Tango: The Tale of an Island Dog (4 page)

Now Tango’s blanketed body was being unwrapped. Something cold pressed against his throbbing chest.

“Hmm… weak, irregular …”

The man checked Tango’s ears and peeled back his eyelids. A pull. A pinch. A blinding beam of light.

When the man’s fingernails grazed the wound on Tango’s left side, Tango made his first sound, a meager whine, like a kitten mewing.

The man lifted Tango’s right hind leg and stretched his left.

Stop. Please. You’re killing me,
Tango groaned in a language that humans could not understand.

The man tugged on Tango’s paws. “I’ve eaten chicken wings with more meat on the bones than these.”

“This is no time for sarcasm, Jack.”

Those voices. Now Tango remembered: the woolly woman who’d untangled him from the trap. And Jack—the man who called him a lucky rat.

“What’s this, Gustie?” asked Jack.

“What’s what? And for heaven’s sake, call me Augusta. We’re not children anymore.”

“Looks like he’s bleeding.”

Tango cringed.

“Oh my.”

“He’s in rough shape, Augusta. I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

“I’ll thank you to keep your opinions to yourself, Jack Tucker.”

“I’m a vet. People pay for my opinions.” Jack sighed. “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

A vet? Tango was in an animal hospital?

Tango heard human hands rubbing together, a soft scratching of skin on skin.

“Just tell me what needs to be done,” said Augusta curtly.

“Right now, the dog needs stitches, antibiotics, and, to be on the safe side, a tetanus shot.”

A window shade rolled, giving light to the room.

“But you’ll have to hold him down.”

Oh, no! A SHOT!

“Poor pup.”

“Oh, he’s not a pup,” said Jack. “He’s full grown—
some kind of terrier, I think. He’s so beat up, it’s hard to tell, eh?”

The woman’s hands held Tango’s body firmly but gently. A steel needle drove deep into Tango’s rump.

Just let me die,
Tango pleaded.
Just let me die.

Finally, the needle eased out, leaving a burning tingle. Tango felt dizzy—a sleepy, spinning out of control.

“A Yorkshire Terrier, probably,” Jack said. “You know, in all my years of practice, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one on the island.”

What island?

Tango tried to untangle his thoughts, but as the veterinarian started stitching, he slipped back into the sea.

The now-deserted home of Old Ada Phillips was built on the rocky shore just west of the wharf in Victoria-by-the-Sea. Villagers, Nigel Stump knew, called the dilapidated structure the Pitiful Place.

Indeed its peeling blue paint did appear to be weeping. The windows were shaded and sad. A bare, warped board above the door resembled a frown.

With the thin silver heart clenched in his teeth, Nigel scrambled up a wooden ramp that led to a one-hinged door. He squeezed through a space between the door and its frame, pausing to inhale the deliciously pervasive ratty smell.

Even into her mideighties, Old Ada had rescued white mice and rats discarded by biomedical laboratories. After the good-hearted but eccentric woman died, village councilmen filled burlap sacks with a few heavy rocks and—what they believed was—
every last one of the rodents. Mice, rats, and rocks were tossed into the sea.

Nigel found the other cats—Axel, Tate, Leftie, Flint, and Briar—lounging about in the main room. Amid stacks of decades-old newspapers, trash, bones, broken lamps, and bird skulls were dozens of empty rodent cages, both steel and glass.

On his very first scavenger hunt, Nigel found a set of car keys that he’d hung on one of the cages. He’d been scavenging and decorating ever since, trying to make the place feel like a real home.

Axel, a brown-striped tabby with a sharp tongue, was the cats’ self-appointed leader. His former owner had chopped off the tip of Axel’s tail with—you guessed it—an ax, a brutal act which Axel vowed never to forget.

Axel insisted that Nigel adopt the name Stump to prove that he, too, had renounced the domesticated life.

In Nigel’s heart and mind, Nigel was still Nigel.

Tate, Leftie, Flint, and Briar had their own tales of maltreatment. It was part of the glue that held the gang of cats together.

Nigel drooled in anticipation of the envy the silver charm would evoke. He leaped from the back of a wing chair to the fireplace mantle—no easy feat for a three-legged cat.

“What’s up, Stump?” asked Axel.

Nigel revealed the heart-shaped piece of silver that crowned the tip of his tongue.

“For me?” asked the blue-furred female named Briar.

Tate, a black cat with an even darker spirit, eyed the charm and, with a casual flick of his seriously long tail, dismissed its value.

“Way to go, Stump,” said Leftie, who’d lost his right ear to a Pit Bull Terrier. “Where’d ya find it?”

Nigel let the heart drop onto a cracked saucer. “On the beach. Washed up in the storm, I guess.”

“That was a whopper of a storm,” Leftie commented, pointing his orange paw at a puddle of water by the refrigerator, which lay like a white coffin in the middle of the room.

Somehow, the discovery of the shiny charm had empowered Nigel. Something had been eating away at him for weeks. It was time to speak up.

“Hey, guys …”

Not a single eye turned in Nigel’s direction.

“Guys?”

“Say what ya gotta say,” Tate hissed. Nigel glared at the cats until he had their complete attention.

“
We
have a problem,” he announced. “The
village
has a problem. For all I know, the whole
island
has a problem.”

Grins broke out all around. The cat pack loved
problems, troubles, sorrows, and other states of anxiety and fear.

Briar stopped grooming her luscious blue fur. “What’s the problem, Stumpy?”

“Outsiders.” Nigel curled the word off his tongue with disgust. “They’re invading our village.”

“Stump, what’re you talking about?” demanded Axel.

“As you know—today is the opening day of lobster season,” Nigel continued.

More grins. The cats loved lobster season—all the succulent scraps that littered the wharf after the fishermen unloaded their traps.

“Just a little while ago, at the wharf,” explained Nigel, “one of the men saw—I mean, he thought he saw—a rat tangled in a lobster trap.” He puffed out his chest. “Fresh meat.”

Briar smacked her lips. “I
love
rat steak.”

“But it turns out, it was a dog. A very small dog.”

“A dog in a lobster trap?” Axel sneered. “You gotta be kidding. Where’d it come from?”

“My point exactly,” said Nigel. “Where are all of these foreigners coming from? And why?”

“Who else,” asked Briar, “besides the dog?”

“That girl—the one with long black hair. She’s strange, I tell you—always hanging around our beach, stealing our stuff.”

“No stranger than any of the other two-leggers in the village,” Leftie noted. “Who else?”

“The fox,” Nigel snarled. “That foul creature showed up on the same day as the girl. No coincidence, if you ask me.”

“Strange. Very strange indeed,” agreed Tate.

“A strange girl, a fox, and now this Rat-Boy,” Nigel complained.

Flint, a Siamese Cross, yawned. “Who’s Rat-Boy?”

Fur on end, Nigel bared his brownish teeth. “Flint, listen up! Rat-Boy’s the name I gave the new dog! We’ve got to call him something.”

With narrowed eyes, Axel stroked his Whiskers with a paw. “Three outsiders moving into the village since the snow melted. If this keeps up, by next spring, that’s—”

“Too many,” Briar declared.

“This calls for a plan,” concluded Axel, switching his tipless tail.

An odd smile skewed the tabby cat’s face—a sinister look that Nigel hadn’t seen before.

“The Scram Plan.” Axel sniggered. “Effective immediately.”

Nigel was correct. It was no coincidence that Beau Fox showed up in Victoria-by-the-Sea on the same day as McKenna Skye. So, while we give our little friend Tango some time to heal, we’ll meander back in time—twelve years or so, to another shore.

The unlikely bond between the girl and the fox formed during the second summer of Beau’s life.

A few hours before dawn, Beau was curled inside his den, deep in the sand dunes on the North Shore. Above him, meadow mice tittered and skittered, reminding Beau of his hunger. He unfurled his tail, stretched, and stuck his head out of the den. A thin wail, carried on the northeast wind, cut through the familiar buzzing, humming, lapping, and flapping sounds of the night.

Beau’s black ears perked. He sniffed the air. The sound unsettled him. With his hind paws stepping
into tracks left by his front paws, he trotted across the sand in search of its source.

As he approached the marsh near North River, the cry became thicker, more desperate. The fur on Beau’s back bristled. This was not the final cry of a frog clasped in the jaws of a raccoon. Not a rabbit’s squeal, nor a plea for mercy from a mole clamped in an owl’s beak.

Heavy spring rains had caused the river to over-flow its banks. Crabs scattered as Beau plodded through the slimy marsh grasses. He found himself sinking in muck and once had to swim to safety.

The wail peaked, broke, and rose again to a screech.

Winds blew the clouds off the face of a full moon, exposing a brilliant white path of light across the marsh. Just ahead, a solid dark bundle was wedged between the trunks of two silver birches. Four tiny flesh-covered limbs rose out of the dark mass, kicking and thrashing.

Cautiously, Beau approached. A step. Another step.

And then—a baby. A human baby. Very small. Very young.

Beau held a point, prepared to pounce.

The dark-haired infant screamed. Beau retreated. Water swirled close to the white hairs at the bottom of his chest.

When the infant’s voice stilled, Beau moved forward and sniffed. The terrified baby’s glassy eyes widened. Tears streamed down the plump flesh of its cheeks. Beau growled. For a moment, he considered biting the soft flesh. Such sweet revenge it would be.

Beau’s mind flashed back to a sleeting night in late winter. The distant squeal of tires. The scream of his mate, Tawny—her body crushed by the tires of a bright red car. When Beau reached her, it was too late.

Shaking off his grief, Beau studied his discovery.

The infant, he realized, was lying in a basket woven out of reeds and green branches. It was lined with the feathered skin of a goose. All but one of the leather cords binding the baby to its makeshift cradle had loosened.

Finally, the baby’s cries of desperation cut deep into Beau’s heart, cracking a frozen spot. Beau touched his nose to the infant’s wet forehead. He licked its salty cheek, and the crying ceased. The infant squirmed; innocent arms reached out to him.

Suddenly, a powerful eddy dislodged the cradle.

Beau lunged and caught the infant’s foot in his mouth. The infant screamed. Beau softened his grip but did not let go.

Stepping backward, Beau tried to pull the cradled infant to safety. But as soon as he gained a little
ground, the water propelled him backward. Finally, using one last burst of strength, Beau pulled the baby and its water-logged basket out of the swirling water to a bed of needles under a fir tree.

Beau smelled blood. The infant’s foot was bleeding. Beau saw that it was a girl-child. Beau was weak with exhaustion, sick with fear that the baby’s scent would be picked up by a predator. Beau had the will to tow the infant to the safety of his den—but not the strength.

He curled his bushy tail around her body and licked her wounded foot. The infant quieted, and they slept.

A few hours later, screams of hunger pierced the predawn air.

Beau opened his eyes, for a moment confused. Two Great Blue heron towered above them. The baby—perhaps out of fear—stopped crying.

“You can’t keep her,” the male—whom Beau now recognized as the bird called King—pronounced.

“She’s human! She can’t survive,” said the female, known as Queen.

“You must return her to her own kind,” warned King, “before it’s too late.”

Beau brushed his snout across wisps of black hair on the baby’s head. “Do you know what happened?”

“No. But sometimes humans give up their young to the water.” King glanced at the soggy scraps of feathered goose skin still tied to the baby. “What-ever happened, it happened in the Old Way.”

“The Old Way?” questioned Beau.

“At birth,” explained Queen, “babies of the First Nation were dipped into the coldest water that could be found and—”

An owl perched on a nearby pine branch completed Queen’s sentence. “They were wrapped in warm furs and sometimes—in the skin of a wild goose.”

King pointed his thin, sharp beak at Beau. “Her fate is for humans to decide. Intervention is noble but unwise.”

The infant’s whimpers tore at Beau’s heart.

“The closest human house is—”

“I know where it is,” Beau said forlornly.

It was the house with the killing machine parked in front of it—the red car that had taken Tawny. Beau felt overwhelmed; the responsibility was too great.

“Fox! Now! You must act,” King commanded. “Take her there, or she will die.”

“Dig roots for her to suck on—to keep her quiet,” Queen instructed.

“I saw a large piece of net lying on the beach,” said Owl.

“Show me,” said King. “But hurry. Dawn is coming.”