing in the doorway with the sleet coming in sideways around her.
“I decided you wouldn’t,” Dale said. “A week ago you’d have said no, and I’d have been the one who did what he would’ve done, and that’d be the end of it.” He looked out at his car. “I don’t know why I’m telling you. I could’ve kept my mouth shut.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He thought about it honestly, which she gave him credit for. “Because he picked the gate,” he said. “Same as he did for Dad.”
He left the new leash on the hay bale by the door, still in its cardboard. Jo found it there the next morning and used it.
Wednesday came and went with no appointment in Emporia. Wren took a full bottle at six, at eleven, and at three. Jo wiped Friday’s deadline off the bottom of the whiteboard without telling anyone, and Becca, passing with a bucket, became very interested in the bucket.
Gil’s condition was simple and not negotiable. The rescue could not own a dog with a bite on record. Jo could. Boone was hers now, on her homeowner’s policy and her name, and while he was on the property he was her responsibility just as her truck was. Gil had a lawyer friend write it on one page, and Jo signed it on the hood of the truck.
By March, Boone had a hutch, and Gil had a wall calendar in his office with a red circle around the eighteenth of June, the day the state’s temporary permit ran out. The hutch was an old fiberglass calf hutch that maintenance dragged out of the weeds and set inside the barn by the main gate, with a square of indoor-outdoor carpet on the floor because Dale had mentioned the carpet. Boone inspected it, turned around in it twice, and moved in. He ate there. He slept there. He went out to walk the fence line at dawn and dusk and came back to it like a man coming back to his chair.
Becca built the rest. She called it Wren’s map. A cowbell hung by the water trough, so that any bump of the trough rang it. A strip of pea gravel ran a foot wide along every wall, so the calf’s hooves told her when she was close. Everyone who came into the pen hummed first, Becca in her bright soprano, Gil tunelessly and with visible embarrassment, Jo in whatever key arrived. Wren learned the difference between a human hum and a dog’s groan inside a week, and she learned that both meant something was coming that wouldn’t hurt her.
She gained four pounds the first week of March and nine the second. She found the trough by the bell and the walls by the gravel, and when she lost her bearings she stood still and listened for the hutch.
Becca brought her laptop into the office one morning with the night camera footage pulled up. “Turn it up,” she said.
At 2:14 a.m., with the barn dark and Boone a white curl in his hutch, the calf was standing in the middle of her pen making a sound. It was low and steady, a hum like a refrigerator compressor, almost too deep to hear on the little speakers.
“I thought it was the furnace,” Becca said. “Then I checked. It’s her.”
Jo had read about it years ago. A team in Europe had recorded zoo giraffes humming at night, low and long, and nobody yet knew why. Some people thought it was a way of keeping in touch in the dark. Nobody at Tallgrass had ever heard a giraffe do anything at all.
On the screen, as the hum went on, the white curl in the hutch lifted its head.
April came wet. Wren went out for the first time into the dry lot behind the barn, with Boone in a chain-link alley along the outside of the fence. She stood in the doorway with her nose up, sorting wet cedar from diesel, and when the rain started she lifted her face into it and stood there trembling, then not trembling. Boone, who hated rain as much as he hated being told to come, watched from under the eave with pure disapproval. Then she walked the fence, and he walked the outside of it at her shoulder, at the pace of his hips. When he stopped, she stopped.
By May she was eight feet tall at the ears. The bull pen ceiling was eleven feet, and the door header was nine. The red circle on Gil’s calendar was six weeks off.
On the first Monday of May the state veterinarian drove out from Topeka. Her name was Dr. Lorna Haig, and she had called Gil every week since February. She stood in the aisle with her arms folded and watched Wren drink while Boone lay at the hutch with his chin on his paws.
“Take him out,” she said.
Jo didn’t move. “She’ll drink less.”
“I know she’ll drink less. That’s my point.” Dr. Haig didn’t raise her voice. “A calf who can’t eat without a dog in the room hasn’t been rehabilitated, Jo. She’s been rearranged. You’ve built her a world with one fixed point in it, and that point is ten years old.”
Becca, holding the bottle, looked at Jo. Jo looked at the dog.
“I’m calling Oklahoma,” Dr. Haig said. “Her mother’s there, and a herd, and people who do this for a living. I’d rather you sent her than I made you.”
“And she needs giraffes,” Jo said in Gil’s office after the state car had gone, before he could say it. “I know. He can’t teach her how to be one.”
Gil had a letter by Friday. Dr. Haig had made the call to Oklahoma herself. The zoo in Oklahoma, the one that had taken Wren’s mother, would take the calf back too. Their giraffe curator had written it himself, and it was a good letter. They had a herd, a barn built for the work, an animal care team of twenty. They would try a slow reintroduction to her mother. He was honest that cows who rejected a calf sometimes accepted her later and sometimes didn’t, and that they’d keep her with the others if it failed. The dog wasn’t mentioned. The dog was not a thing a zoo would mention.
Jo read the letter twice in the barn office that night with the hutch light glowing outside the window, and the hardest part was that she could not find one thing wrong with it.
“It’s a good offer,” Gil said in the morning.
“It is.”
“You’re going to make a call anyway.”
“Becca is.”
Becca had worked two years for a woman named Mags Dunlevy, who ran a hoofstock sanctuary on two hundred acres along the Sabinal River outside Utopia, Texas. Mags had one giraffe, a twenty-two-year-old cow named Opal, whose calf had been born dead the spring before. Mags had built the barn herself, with her late husband’s money and her own hands.
Mags listened to all of it on speaker in the office, with Becca and Jo and Gil leaning toward the phone. She didn’t interrupt. When they finished, she breathed out.
“I’ll take the calf,” she said. “Opal’s been standing at the barn door since last April. She needs something to fuss over or she’s going to fuss herself to death.” Then: “I can’t take the dog. My insurance won’t touch a dog with a bite on a property with school groups. Unless it’s somebody’s dog who lives here, on their own lease. That’s the only way they’ll write it. I asked once, about my nephew’s shepherd.”
The space heater under Gil’s desk ticked.
“And I’m not hiring a vet to get a dog,” Mags said, “if that’s what anybody’s thinking. My contract man retires in July and I need someone who can work on hoofstock without a textbook. That’s a different conversation.”
Jo looked at Gil. He had taken his glasses off and was cleaning them on his shirt.
“Then let’s have the different conversation,” Jo said…
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇