Best Friends (2 page)

In a big hutch next door, seven rabbits snuggled in their straw-plumped bed. Six tiny hamsters snoozed in a spacious neighboring cage, safe, yet close to the bunnies for company. Nothing stirred in the emerging dawn. All was well.

Faith sipped her coffee slowly. She loved this time of morning: the palpable quiet that wrapped her in a cloak of serenity. All she could hear was the swish of a hawk's wings flying low, a raven's caw, the chattering of a creek as it wended its way to the Grand Canyon that seemed to deepen rather than shatter the tranquility.

She stood silently, watching the dawn sweep the shadows from the valley floor, higher and higher until the naked cliffs of the red-rock gorge were brushed with the delicate pinks and blues of a Monet painting. No wonder the Anasazi Indians had gathered here to beg plenty from Mother Earth.

A distant barking told her the sanctuary was awakening. Faith stepped back to the trailer, turning her mind to what must be done this day.

“I'm at a pay phone outside of Kanab. I'll be there in twenty minutes,” Lydia was almost shrieking with excitement.

“Stop by the Welcome Center and get directions. You'll find me outside Building Three at the WildCats Village,” Faith said.

As usual, the feral cats' habitat looked like a disaster area first thing in the morning: overturned water bowls, toys flung everywhere, scatters of granules around the litter boxes betraying nighttime toiletries. Faith smiled as she surveyed the damage.
Partying all night, the lucky pussycats.

To a casual observer there was not a feline to be seen, but Faith knew to look up at the redwood joists. She counted twenty-one pairs of wary eyes watching her every move.

A serious young man pushed a cart laden with bowls into the room. Judah grinned when he saw Faith and waved “hello” before proceeding to ladle vittles from a red bucket.

Within seconds the room erupted in a flurry of fur. Down from the roof joists they scurried, jumped, or climbed with dainty precision. From behind litter boxes, from carpeted climbing trees and shocking blue sleeping tents they emerged in full meow, tails swishing, all wariness abandoned. The cats knew Judah. They knew feeding time.

Faith felt the vibration against her hip. She pulled the cell phone from her jacket. “Lydia's just left the Welcome Center. She's on her way.”

“Please let Francis and Dr. Allen know, and Michael needs to talk to her, too,” Faith instructed.

A minute later, Faith stood assessing the woman she'd talked with many times but had never met. Lydia Rice was slender, with dark hair cut short and chic. Light wrinkles fanned from intelligent eyes. More than anything, Lydia radiated a sense of confidence and reliability as she stood beside her rental car, appraising Faith in turn.

Faith closed the gap between them and the two women hugged in wordless conversation. “I've wanted to come here for so long,” Lydia finally offered.

They both turned as a white Jeep slid to a stop behind them. A tall, lean man with a shock of red hair unfolded himself from the driver's side and strode toward them. “Michael Mountain,” he introduced himself. Faith smiled as she saw Lydia take in his impeccable khakis and matching vest, the crisp cotton of his precisely pressed shirt. Michael was always immaculate, and always so intensely British.

“Michael is our president and editor of our
Best Friends
magazine,” she explained.

Lydia's eyes lit with pleasure. “Of course. I've got to tell you I devour every issue. I love that it's so upbeat. I can't stand to read any more horrible things done to animals.”

A faint blush diffused Michael's cheekbones. “Thank you.”

“Hello, Lydia,” Francis Battista smiled as he joined them.

“Francis,” Lydia exclaimed, obviously happy to see the familiar bearded face beneath the soft felt hat. “I tried to call you in L.A. but couldn't reach you.”

“I was traveling,” Francis explained. “How're you doing?”

“Great, now that I've got the cats here.”

Before she could say more, a battered Dodge Ram diesel fishtailed to a halt in a cloud of red dust beside them. A round-faced man with an outrageous handlebar moustache bounced out of the vehicle, rushed over to Lydia, and pumped her hand. “I'm Dr. Allen. So pleased to meet you. This is a fine job you've done. Fine job. Where are the little ones?”

“They're right here.” Lydia was enjoying the action. “In the backseat.” She opened her car door. “They're quiet now, but boy do they have some vocal cords!”

“Let me,” Michael offered and disappeared into the car's interior. He re-emerged with a large black cat carrier. “Ah, matches the cats,” he said with a little smile, leading the way to Tommy and Tyson's new home.

They all lapsed into silence as they followed Michael, who bore the brothers' carrier before him like a precious gift.

“Oh how lovely,” Lydia exclaimed, eyes huge as she took in the sunny window, toys, and carpeted kitty condos of the quarantine room. Michael set the carrier on the floor and cautiously opened its door.

Dr. Allen was already ushering everybody out. “Let's give them some space.”

The five humans bunched together outside the quarantine room, unable to tear their eyes away from the small glass aperture that afforded a view into the interior. Nothing. The brothers stayed as silent as mutes in their former prison. Not a movement. Not a meow. Faith could feel the rising tension in the woman beside her. “Easy,” she said. “Remember, they're terrified. They may not stir for hours.”

“It's good Judah put tuna out for them,” Francis observed.

Minutes passed. Half an hour. Forty-five minutes.

“How's your day?” Faith whispered to Michael.

“Nothing that can't wait,” he replied.

Some of the residents of WildCats Village decided that breakfast done, maybe it was time to play—or nap, whichever came first—and wandered in from taking the air of their outside play area. One glimpse of the knot of people, staring as if all the answers to life's questions lay beyond one door, and they scattered like buckshot.

Faith shifted position for the umpteenth time and thought of all the things she should be doing. Michael waited, motionless. Dr. Allen's cherubic smile said that all would happen in its time.

“They're coming out,” Lydia whispered.

“I can't see any movement,” Faith said.

“They're coming out.”

Two paws emerged first. Tentative, kneading the rag rug in front of them as if to ascertain its safety. A small, dark head appeared, nose twitching, sniffing this alien territory. One solitary step and the cat froze, eyes fixed on a bowl a foot away.

“It's Tyson. He smells the tuna,” Lydia whispered.

Another step and a second face appeared, seemingly glued to the haunches of its protector. But the lead cat wasn't sure. He backtracked his brother into the carrier. “Damn,” breathed Lydia.

“They'll be out soon now. Tyson's just testing for any reaction,” Faith soothed.

As if not wishing to prove her wrong, Tyson emerged once more . . . curious . . . hungry!

And then what the five humans had been waiting for: the bigger feline stepped purposefully into the light, stopped for a second, and licked the little head beside him. Tommy swayed unsteadily against his brother. Two skinny, tiny bodies trod tentatively in lockstep . . . forward.

Then they saw what Lydia had tried to explain. Tyson would not walk fast. He couldn't. His tail was entwined like a garland around his blind sibling's. The cats walked as one, tails high, Tyson leading the way—truly his brother's keeper.

“You see what I mean?” Lydia did not try to hide her tears.

“I've never seen the likes of this,” Dr. Allen murmured. He put his arm around her. “You did good, woman. You did very good. Now just from looking, they need nourishment. But unless I find something bad, they've got some good years ahead of them. We've got many special-needs cats here. Tommy will fit right in.”

Lydia buried her face in his chest. “I'm not a silly woman. It's just . . . thank you.”

Faith took Lydia's hand. “Let's go outside for a minute.”

“Why don't you all go,” Dr. Allen said. “I want to observe a little longer.”

They strolled into the sunshine, Michael and Francis chatting animatedly with Lydia. Faith wandered over to a piñon tree whose trunk, thick and wide, said it had seen many things. She leaned back against the smooth, silver trunk and closed her eyes.

Into her mind floated the classical tale of the man walking by the ocean, throwing back the starfish beached after a storm. One at a time you save them. One at a time.

That's the way it had always been for the men and women of Best Friends. Most of them had known each other since the 1960s. Even when they'd been scattered over the globe with everyone “doing their own thing,” they'd stayed connected, bound by their passion for animals and the belief that kindness was the answer—to each other, to the environment, to the creatures with whom they shared the planet.

To rescue animals was as natural to them as waking up in the morning. It was the notion that they could make a difference that encouraged half a dozen of them in the late seventies to pool their monies and buy a small ranch in Arizona as a place of refuge for more of the animals they saved . . . one at a time.

Yet it wasn't until Francis Battista had found this place that their ideas could blossom—that Best Friends could truly become a force for change.

June of 1982: That's when it all
really
began.

The day Francis found the canyon.

I
t was just sweet serendipity, Francis said. Yet he believed nothing extraordinary happened by chance. And this, after all, had been foretold.

On a late June morning in 1982, Francis left the ranch in Prescott, Arizona, heading north for Salt Lake. He drove steadily through the afternoon, stopping only once as he neared the Utah border to rifle through the jumble of U.S. Geological Survey maps he carried everywhere. With his real estate background, Francis was always on the lookout for that perfect piece of land where they could build the animal sanctuary of their dreams.

The small ranch a few of them had bought four years earlier was already too small for the increasing number of animals that he, Faith, and the half-dozen other permanent residents rescued and cared for. When any of their far-flung coterie of friends came to stay, sooner or later the talk turned wistfully to everyone's vision of a place where hundreds of animals could be safe, loved, and allowed to live out their natural lives.

Francis checked in at the Parry Lodge in Kanab that night. He was the first customer in the dining room the next morning, ordering his customary black coffee—the stronger the better.

As he waited for his breakfast, Francis casually studied the map of the southernmost slice of the state, but his attention kept wandering to the framed pictures and movie posters that adorned the walls: signed sepia photos of Tom Mix, Clint Eastwood, and Ronald Reagan, in full cowboy regalia flanked by advertisements for
The Lone Ranger, MacKenna's Gold,
and
The Outlaw Josie Wales.

The high-school waitress was full of information as she poured his coffee. “Oh yes, they used to shoot a lot of westerns around here in the old days. In Kanab Canyon, just outside of town. Ronald Reagan had his own room right upstairs,” she confided, as if she'd known the President personally.

The waitress looked down at Francis's map and pointed to a large block of land about eight miles north of town. “There, that's Kanab Canyon.” For a moment her young face looked sad. “But nothing much happens there nowadays. Nobody seems to know what to do with the place anymore.”

After breakfast, Francis cruised slowly through the one main street of Kanab, but nothing particularly caught his interest. He passed the canyon the waitress had mentioned, but didn't pay it much mind. He had the impression that the terrain hereabouts was mostly inhospitable desert favored by rattlers and needled with wind-chiseled rocks.

What Francis didn't realize as he left the town behind was that he was entering the golden circle of Grand Canyon, Zion, and Bryce Canyon National Parks. He was not prepared for the stark beauty of red-rock cliffs, majestic cottonwoods, and soft, summer greens of whispering willows that gentled his way as he pressed on toward Salt Lake City.

He had no reason to turn around that morning, but forty miles up the highway he made a U-turn. Half an hour later he eased onto the rutted road of Kanab Canyon and stumbled onto destiny. By noon he was on the phone to Michael.

 

“Michael, I've found it.”

“Did I hear a ‘Hello, how are you?' I'm fine. Thanks for asking.”

“I've found our place, Michael.”

The two men had been close for years, working together in London, New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. As well as he understood anyone, Michael thought he knew Francis. Yet he couldn't ever recall hearing such suppressed excitement from his normally pragmatic friend. He stopped joking. “Where are you?”

“Kanab.”

“Kanab?”

“It's a town north of the Grand Canyon in southwest Utah.”

“What are you doing in Utah?”

“On my way to Salt Lake. But listen, remember that dream you had about an oasis in the desert? You won't believe it, but I've just stumbled on a three thousand-acre oasis.”

“Three thousand acres?”

“Along with all the federal land we can lease with it. It's the size of
Manhattan;
that's how big it is.”

Michael tried to visualize the immensity of a piece of land the size of Manhattan.

“And it's filled with junipers and willows, and there's this tributary of the Colorado that runs through it, and these incredible red cliffs that embrace the whole place. . . .” Francis paused. “And they have over three hundred and twenty days of sunshine a year.”

Francis definitely had Michael's attention. For a man who had endured, as he liked to complain, twenty long years of terminally gray British winters, the promise of sunshine was like manna from heaven for Michael.

But Francis wasn't finished. “Are you ready for this? There's an ancient legend that when the Aztec King Montezuma was executed, his followers fled with his treasure and buried it right here in an underground lake. Are you hearing me? Red rocks! Treasure! The old man's prediction!”

Michael felt a chill. He knew exactly what Francis was referring to. He'd spent some time on the Yucatan Peninsula in the late sixties with a dozen friends, sleeping on the beach because the boarding house in the fishing village at which they'd stopped refused to rent them rooms. The landlady wouldn't allow their dogs, and, as far as they were concerned, if their dogs weren't welcome neither were they.

A brown-skinned man, bent with age and leaning on a stick, a yellow dog by his side, had appeared out of nowhere and directed them to a Mayan ruin on the seashore where they might stay. Michael had looked for the
señor
the next week to say thank you and invite him to eat with them. But nobody in the village knew of the old man.

This seemed strange given the close-knit nature of a place of less than fifty souls. But at the time, Michael shrugged it off. Mexico, after all, was the land of the mystic writer, Carlos Casta-ñeda. Three months later, as Michael was about to leave, the old man appeared again.

“You will be back,” he said.

“I don't really plan on that.”

“Not here.” He raised a withered arm and pointed his stick toward the United States. “You will go where our people went with Montezuma's treasure, a place of big, red rocks.” He smiled. “There is where you'll find what your heart is looking for.”

The memory washed over Michael like a vivid dream. “I'll meet you tomorrow,” he told Francis. “We need to call Faith.”

“She's next on my list.”