an animal’s pain. She was right. “I’ll look after him,” he had said. “A fox is an unusual patient, but I’ll do my best.”
She went into the house and made the telephone call. Simon was in, and agreed to come immediately. “Try not to stress him too much,” he said. “I don’t think foxes are easy patients at the best of times.”
She rang off and went to join Jamie in the garden. Jamie had moved away from the cage in the hope that Brother Fox would calm down, but it did not seem to have made much difference. Every few seconds a whimper came from the caged animal—a whimper that sounded like a plea—and this would be followed by a yelp or a howl. There was no mistaking the distress in the sounds, and Isabel wanted to block them from her ears. “I can’t bear it,” she whispered to Jamie. “He’s appealing to us to help him.”
Jamie reached out and took her hand. “Which is what we’re trying to do,” he replied.
“I know.”
She felt the pressure of his hand on hers, joined in an intense moment of understanding. It was a little drama being enacted—a tiny thing in the context of the ocean of suffering that the world bore every single day; incessant suffering—but for Isabel it was immediate, and vivid. She returned the pressure of Jamie’s hand; he looked down at her and kissed her on the cheek, as if he might kiss away her pain, and with it the pain of Brother Fox.
Simon did not live far away and it was only a few minutes before they saw the lights of his car coming down the street. Isabel left Jamie with Brother Fox and went to the front gate to meet him. As she opened the gate to the vet, a particularly loud yelp came through the darkness.
“Sounds unhappy,” remarked Simon. “Poor chap.”
They walked round the side of the house. Simon had a bag with him, which he now put down and opened. From it he extracted a pair of thick gauntlets—rather like gardening gloves, but heavier and providing more protection for the wrists. He looked up at Jamie. “I could use these,” he said. “But it might be better if you could keep him under control while I sedate him. Let him bite on one of them and use the other to hold the scruff of his neck. I’ll give him a jab while you’re doing that. Can you do it?”
Isabel felt that she had to protest. “Jamie needs his fingers to play the bassoon,” she pointed out. “Let me do it.”
Jamie objected. “No. I’ll be fine.”
“What if he bites through? I can edit the
Jamie knew better than to argue with Isabel once she had decided upon something, and so he watched as she slipped on the gloves. While she was doing this, Simon extracted a syringe and ampoule from his bag and attended to that; now they were ready.
“All you have to do is engage his jaws,” said Simon. “Then I’ll pop the needle in.”
He was calm, and his calmness seemed to be having an effect on Brother Fox; the yelping had stopped and he was cowering on the floor of the cage, watching them. Isabel moved forward and carefully opened the door. Then she advanced a gloved hand towards Brother Fox. “Gently,” said Simon.
She felt the pressure of his bite through the glove’s thick material. It was not as hard as she had imagined it would be; perhaps he was weakened by the infection—Simon had said that was likely to be the case. It was the first time that she and Brother Fox had touched—the fact struck her forcibly. He had lived in her garden, or at least passed through it every day—it was his corridor, perhaps—and they had seen one another but were like neighbours who remained strangers, never exchanging greetings or doing any of the other things that neighbours do. But now they were face-to-face, not as the friends that she thought they were, but, in his eyes at least, she as an assailant who was trying to kill him.
Simon was quick. Isabel hardly saw his hand as he reached in and slipped the needle into a fold of the fox’s skin. Then Simon withdrew, and she noticed, curiously, a tiny drop of blood on the tip of the needle—vulpine blood, the blood of Brother Fox. The blood of another creature seems always so alien; stranger to us than our own blood, the bearer of the biological secrets of the species.
“That should calm him down,” said Simon. “Give it a few minutes and he should be as docile as a lamb.”
Isabel looked at Brother Fox, who looked back at her. His jaw slackened and she released him. For a moment she thought that she saw puzzlement in his eyes, replacing the fear that had been there before. Then he shook his head, as if trying to clear it; the sedative was clearly having its effect. His head drooped, and then he collapsed to the floor of the cage.
“That’s him,” said Simon. “Now we can bring him out.”
The vet reached into the cage and took hold of Brother Fox’s front paws. There was no resistance. Once he was outside, lying on the grass, Simon reached beneath him and picked him up. “The kitchen might be the best place,” he said.
They took Brother Fox into the house. In the kitchen, Isabel covered the table with newspapers, copies of the
Simon washed his hands, dried them carefully and put on a pair of latex gloves. Then, very gently, he probed at the wound on Brother Fox’s flank. It was not a large wound; a cut of some sort, he said, that had become infected. He took a pair of scissors from his bag and snipped the fur away around the wound; there was congealed blood on the fur, a blackness. Then with a small scalpel he cut at what looked like small bits of string around the wound; dead tissue, he explained. Isabel watched, but Jamie turned away in his squeamishness. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t like this sort of thing.”
“It won’t take long,” said Simon.
Isabel had moved a lamp over to the table and was holding it above Brother Fox so that Simon could see more clearly. He worked nimbly, and was soon ready to suture the top part of the wound. “I’ll leave this lower part open to act as a drain,” he said. “And then all we need to give him is a big shot of antibiotic and that’ll be it.”
Now Isabel studied Brother Fox on the table. She stared at the pads of his feet—rough and scarred—and the imperfections in his coat. His fur was rough and unkempt, but thicker than she had imagined. His tail, she thought, was beautiful; she had admired it so many times when she had seen him walking along the top of the high wall that surrounded the garden at the back, as firm-footed and assured as … as a funambulist. Bruno. She had not thought
