Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul (27 page)

One time, the dogs killed a leopard. They were badly injured in the fight. Both dogs had multiple puncture wounds, lacerations and a great deal of blood loss. I worked through the night to stitch up their endless wounds. Yet in the morning, I was amazed to see each dog stand and eat a little breakfast.

As I packed up my motorbike, I left Dr. Mzimba with after-care instructions and some follow-up antibiotics. He thanked me profusely and hugged me with tears in his eyes.

“That is the second time that you have saved their lives, Doctola. From this time on, they will be your protectors. I have seen it!”

Five months later I was again in the area on one of my regular three-day tours. I was approaching Dr. Mzimba’s village and having a rough time. Heavy rain had turned the dirt roads to rivers of mud. I had fallen four times in the last forty minutes and was having a terrible time climbing the hill to Dr. Mzimba’s village. It was drizzling and I was wet, muddy, cold and in a bitter mood as I tried to maneuver my motorbike along the slippery one-lane path.

I stopped short. Ahead, in the beam of my headlight, a hyena stood blocking the path. It was slowly making its way toward me, unafraid of the light or sound of my motor. I honked the horn, to no effect. The hyena’s advance continued, slow and steady.
How strange,
I thought. In the past, they had always run off in fright. Then I saw the blood and saliva dripping from its mouth and the blank stare in its eyes. Rabies!

As the hyena came toward me, I slowly backed up and tried to keep my distance. The mud was much too thick and slippery to make a run for it, and the path too narrow to turn around.

The only real option was to run anyway and hope the hyena would choose to attack the motorbike instead of me. Despite my efforts to keep a reasonable distance, I was unable to backpedal fast enough. The hyena was gaining on me. It gave a ghoulish laugh as it snapped its powerful jaws in the air. I was about to make a run for it when, on either side of me, Bozo and Skippy appeared. They jumped onto the path between me and the hyena. Their muscles were rock-steady and the hair on their backs stood straight up. They held their ground, teeth bared.

The ensuing battle was fierce and bloody. Not once did the dogs cry out as they fought with a speed and endurance I never thought possible. The life-and-death battle unfolded in the beam of my motorbike headlight. When it was over, the hyena lay dead and the dogs were nowhere to he found. I called and called but there was no sign of them.

I hurried to Dr. Mzimba’s home. As I slipped and stumbled along the path, I was thinking about my treatment plan: stitches, antibiotics, a rabies booster, fluids, shock treatment. I owed those wonderful dogs so much. I had to find them and I had to thank them and they had to live and I wasn’t going to settle for anything less.

When I arrived at Dr. Mzimba’s house, I found him waiting patiently in a chair on the porch outside his hut. I ran to him, explaining all that had happened in a combination of Chichewa and English. I was breathless and hyperventilating and I wasn’t sure if he understood me. It seemed that he did.

“Come with me and I’ll show you the dogs,” he said, and he motioned for me to follow.

I grabbed my medical cases and followed him to the back of his hut. He stopped and pointed to two graves. “Bozo and Skippy sleep there. Three days ago, a pack of hyenas came down from the hills and attacked our cattle. Bozo and Skippy fought like ten dogs and they chased the hyenas away and saved our cattle. But it was too much for them, Doctola,” he said with tears streaming down his cheeks. “They both died shortly after the fight. There was no time to send for you.”

I shook my head. “No! It can’t be. They just saved my life fifteen minutes ago. I know it was them. I saw them and I know it was them.” I fell to my knees and looked up at the black sky. The pelting drizzle now mixed with my own tears. “There aren’t two other dogs in this country that look even close to Skippy and Bozo. It had to be them!” I said, half pleading, half arguing, wishing and hoping it was not so, and all the time sobbing uncontrollably.

“I believe you, Doctola,” said the wise African as he knelt down next to me. “I told you that someday the dogs would return your kindness. They will always protect you!”

Herbert J. (Reb) Rebhan, D.V.M.

A Mother’s Love

I am a New York City fireman. Being a firefighter has its grim side. When someone’s business or home is destroyed, it can break your heart. You see a lot of terror and sometimes even death. But the day I found Scarlett was different. That was a day about life. And love.

It was a Friday. We’d responded to an early morning alarm in Brooklyn at a burning garage. As I was getting my gear on, I heard the sound of cats crying. I couldn’t stop—I would have to look for the cats after the fire was put out.

This was a large fire, so there were other hook and ladder companies there as well. We had been told that everyone in the building had made it out safely. I sure hoped so—the entire garage was filled with flames, and it would have been futile for anyone to attempt a rescue anyway. It took a long time and many firefighters to finally bring the enormous blaze under control.

At that point I was free to investigate the cat noises, which I still heard. There continued to be a tremendous amount of smoke and intense heat coming from the building. I couldn’t see much, but I followed the meowing to a spot on the sidewalk about five feet away from the front of the garage. There, crying and huddled together, were three terrified little kittens. Then I found two more, one in the street and one across the street. They must have been in the building, as their fur was badly singed. I yelled for a box and out of the crowd around me, one appeared. Putting the five kittens in the box, I carried them to the porch of a neighboring house.

I started looking for a mother cat. It was obvious that the mother had gone into the burning garage and carried each of her babies, one by one, out to the sidewalk. Five separate trips into that raging heat and deadly smoke—it was hard to imagine. Then she had attempted to get them across the street, away from the building. Again, one at a time. But she hadn’t been able to finish the job. What had happened to her?

A cop told me he had seen a cat go into a vacant lot near where I’d found the last two kittens. She was there, lying down and crying. She was horribly burnt: her eyes were blistered shut, her paws were blackened, and her fur was singed all over her body. In some places you could see her reddened skin showing through the burned fur. She was too weak to move anymore. I went over to her slowly, talking gently as I approached. I figured that she was a wild cat and I didn’t want to alarm her. When I picked her up, she cried out in pain, but she didn’t struggle. The poor animal reeked of burnt fur and flesh. She gave me a look of utter exhaustion and then relaxed in my arms as much as her pain would allow. Sensing her trust in me, I felt my throat tighten and the tears start in my eyes. I was determined to save this brave little cat and her family. Their lives were, literally, in my hands.

I put the cat in the box with the mewing kittens. Even in her pathetic condition, the blinded mother circled in the box and touched each kitten with her nose, one by one, to make sure they were all there and all safe. She was content, in spite of her pain, now that she was sure the kittens were all accounted for.

These cats obviously needed immediate medical care. I thought of a very special animal shelter out on Long Island, the North Shore Animal League, where I had taken a severely burned dog I had rescued eleven years earlier. If anyone could help them, they could.

I called to alert the Animal League that I was on my way with a badly burned cat and her kittens. Still in my smoke-stained fire gear, I drove my truck there as fast as I could. When I pulled into the driveway, I saw two teams of vets and technicians standing in the parking lot waiting for me. They whisked the cats into a treatment room— the mother on a table with one vet team and all the kittens on another table with the second team.

Utterly exhausted from fighting the fire, I stood in the treatment room, keeping out of the way. I didn’t have much hope that these cats would survive. But somehow, I just couldn’t leave them. After a long wait, the vets told me they would observe the kittens and their mother overnight, but they weren’t very optimistic about the mother’s chances of survival.

I returned the next day and waited and waited. I was about to completely give up hope when the vets finally came over to me. They told me the good news—the kittens would survive.

“And the mother?” I asked. I was afraid to hear the reply.

It was still too early to know.

I came back every day, but each day it was the same thing: they just didn’t know. About a week after the fire, I arrived at the shelter in a bleak mood, thinking,
Surely if
the mother cat was going to make it, she’d have come around by
now. How much longer could she hover between life and death?
But when I walked in the door, the vets greeted me with big smiles and gave me the thumbs up sign! Not only was she going to be all right—in time she’d even be able to see again.

Now that she was going to live, she needed a name. One of the technicians came up with the name Scarlett, because of her reddened skin.

Knowing what Scarlett had endured for her kittens, it melted my heart to see her reunited with them. And what did mama cat do first? Another head count! She touched each of her kittens again, nose to nose, to be sure they were all still safe and sound. She had risked her life, not once, but five times—and it had paid off. All of her babies had survived.

As a firefighter, I see heroism every day. But what Scarlett showed me that day was the height of heroism— the kind of bravery that comes only from a mother’s love.

David Giannelli

THE FAMILY CIRCUS
_®
      
By Bil Keane

“If I was Noah, I’d have taken a whole
BUNCH of cats instead of just two.”

Reprinted by permission of Bil Keane.

Daughter of Sunshine

The baby gorilla was born in the zoo. Her mother, Lulu, could not produce enough milk to adequately feed her, so the zoo keepers stepped in. They worked in shifts to hold the two-month-old ape in their arms around the clock, imitating the way real gorilla mothers take care of their young. The baby thrived and grew to be an exceptionally loving and gentle creature. The keepers named her Binti Jua, which means “daughter of sunshine” in Swahili.

Since Binti Jua was born in captivity, she was content with the life of a zoo gorilla, climbing the trees in her enclosure and playing happily with the other gorillas.

There was an old male gorilla living at the zoo, a large silverback, who had never shown any interest in fathering any offspring. Something about Binti Jua appealed to the elder ape and when Binti was six, she became pregnant.

The zoo keepers were concerned that because the young gorilla hadn’t had any maternal role models, she might not be fully prepared to mother her own young. So they gave her lessons. They used a stuffed animal as a baby substitute and taught her to put the “baby” to her breast and to hold the “baby” constantly, the way gorillas do in the wild.

She was a good student and when her daughter, Koola, was born, Binti Jua was the perfect mom. This combination of natural motherliness and her comfort with humans would later make her an internationally celebrated heroine.

One day, when Koola was about a year-and-a-half old, Binti Jua was in her outdoor enclosure, holding and grooming her baby as usual. The zoo visitors were all enjoying the sight of the gorillas, when suddenly a little three-year-old boy who had been playing along the barrier of the enclosure toppled over the edge and fell over twenty feet to the concrete floor below.

There was a sickening thud, and the little boy’s hysterical mother began screaming for help.

Immediately, Binti Jua, still holding Koola, made her way over to the unconscious child. The watching crowd gasped in horror. Unconsciously, people tend to associate gorillas with the movie monster King Kong. What would the huge ape do to the little boy?

First the mother gorilla lifted the boy’s arm, as if checking for signs of life. Then, gently, she picked him up and held him tenderly to her chest. Rocking him softly as she walked, she carried him over to the door the zoo keepers always used to enter and exit the enclosure. When another larger female gorilla approached her, Binti Jua made a guttural sound, warning the other gorilla to stay away. By this time, the door was open and the keepers were there with the paramedics, who had been called to rescue the injured boy. The gorilla carefully placed the boy on the floor in front of the door, and the paramedics whisked the child away. When the door closed again, Binti Jua calmly walked back to her tree and began grooming her own baby once more.