The Rhino with Glue-On Shoes Read Online Free PDF Page B

this place, and why is it always on a weekend?” Plus, we already had more than enough animals.
    Twenty years earlier, in 1976, Martine bought a piece of land north of Los Angeles, inside the boundaries of the Angeles National Forest, and established the Wildlife Way-station, a home for illegal or discarded pets. She took in leopards, jaguars, African lions, mountain lions, bobcats, bears, coyotes, llamas, deer, hawks—even tortoises. When a research facility closed down on the East Coast, she built caging for dozens of homeless chimps. She made room for a pride of ligers (lion-tiger crosses) someone had bred in Idaho. Every spring, our hospital ward filled up with baby opossums.
    The call about the bear cub frustrated me. The motto at the bottom of the Waystation entrance sign read “No Animal Turned Away.” That was an understatement. We needed more equipment and supplies for the clinic, to say nothing of more staff. I missed my weekends. A day off once in a while would also be cool.
    It wasn't a wild cub, I learned, but a cub from the pet industry. Someone in Arizona was breeding black bears to sell as pets. I knew Martine well enough to know I had no choice but to go. She wasn't asking me to make the trip; she was telling me. On paper, I was her licensed veterinarian, even though I'd started teaching part-time. We were trying to find someone who could take over the bulk of my clinical duties, especially these emergency calls.
    That Friday, still annoyed, I alerted Silvio, the other Waystation vet, and we grabbed our equipment and headed out across the desert toward Arizona. He drove as I searched for a radio station. I settled on country music, the only clear signal I could find. Silvio later told me this style of music was new to his ears; he's called it “desert music” ever since.
    Why did I stay at the Waystation? I wondered again as we cruised along. Of course, the animals were the main reason. I knew them all, their names and their medical histories. I regularly walked the Waystation grounds just to visit my patients, old and new. The mostly Mexican staff was a good group. They could rise to almost any occasion. I'd also grown attached to the place itself: simple chain-link enclosures clustered on the floor of a beautiful canyon. Martine tells a great story about how she first heard of the property from a drunk in a bar and rode up the canyon on horseback to see it.
    Martine was another reason I'd stayed at the Waystation. Not only did she know her stuff, she could charm just about anyone into working his or her butt off for homeless animals. People who'd never imagined cleaning up after an animal found themselves mucking out cages, thanks to Martine. She'd never told me much about her background, only that her dad had been a diplomat and they'd traveled a lot to Africa when she was little. That must have been how she fell in love with the animal world.
    Late that evening, I stood looking at a tiny black bear cub in Martine's backyard. The bear couldn't walk. When Martine picked it up, it barely responded. We guessed it was two months old and about ten pounds. The cub's stumpy little front legs were drawn in close to her chest and she whimpered whenever she moved. With each breath, her face wrinkled. She could barely keep her eyes open, and what I could see of them looked dull and listless.
    Martine sat down with the cub in her lap so I could examine it. Tough as she could be, she always softened when she had an animal in her arms. She cooed at the bear but it seemed to ignore her. She insisted it had been fine during the past week, ever since a local man, hearing that Martine ran a wildlife rehabilitation facility, had dropped it off at her house. She'd named the little female Kachina, after the Hopi Indian woodcarvings, and planned to bring her to LA when Kachina got a bit bigger.
    I asked Martine for Kachina's history again. The cub had been cranky that morning, not drinking her milk, and