Howl (11 page)

Griff’s hand flew to her chest. “Heavens, child. You scared the daylights out —”

“Look what I’ve got!” Zo-Zo hefted a box on top of a hay bale then stopped and stared into the stall where the bear was. “Yikes! Is that what I think it is?”

“Yes, but don’t tell anybody,” Robin said.

“They wouldn’t believe me if I did,” she said, turning her attention back to the box she’d brought. From inside came high-pitched mewing. Zo-Zo gently peeled back the flaps.

“Ohhhhhh! Kittens,” Robin crooned. She reached in to stroke the little balls of black fur. Then she saw the white stripes and yanked her hand away. “Skunks?”

Griff beamed. “I
love
skunks.” She picked one up and cradled it in the palm of her hand, stroking it with the other.

Robin looked at her worriedly. “Won’t it spray?”

“Too young for that sort of nonsense,” Griff said.

“Dad and I found these on the side of the road,” Zo-Zo said. “The mother was killed by a car. There was blood everywhere.” She grimaced.

Griff made happy little cooing sounds as she petted the baby. “Oh, you poor little orphans!”

“My dad called the animal shelter,” Zo-Zo said, “but they only take domestic animals, like cats and dogs.”

Robin touched one of the babies. Its fur was silky soft.

Behind them, Mukwa made some snorfling sounds.

Zo-Zo looked at Robin. “And you have a baby bear in your barn because —?”

Robin explained. “He fell down a well and we saved him. He’s got a broken arm, but he’s going back to the wild as soon as he’s better. No one’s supposed to know about him, okay?”

Zo-Zo swallowed. “Got it.” She turned back to the skunks. “My dad and I can’t keep the skunks. Our house is too small. Since you’ve got the barn and everything, can you take them?”

Robin’s eyes went from Zo-Zo to Griff. “Dad said no more animals.”

Zo-Zo nodded. She bit her bottom lip. “Would your dad have to know?”

“If we put them at the back, he probably wouldn’t find out.” Robin scrutinized her grandmother’s face. “Would you tell?”

Griff put the baby back in the box and smiled. “Tell? Tell about what?”

The skunks began mewing again. “They’re hungry,” Robin said.

Zo-Zo nodded. “Starving.”

Griff suppressed a smile. “But let’s say there
were
skunks here. Because of what you learned feeding the puppies, you’d know how to feed these little critters as well. With the feeding bottles. The food is different, but if you came to the cabin in a little while, you just might find some food on the counter.” She waved and went off.

Robin grinned and waved back.

Zo-Zo stared after her. “That’s your granny?” Robin nodded. “You’re lucky. Mine knits socks and watches game shows.”

For the next week, Robin and Zo-Zo passed notes all day long at school as they tried to come up with names for the skunks. It should have been easy to name them, because each of them looked so different. That had surprised her. She had always thought that all skunks had two white stripes, but that wasn’t so. Each of the babies had its own unique markings, some with one fat stripe, others with one fat one and a skinny one, some with no stripes at all.

One day after school, Robin and Zo-Zo were reviewing the names as they waited for Brodie to show up for their eco-contest meeting in the library. Robin wished they weren’t even having a meeting. First of all, she didn’t see how they were going to solve the problem about the depressing questionnaire. There was nothing that wasn’t depressing about the environment. Secondly, she was still upset about Brodie saying nothing when Brittany had squashed her apple.

Robin reviewed all the names for the skunks and underlined the ones she liked best. Meanwhile, Zo-Zo searched through the library shelves and came back with a book. “Look, it’s all about skunks.” They sat close and opened it up.

“Can we tell Brodie about the skunks?” Zo-Zo asked, flipping the pages.

“I don’t think we should tell
anyone
. If my dad finds out, I’ll be grounded for life.”

Zo-Zo sat back and crossed her arms. “Oh, come on — Brodie wouldn’t tell. Not if we made him promise. He’s cool.”

“Me, cool? Glad you noticed,” Brodie said, breezing into the library. He plunked his books down on the table. “I figured it out.”

Zo-Zo looked up at him. “Figured what out?”

“How to make our contest less depressing. All we have to do is get people to do exactly what I did. Fill out the questionnaire twice.”

Zo-Zo and Robin both stared at him.

“Remember how pathetic my score was the first time I did it? I felt really down about it, so, when I went home, I changed some things, then I did it again and my score was
way
better. That made me feel really good.”

Robin wanted to stay mad at him but found it too hard to. “What kind of things did you do?”

“Nothing huge. I, like, changed our light bulbs to those weird-looking environmental ones, then I put up a clothes line, and got my dad to install one of those water-saving shower heads. Oh, yeah, and I got my mom to make veggie burgers. When I did the questionnaire again, my score went way up.” He grinned at them. “That’s the way we should do it with everybody.”

“Oh, I get it,” Zo-Zo said, tapping her pen excitedly. “The first time is kind of like an assessment or something. It just shows people where they’re at in terms of being green. But then we give people a chance to do better. That’s cool. Really cool.”

“And the person who makes the most changes wins!” Brodie said.

“Yeah!” Zo-Zo’s pen tapping quickened. “After people do the questionnaire once, we could give them a list of things they could do if they wanted a higher score.” She grinned. “Then we’d really ace the project.”

“Yeah!” Brodie said. He turned and looked at Robin. “This probably all sounds pathetic to you, but the way I figure it, if we can get a whole lot of people doing a whole lot of small things, the total could be huge.”

Robin couldn’t really argue. She found his excitement infectious. “Maybe we should take the questionnaire to other classes and get more kids involved.”

Brodie’s smile became huge. “Great idea. We could make this really big.”

Zo-Zo ping-ponged from Robin to Brodie. “If we go big like this, my dad will want to do an article on us for the newspaper!”

Brodie preened his hair. “I’ve always wanted to have my picture in the paper.” He grinned at Robin. “Told you guys it would all work out.”

Zo-Zo leaned over and pulled a package of papers from her backpack. “Now that we’re back on track, take a look at this. It’s a mock-up of our questionnaire.”

Robin looked at the freshly printed contest sheet. It was printed in a rich green and blue, and the questions had been done in white with little boxes to fill out beside each one. She had to admit it looked great.

Brodie held one up and whistled. “Sweet!”

“Okay, it’s a go,” Zo-Zo said. “I’ll call my dad at lunch. If they print it today, we could have the printed contest sheets by morning. That way we can hand them out tomorrow.”

Motivated now, they spent the next fifteen minutes brainstorming ideas for the fact sheet. Within twenty minutes, they’d come up with over twenty things people could do to be greener. Zo-Zo wrote them down and promised to work them up into a fact sheet.

“Okay,” Brodie said. “If we hand out the first round of the eco questionnaires tomorrow, we’ll have them back by the weekend. Then all we’ll have to do is score them.”

“Let’s do the scoring together,” Zo-Zo said. She turned to Robin. “If we meet at your place, Brodie can see the bear and the sk —” Zo-Zo’s threw her cupped hand over her mouth.

Robin stared at Zo-Zo in disbelief.

Brodie blinked. “You have a bear?”

Robin glared at Zo-Zo, then turned to Brodie. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

His face had a shy, dreamy expression. “I have a thing about bears.”

Zo-Zo scrutinized him. “What do you mean, ‘a thing’?”

“One tried to maul me when I was a baby. My bassinette was outside, and this bear came right up, my mom says to eat me, but I think it was just saying hello. I
love
bears.” He turned to Robin. “Can I come and see it? Please?”

Brodie looked at Robin. “How about Saturday?”

Robin wasn’t sure what to do. The safest thing was to say no. However, if Brodie and Zo-Zo came on Saturday, her father would be at the clinic, so they’d be able to play with the animals at their leisure. And her father wouldn’t be the wiser. She just might get away with it. But what if she didn’t get away with it?

“I work in the morning, but I can come after that,” Brodie prodded.

“Okay, Saturday it is,” Zo-Zo said.

Robin heard the word “sure” slip out of her mouth.

On the weekend, sunshine blasted through Robin’s window, making it easy for her to get out of bed. Wanting to get the animals fed, and fed quickly, she skipped breakfast and headed outside. The day was windy but bright and seemed to rush towards her like a best friend. She smiled. Zo-Zo and Brodie were coming today. How good was that? She stepped quickly towards the barn.

“Guess what?” she told Mukwa as she went into his enclosure and began feeding him. “You’re going to meet my friends today!”

Mukwa looked at her as if he totally understood.

“This bear is so smart,” she said to Griff when she heard her come into the barn.

“All bears are smart,” Griff said. “That’s why the Natives hold them in such high esteem. They believe bears are equal, if not superior, to man, with the same intelligence, memory, you name it.”

The puppies started to yip and bark for their breakfast. Robin covered her ears.

“Hold your horses,” Griff shouted over the din. She put a handful of food into each bowl and stood back as the puppies wolfed it down. She laughed. “Breakfast in fifteen seconds flat. That might be a record.” She looked at Robin. “You feeding those other animals we don’t have?”

“Oh, the skunks,” Robin said, clueing in. She nodded. “As soon as I’m finished with Mukwa.”

“I’ll take the puppies out then.” At the word “out,” there was an explosion of yipping and yelping. Griff opened the enclosure, and the pack of puppies bolted towards the barn door and ran outside.

“Come on, Relentless,” Griff said. “You better come along and help me keep these babies from running off in ten different directions.” Relentless ran ahead, and Griff hurried after them. “I might be getting too old for this.”

Robin hurried to feed the skunks. She had hidden them at the back of the barn, and so far not even Squirm knew about them. She didn’t want him to know. Normally, she fed them quickly and left so he wouldn’t come in and find her with them, but he had slept over at his friend Tom’s last night, so this morning she didn’t have to worry.

She made up some formula and took it and some needleless syringes into their enclosure. Very gently, she picked up one of the skunks and held it in the palm of her hand. It was no bigger than a small egg. Carefully, she tilted the baby skunk’s head back and eased the syringe into its minuscule mouth. As she pressed the plunger, most of the food went in, but some came back out again. This always happened when she went too fast.
Slow down
, she told herself, but it was hard. She felt so revved up. Brodie was going to be here. She was excited and nervous all at the same time.

She eased the next bit of food into the baby skunk more slowly. This time, the whole amount went in, and she could actually see the skunk’s belly expanding. She smiled. It felt so good to be able to help them survive. Who knew what would have happened to them if she hadn’t taken them in. They probably would have died. She didn’t like having to disobey her father, but hopefully he’d never know. She’d feed them until they were strong enough to survive then release them back into the wild. Her father would never find out they had even been there.

She was just about finished feeding when she heard someone come into the barn. She tensed. She knew it wasn’t Griff, because she could hear the puppies way off in the field. Her father had already left for the clinic. But what if he’d come back for some reason? Or maybe it was Ari? No, Ari never came out here.

Hurriedly, she tried to gather up the skunks, but they were spread out all over the hay — she didn’t have a chance of hiding them now. She heard footsteps coming closer and looked up.

Her brother stepped around the corner. He looked as surprised to see her as she was to see him.

“Squirm! What are you doing here?”

He quickly moved a basket he’d been carrying behind his back. Seeing the skunks, he dropped to his knees. “Wow!” He laughed and began to touch them excitedly.

Robin peeked into the basket Squirm had tried to conceal. She could see something moving beneath the cloth that was covering it. She steeled herself. “Look, we’re not supposed to take any more animals —”

“You should talk,” Squirm said.

Robin lifted the blanket. Cuddled together at the bottom was a nest of babies. Robin looked at their tiny sleeping bodies. “Squirrels?”

Squirm grinned. “That wind must have knocked their nest down. Tom and I found them this morning.”