Ivy Takes Care Read Online Free PDF

looked at Ivy. Then he sauntered over to the spare stall and took a long look inside.
    “Oh, my stars,” he said.
    “It’s wild critters,” said Ivy. “I know I shouldn’t feed ’em, but she’s doing poorly and the kits are hungry.”
    Dr. Rinaldi’s eyes flickered from Ivy to the foxes and back again, taking it all in. “Mama’s got an infected front pad,” he said. “She won’t make it without help.”
    “I know,” said Ivy. “I’ve been giving her aspirins in scrap food.”
    Dr. Rinaldi strolled thoughtfully to the tack room and took down a three-inch-wide saddle girth from a peg. Then he opened his medical bag. “First we’ll need a tranquilizer,” he said. He prepared a needle and gave it to Ivy. “Want to give the injection?” he asked. Ivy had never held a shot needle in her life.
    “Now, you gotta move quick while I hold her down,” he said. He opened the stall to the harsh, scratching growl of the mother fox. Lightning fast, he drove the kits into a corner and threw himself over the fox’s body, pinning her down across the head and shoulders with the hard leather girth. The kits mewed and scattered.
    “Shoot her in the rump!” he instructed Ivy. “Right there on the larger muscle. Quick, now!”

    Ivy felt a rush of blood to her head. With his legs, Dr. Rinaldi protected Ivy against the fox’s flailing rear paws with their razor-sharp nails. Aiming at the silky haunch, she plunged the needle, releasing its contents into the fox’s body. Within seconds, the animal relaxed and went quiet.
    Dr. Rinaldi examined the fox’s front paw. With a tweezer, he pincered out a spike of rusty barbed wire. Then he cleaned the foot and took out another hypodermic. “Antibiotic. You want to do another?” he asked Ivy.
    She nodded.
    This time Dr. Rinaldi showed Ivy how to prick the needle into the rubber top of the medicine vial and draw the medicine into the glass. Then he showed her how to check the full needle for air bubbles and get rid of them by popping it with her finger.
    “Here is the muscle,” he said, placing Ivy’s fingers on the correct place on the fox’s withers to inject. “Here. Right here. Just shoot it in.”
    She did exactly as he instructed. The red liquid flowed easily into the sleeping fox.
    Ivy laughed. “I didn’t think I could do it,” she said. “But it was easy. I thought I was afraid of needles, but I’m not!”
    “You know something, Ivy?” said Dr. Rinaldi. “You’re good at this.”
    “Good at it?” asked Ivy.
    “You’ve got instinctive hands and a way with animals,” said Dr. Rinaldi. “Those are things a person is born with. You can’t learn them. Ever since you brought that half-dead rabbit for me to fix when you were four years old, I said to myself, that girl’s got good hands, nerves of steel, heart of gold. That’s what makes a vet. Ever think about it?”
    “Being a vet, like you?”
    “Why not?” Dr. Rinaldi asked. There was no joke in his eyes. “I have no doubt in my mind that you could. Most people are driven by what other people expect. You’ve got a purpose of your own.”
    For one moment, Ivy felt everything small in her life fall away, as if she were already a vet, just like Dr. Rinaldi. Then she took a deep breath of reality.
    “If I could ever afford to go to college,” she said. “But that’s a lot of money. My folks just get by.”
    Dr. Rinaldi smiled. He began packing his medical bag, capping the glass syringes carefully so they could be sterilized and reused.
    “You’ll make it. With a little spit ’n chicken wire, same as me,” he said.
    “And you have to be smart,” added Ivy.
    The doctor laughed. “You were born bright as a tree full of owls, girl,” he said, running his hand over the silky red coat of the mother fox. She was already beginning to stir. Ivy placed the kits on the vixen’s belly, where they squirmed and drank gratefully.
    Dr. Rinaldi watched her. “Some people are just meant to do certain