Animal Nature

Chapter 7

After school, Shyanne entered the shelter to find Martha sweeping a mess of broken glass from the tiles on the office floor. The small refrigerator in the corner had been hurled against the wall, and all the food inside lay in puddles on the floor, and the window in the door to the kennel had been broken.

"What happened?" she asked.

"I don't know. I came in here this morning to find this mess. In back, too. And that wolfhound we got in the other day is gone."

"Gone? Did he escape?

"I don't see how he could have. His cage was locked, all the doors were locked. There's just this mess here, from that—" Martha gestured to the window, "—and the refrigerator. It doesn't make any sense."

"Do you think someone broke in?"

"If they did, they didn't take anything. All the animals are safely locked in their cages. No money missing, even all the pain killers in Dr. Fleiss's office are all accounted for. Darndest thing."

"Wow," was all Shy could think of to say. She got to work helping Martha clean the office.

"I spent all morning cleaning up the kennel. Blood all over the floor, bits of fur. But no animals are missing. The dogs were going crazy."

"Blood?"

"I don't know where the blood came from, unless it was from that wolfhound. He's the only animal missing. I don't know, maybe he was a purebred and there's some kind of bad deal. It sound crazy, but things like that can happen."

"Did you call the police?"

"Yeah, they were here this morning. They thought it might be some kind of protest. I don't know what kind of animal rights people would protest a shelter, but you never know."

"We don't even do euthanasia here. Dr. Fleiss does it at his office."

"I know. But I guess maybe some people don't."

With both of them cleaning, the office was presentable after an hour. "We can skip cleaning out the cages for one day," Martha said. "Let's get the A group dogs outside. They've been barking like crazy all day."

When all the dogs were let out, and Martha and Shy had sat down to rest on the picnic table, Shy began to notice a strangeness in the dogs' behavior. The more timid dogs hovered around the picnic table, frequently licking Shy or Martha's hands and whining, while the dogs who were usually aggressive paced silently around the perimeter of the fence.

"What's going on with them today?" Shy asked.

"They've been like this all day. Probably whoever broke in scared 'em." Martha looked toward the empty pen where the wolfhound had been yesterday. "Who knows. Maybe he did get out somehow. The sides of that pen don't go all the way up to the ceiling."

"But the fence is at least six feet high!"

"Wolfhounds are good jumpers." Martha plucked a tall blade of grass and chewed on the end. "But I'd expect he'd need a bit more running space to get that kind of height."

Shy considered the gate to the outdoor pen. It took up the full length of the door. "But he would have had to get outside somehow. Both doors of the kennel are steel and I know I locked them up last night," she said.

"I've gone over every possibility and I can't figure it out either. Someone must have broken in."

Shy and Martha fell silent watching the unusual behavior of the dogs.