The Village Vet by Cathy Woodman Page B

lightly.
    ‘I’ll bring the traps up this afternoon. I might as well take advantage of this good weather to set them up.’
    As Jack leaves, Mrs Dyer, the butcher’s wife, brings the ducklings to me in a cardboard box.
    ‘The mother abandoned them,’ says Mrs Dyer over tea and biscuits with Diane, Wendy and me. ‘I took them back to the shop for the night, but I’m afraid my dog will snap them up if he gets anywhere near them. How old do you think they are?’
    ‘Tessa, what do you think? You’re the vet nurse,’ Wendy says, turning to me.
    ‘Your guess is probably as good as mine.’ I peer into the box. They aren’t the smallest of ducklings, or the largest either. ‘About three weeks old, maybe?’
    ‘Jack will know,’ Diane says with confidence. ‘I’ll ask him when I see him.’
    I’m beginning to feel that with Jack around, I have a lot to prove.
    ‘Where do you want us to put them, Tessa?’ Wendy asks.
    I think for a moment.
    ‘We aren’t set up for ducklings, so we’ll have to improvise. We can set up a pen in the barn with straw and a water tray. That will need to be filled with stones because we don’t want the ducklings to drown – they might not be waterproof yet.’
    ‘Gloria used to give them freshly cut dandelions and hang lettuce up for them to peck at,’ says Wendy.
    ‘How long will they have to stay here?’ asks Mrs Dyer.
    ‘We can release them when they’re about eight weeks old and fully feathered,’ I say. ‘We’ll have to find them a suitable pond.’
    Under Diane and Wendy’s instruction, I build a temporary pen with wire netting and hurdles in one end of the barn, the other end from the one that DJ is supposed to be turning into two stables, and we release the three brown and fawn downy ducklings into it. They run about – I was going to say like headless chickens, except they’re ducks – frantically taking in their new surroundings.
    I offer to order some straw from one of the local farmers and pick up some grower’s pellets. When Diane says that the charity will reimburse me, I’m too embarrassed to insist on payment upfront because I have no money, apart from the twenty pounds that my father lent me to buy groceries so that I would be set up in my new home here at the Sanctuary. Worrying that it looks as if I’m taking advantage of him, I go outside to phone Jack who says he’ll pick up the ducklings’ feed and a bale of straw as well as the traps. When I return to the barn, I find the ducklings have settled down and fallen asleep, lying on top of each other for warmth and security, and my heart melts.
    ‘They’re lovely, aren’t they, Tessa?’ Wendy says from her perch on an upturned bucket. ‘Diane and I thought we’d keep an eye on them for a while.’
    ‘I needed to take the weight off my feet,’ says Diane, who’s managed to find an old but serviceable deckchair.
    I realise that I’m not sure how to handle the volunteers . I don’t want to nag them when they’re here out of the goodness of their hearts, but I can see that it’s going to cost the charity a small fortune in tea and biscuits if they sit around doing nothing all day. Clearly there hasn’t been much grouting going on, and I don’t begrudge Wendy that because I’d rather be with the animals than making the finishing touches to the kitchen tiles too.
    I have a lot to learn, I muse, and I’m not sure that I’ve done the right thing, taking the Sanctuary on. It isn’t merely the challenge of dealing with Diane and Wendy, but the contact with Jack, which, so far, has been more than I anticipated. It appears that, whether I like it or not, circumstances are conspiring to push Jack into my path as much as possible, because he’s back at four in the afternoon with the bits and pieces for the ducklings and three traps: wire cages with trip plates that the cats will set off once lured inside with some tasty food as bait, the doors closing behind them.
    As Jack arrives, DJ is just