Snake Island
Copyright© 2026 by James Foster Reed
Chapter 5: The Third One This Month
By the last week of April the mud had given up most of its ground and was holding out only on the north sides of things: the shaded ruts, the fence-line hollows, the low corner of the clinic lot where the culvert never quite drained. The maples along Old County Road had traded their red haze for actual leaves, small and folded, like they were not sure yet of the welcome. In town the lawns had come into that first loud green that lasts about ten days and makes everybody briefly forgive New England for the other three hundred and fifty-five. Nora had the clinic windows cracked for the first time since October, and the waiting room smelled like disinfectant and cut grass instead of disinfectant and wet dog, which in her line of work passed for a season.
The afternoon book had white space in it. Deb had stopped remarking on the white space sometime in March, which Nora appreciated, because there was nothing to say about it that the two of them did not already know. A shepherd cross came in at one for spring shots and went out again at one twenty. At two, Mrs. Pelletier dropped off Banjo, a beagle with a face like a folded blanket, to board through her niece’s wedding in Nashua, and paid for the week in advance because she did not trust herself with the money once she got near the wedding. At two thirty a man from East Calder called to move his terrier’s dental from May to June, and Deb wrote it into the June page in pencil, which was its own kind of arithmetic.
Maggie came up from the school at ten of three. Tuesdays and Thursdays she walked the half mile up Old County Road instead of taking the bus, because the bus went the long way around by the Falls and the walk did not, and because the clinic had a snack drawer and the house did not. Nora heard the door and then heard nothing, which meant Maggie was already in the back. Her daughter moved through the clinic the way she moved through the house, without looking, reaching for the light switch behind the towel shelf that no visitor ever found on the first try. By three she was installed at Nora’s desk with her algebra open and her sneakers up on the recycling bin, working the problems with the eraser end of the pencil the way she did when she believed no one was auditing her methods.
“There are crackers and there are the good crackers,” Deb said, passing the office door.
“I know where the good crackers are,” Maggie said, not looking up.
“I know you do. I’m asking you to leave me two.”
Around four Maggie took Banjo out to the fenced patch and walked him in slow circles while he vacuumed the fence line, and Nora watched them through the treatment room window for a minute without meaning to, the beagle towing, the girl letting herself be towed, the two of them conducting the inspection with equal seriousness. Then a cat with a weepy eye arrived, and the eye was nothing, a scratch from a housemate, and Nora said so and charged for saying so, and the owner split it over two cards without being asked how she wanted to pay, because Deb had learned by now to just take the cards.
Wayne Michaud came in at twenty of five with a cardboard box.
Nora knew him the way she knew half the county, which was through his animals. He kept a small place out on Old Reservoir Road, farming in the way men farm after the real job goes away: sweet corn for the freezer, beef cattle you could count on one hand, a tractor older than his marriage. He had brought her a heifer calf with a bad eye two summers back and paid cash from an envelope. Today he set the box on the counter like it weighed more than it did and said, “I don’t need anything done for him. I need to know what did it.”
The cat was a big gray tom, seven or eight, a barn cat with a barn cat’s resume written on his ears. Michaud called him Duster because as a kitten he had slept on the tractor dash. He had been fine at grain time the night before, sitting on the ramp taking attendance. This morning he was dead behind the barn by the old stone ramp, stretched out, Michaud said, like he had been headed for the house.
Nora took the box back to the treatment room. Maggie glanced up when she went by and went back to the algebra.
The cat’s left hind leg was swollen to twice itself from hock to hip, the skin tight and dark, split in one place where the swelling had beaten it. The bruising ran up under the fur along the belly like water finding its level. The rest of him was untouched. No new tears in the ears, no raked flank, no crush marks, nothing at the throat. Whatever had happened had happened once, low on the leg, and been over.
She put on gloves and shaved the leg down, working from the worst of it outward. In the middle of the mess she found two small punctures, or what she took for punctures, so tidy they were almost prim, set wider apart than a rat’s mouth had any business being. She pressed the tissue around them and did not like the feel of it, pulpy and dark, the blood in it gone wrong in a way she associated with nothing on her usual list.
She stood a moment with her thumbs on the margins of the wound and ran the list anyway, the way she had run it a thousand times for a thousand owners. Rat: wrong spacing, and a rat bite killed by infection, days, not overnight. Weasel or mink: four holes, not two, and closer together, and up at the neck, where they did their business. Fisher: a fisher did not leave a cat this whole. A dog: no crush, no shake, no second grip. A sting, some bad reaction: stings did not puncture, and this swelling was angrier than a sting’s, meaner, with the blood involved in a way stings did not involve it. The math kept coming out a little short whichever way she ran it. Close enough to file. Not close enough to like.
Michaud was waiting in exam two with his cap in his hands, turning it by the brim.
“Somebody put something out,” he said. “That’s my thought on it. There’s a fellow down the road treats his whole lawn like it’s a golf course.”
“Poison doesn’t do this,” Nora said. “Poison is quiet. This was a bite. Something bit him low on that leg, and he reacted to it about as hard as an animal can react.”
“Bit him.” Michaud looked at the wall over her shoulder. “What bites like that?”
“That’s the part I’d want the lab for.” She told him what the state lab cost, the send-out and the courier, and watched him do the division against everything else April was costing him.
“He was a good cat,” Michaud said finally. “He wasn’t a hundred-and-eighty-dollar cat. No offense to him.”
“None taken on his behalf.”
She did not push. Pushing the money out of a man like Michaud would have fed her curiosity and helped nobody. She told him what she could say without the lab, which was the truth: a bite from something, a severe reaction, fast, and no evidence anywhere on that cat of poison, and his neighbor’s lawn, whatever else it might be guilty of, was innocent of this. Michaud nodded slowly, receiving the verdict the way men his age received most verdicts, as one more thing to be carried out to the truck.
At the door he stopped. “He was a good mouser,” he said. “You wouldn’t think it to look at him. Big soft thing. Kept that barn clean as a bank.”
“They earn their keep,” Nora said, and he seemed satisfied with that, or as satisfied as he was going to get.
She wrote it up while it was fresh: found dead, bite wound left hind, species unknown, severe local reaction, tissue changes noted, owner declined necropsy and toxicology. She read it back and it was accurate and complete, and the chart sat in her hand a second longer than a closed chart usually sat. The spacing of the thing. She measured it once more in her head against everything with a mouth in the county and came up the same little bit short, and then Deb put her head in to say the Trombley recheck had moved again and did she want it Tuesday or should they just make the poodle a standing appointment, and the day picked itself up and moved the way days did.
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