Дорин Тови - The New Boy_INSIDES.indd

Halfway to the surgery Seeley suddenly quietened. He was looking at me with big round eyes but he didn’t appear to be quite so frightened. ‘I bet it was a bee-sting after all,’ I said, ‘and we’ve been making all this fuss for nothing.’

The Vet didn’t think so. ‘That’s pretty big for a bee-sting,’

he said, examining a paw which was now swollen up to Seeley’s shoulder. And when I said but wouldn’t Seeley have been unconscious by now if it really had been an adder, he said not necessarily. In his experience, he said, cats and dogs had more resistance to adder-bite than was generally supposed. Some did die within a very short time – if, for instance, they were bitten on the mouth; but if they were 144

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bitten in the foot, like Seeley, he’d known a good many of them to recover. It was shock we had to guard against, he said. It was half an hour now since Seeley’d been bitten and he hadn’t yet collapsed. He’d give him a cortisone injection and we’d keep our fingers crossed. Take him home; bathe, bathe and keep on bathing his paw in water as hot as he could stand it – and if Seeley did collapse we were to call him at once.

Seeley didn’t collapse – though, when we got him home and out of his basket and I saw the size of his leg, I was pretty near it myself. He wouldn’t have his paw bathed, either. It Hurt, he said, and rushed to hide under the table. So – not knowing whether we were doing right but remembering that with adder-bite in humans one is supposed to keep the patient still to prevent the venom circulating – we abandoned that and put him on our bed, in his favourite refuge, the nest of sweaters, with a hot-water bottle in it to keep him warm.

Years before, Sheba had had a swollen paw and we thought it might have been an adder and the Vet had given her antihistamine. They didn’t give antihistamine now, he’d explained in the surgery; some cats reacted to it badly. They didn’t give snake-serum, either. Some cats reacted to that. They’d found it best to treat them for shock.

All I knew, looking at Seeley lying quiet against the bottle, his paw stretched out before him like a furry black bolster, was that Sheba’s paw had never swollen like that.

Huge it was now, and when I touched his shoulder he cried. Either Sheba’s bite hadn’t been from an adder – or was cortisone enough?

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It was. Our Vet, as usual, knew what he was doing. Seeley’s leg was so swollen that at one time it must have been at least four times its normal diameter. It couldn’t get any bigger without bursting, I said, looking at it despairingly.

But Seeley didn’t collapse. When, at three in the morning, we got up to see how he was, he was sitting up himself, looking at us alertly, and we could see the shape of his leg.

It was still badly swollen, and the paw on the end of it was gross, but at least it didn’t look so much like a policeman’s truncheon.

By midday it was down still further. By evening he could walk on it – though still with a decided limp. We ourselves were still shaken by the narrow squeak he’d had. ‘No more putting it off,’ said Charles. ‘We’d better build that cage.’

We did. We also, for Annabel’s sake, scoured her field for signs of the adder, but we couldn’t find it. How was it she’d never trodden on one if they were up there? I asked.

Because of the ground vibration when she walked, said Charles; an adder would hear her coming and slip away before she reached it, but Seeley’s light little tread wouldn’t have disturbed it at all. The water from Seeley’s paw – that, said the Vet, had been serum; the liquid that is left when blood coagulates. We hadn’t seen that with Sheba, as we realized when we thought about it. There wasn’t much doubt that Seeley had crossed swords with an adder.

So we erected his cage. A temporary one, said Charles; he’d put it up properly later. The main thing, at the moment, was to get some protection up fast.

It was – as it needs to be with a Siamese – a big cage, about twelve feet by six, and five feet high, consisting of four iron stakes sunk into the lawn with inch-mesh wire netting fixed 146

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round it. The final cage would also have a wire netting roof, but that needed crossbars to support it. For the moment, until we had time to make the crossbars, we covered it with one of Charles’s fruit nets. An unbreakable nylon one, of which he’d just bought several dozens to replace the frost coverings. The frost danger was over, Charles had reported, but now the blasted birds were at the blossom…

And how they were! Bullfinches, blue tits, wood pigeons

– they were up in the orchard in droves. The wood pigeons only attacked the cherry trees, but the small birds were everywhere at once. They’d never seen such blossom, obviously, thanks to Charles’s frost coverings which had protected it. That – putting up the nets; sometimes several nets to a tree if it was a large one and it had to be done, said Charles; several of the trees were already completely stripped – was why Seeley’s adder cage was only a temporary one. Charles needed all his time to put up the nets.

So I draped the fruit net roof over the cage myself, tying it every few inches with string, and put Seeley inside for a try out. He protested immedi ately. INCARCERATED!

SEND FOR THE POLICE! CLAUSTROPHOBIA! he roared, sitting bolt upright inside the wire and proceeding to bawl his head off.

He couldn’t get out, though. We’d fixed the bottom wire down with tent pegs and, inspect it though he might, he couldn’t pull that up. He wasn’t going to be in it permanently, of course. Just for an hour or so when there might be adders about, when it was a shame to shut him indoors but we didn’t have time to watch him.

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again, but it didn’t seem to have worried him overmuch.

All seemed well the second day, too. Seeley was in his cage; Sheba, who liked it really warm, was sleeping in the car; I, with tranquillity of mind at last, was getting on with some writing. Tranquillity as to where he was, that is, not tranquillity as far as sound went, since Seeley, for nearly an hour, had been howling with every breath. At last all was peaceful, however. He was getting used to it at last, I thought – and looked up, right at that moment, to find him sitting triumphantly on the floor beside me.

He’d climbed the wire adjoining one of the corner poles, where it was taut, and, while clinging to it, had pushed his way out under the net. That we could tell from the turned-back piece of fruit netting. So I ran string through the netting on the corner as if I were sewing it; congratulated myself next day, when I saw his little bullet-head thrusting vainly against the roof while he clung to the wire like a monkey, that I’d foiled that attempt at a breakthrough – and half an hour later, looking out through the window from my typewriter, there he was proceeding across the lawn. Got out through the Other Corner, he announced triumphantly when he saw me. And sure enough, when I went out, the fruit netting was pushed back by the other pole.

At least, I thought, firmly lacing up that escape hatch, he wouldn’t try getting out through the back. He wouldn’t realize it was possible to get out through there. At his age he couldn’t have that much intel ligence. He had, though.