Snake Island
Copyright© 2026 by James Foster Reed
Chapter 6: Geography
May did its work the way it always did, all at once and behind your back. One week the trees along Old County Road were bare with a green fog on them, and then Nora looked up from the clinic parking lot some morning in the middle of the month and the leaves were simply out, full size, casting shade like they had been doing it all their lives. The lilacs by the clinic sign bloomed and went over. The lawns in town needed mowing twice a week and got it once. Down at the school they had the windows open, and Maggie came home smelling like sunscreen and pencil shavings and counting the days out loud, seventeen, then twelve, then nine. The peepers had handed the low ground over to the gray tree frogs, and in the evenings the first blackflies found the back of Nora’s neck at the exact moment her hands were fullest. It was the good month. It always was.
The clinic felt it too. Spring put appointments back on the book that winter had scraped off: heartworm checks, kennel cough boosters for the summer boarders, the annual parade of dogs who had learned nothing since last May about porcupines. A young husky named Blue came in on a Friday with a muzzle full of quills and sat for the pulling with his eyes closed like a man at the barber, and his owner told the story in the waiting room three times, adding a quill each time. The white space in the schedule did not go away, but it thinned, and Deb stopped penciling June and started using the pen.
Donna Fournier called on a Tuesday, the third week of the month, at half past noon.
Nora knew her a little. She drove a school bus, the route that ran out Cold Spring Road, where she lived, up where the pavement lifted and dipped through the woods toward the gates. She had a chocolate Lab named Ranger, eighteen months old, all elbows and good intentions, in the previous fall for his neuter and a swallowed sock, in that order.
“He was crying at the back of the yard this morning,” Donna said. “By the wall. I thought he’d stepped on something. Now his leg’s blown up like a bread loaf and he won’t put it down, and he’s shaking.”
“Bring him in now,” Nora said, and moved the one o’clock.
The leg was the right front, swollen hard from the elbow down, the skin drum-tight and hot, the paw a catcher’s mitt with toenails. Ranger came in on three legs, trembling in the big soft way Labs tremble, and stood on the table leaning his head into Donna’s middle while Nora worked. His gums were tackier than she wanted and his heart was going like he had already run somewhere and back. She got a catheter in and fluids going, gave him an antihistamine and something for the pain, and shaved the leg down with him leaning harder into Donna with every pass of the clippers.
Above the wrist, in the middle of the worst of the swelling, there were two small punctures, tidy, set wide.
She stood looking at them for a second longer than looking required. She had seen this leg before. It had been a cat’s leg then, and the cat had been dead on arrival, and this was a fifty-pound dog with a young heart, and those were the differences. The punctures were the same. The width of them was the same. The tissue around them had the same dark, pulpy wrongness under her thumbs, blood doing something blood should not do.
“What is it?” Donna said. “What did that?”
“Something bit him,” Nora said. “And he’s having about the worst reaction to a bite that a dog can have. The good news is he’s big, and he’s young, and we’ve caught it the same morning.” She heard her own voice doing its job, level and specific, and was glad to have it. “I want to keep him tonight. Fluids, keep ahead of the pain, watch that swelling. I’d rather be looking at him at two in the morning than have you doing it.”
Donna looked at the leg, then at Nora, and asked the question owners always got to eventually. “Bit him. What bites like that?”
“Out where you are, could be a few things,” Nora said, which was true, and named none of them, which was also, in its way, honest, because none of the things she could have named fit any better than they had fit in April. “Keep him close to the house for a while once he’s home. Whatever it was, he found it, it didn’t find him.”
Ranger spent the night in the kennel ward with the fluids ticking into him and the leg wrapped loose. Nora came back at ten and again at six and found Deb already there at six, which neither of them commented on. The swelling crested somewhere in the small hours and started down. By Thursday he was eating like a Lab and offering everyone the bad paw as a social gesture, and he went home with a shaved leg, a cone he wore like an insult, and instructions Donna repeated back word for word, being a woman who transported children for a living.
Nora wrote it up long. She was not sure why she wrote it up long. Presentation, timeline, the measurements of the swelling at intake and at midnight and at morning, the punctures photographed with the little ruler laid alongside, because the chart was where photographs went. She read it back and it was a good chart, thorough, the kind of chart you could hand another vet cold. Then she went and pulled Duster’s chart from the end of April and read that one too, standing at the file cabinet with the drawer open against her hip.
Same picture. She ran the old list once, rat, weasel, fisher, dog, sting, and it came up the way it had come up before, a little short all the way down the column. Close enough to file. She filed both charts and went in to see a beagle about his ears.
Six days later, on a Monday morning before the first appointment, Leona Cyr drove herself in from the far end of Old Reservoir Road with a laundry basket on the passenger seat, a towel folded in it, and her cat folded in the towel.
Mrs. Cyr was somewhere in her eighties and drove a Buick the color of oatmeal at a speed that had its own following in town. The cat was a big orange tom named Buddy, thirteen years old, an indoor-outdoor arrangement that had drifted mostly outdoor as he aged, the way old toms negotiate. She had found him that morning at the foot of the porch steps, she said, lying the way cats lie in the sun, except it had been raining.
“He came for his supper Saturday,” she said. “He didn’t come Sunday. He does that. He’s got a lady friend at the Verrettes’.” She kept her hands folded on her pocketbook while she said it, and her chin was steady, and Nora liked her enormously and completely, all at once, the way you do.
She took the basket to the treatment room. She did not need to shave the shoulder to know, but she shaved it anyway, because knowing was not a procedure and shaving was. The swelling had taken the left shoulder and foreleg this time. The skin had gone dark along the inside of the leg. In the middle of it, two punctures, tidy, set wide, the tissue beneath them pulped and blood-broken in that same way that was not on her list, near her list, a little off the end of her list.
She stood with her thumbs at the margins of it, in the quiet of the treatment room with the morning sun coming in on the steel, and she did not run the list this time. She knew what the list said. The list said: a little short.
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