Free It's Like This, Cat by Emily Cheney Neville Page B

getting near time. Come on, I got to hurry."
    We trot along the next twenty blocks or so, up First Avenue and to Peter Cooper.
    "So long," Ben says. "I'll come by Wednesday on the way to school."
    He goes off spinning his dime, and too late I think to myself that we could have had a candy bar. 

Ben and I both take biology, and the first weekend assignment we get, right after Rosh Hashanah, is to find and identify an animal native to New York City and look up its family and species and life cycle.
    "What's a species?" says Ben.
    "I don't know. What's a life cycle?"
    We both scratch our heads, and he says, "What animals do we know?"
    I say, "Cat. And dogs and pigeons and squirrels."
    "That's dull. I want to get some animal no one else knows about."
    "Hey, how about a praying mantis? I saw one once in Gramercy Park."
    Ben doesn't even know what it is, so I tell him about this one I saw. For an insect, it looks almost like a dragon, about four or five inches long and pale green. When it flies, it looks like a baby helicopter in the sky. We go into Gramercy Park to see if we can find another, but we can't.
    Ben says, "Let's go up to the Bronx Zoo Saturday and see what we can find."
    "Stupid, they don't mean you to do lions and tigers. They're not native."
    "Stupid, yourself. They got other animals that are. Besides, there's lots of woods and ponds. I might find something."
    Well, it's as good an idea for Saturday as any, so I say O.K. On account of both being pretty broke, we take lunch along in my old school lunchbox. Also six subway tokens – two extras for emergencies. Even I would be against walking home from the Bronx.
    Of course there are plenty of native New York City animals in the zoo – raccoons and woodchucks and moles and lots of birds – and I figure we better start home not too late to get out the encyclopedias for species and life cycles. Ben still wants to catch something wild and wonderful. Like lots of city kids who haven't been in the country much, he's crazy about nature.
    We head back to the subway, walking through the woods so he can hunt. We go down alongside the pond and kick up rocks and dead trees to see if anything is under them.
    It pays off. All of a sudden we see a tiny red tail disappearing under a rotten log. I push the log again and Ben grabs. It's a tiny lizard, not more than two or three inches long and brick red all over. Ben cups it in both hands, and its throat pulses in and out, but it doesn't really try to get away.
    "Hey, I love this one!" Ben cries. "I'm going to take him home and keep him for a pet, as well as do a report on him. You can't keep cats and dogs in Peter Cooper, but there's nothing in the rules about lizards."
    "How are you going to get him home?"
    "Dump the lunch. I mean – we'll eat it, but I can stab a hole in the top of the box and keep Redskin in it. Come on, hurry! He's getting tired in my hand I think!"
    Ben is one of those guys who is very placid most of the time, but he gets excitable all of a sudden when he runs into something brand-new to him, and I guess he never caught an animal to keep before. Some people's parents are very stuffy about it.
    I dump the lunch out, and he puts the lizard in and selects some particular leaves and bits of dead log to put in with him to make him feel at home. Without even asking me, he takes out his knife and makes holes in the top of my lunchbox. I sit down and open up a sandwich, but Ben is still dancing around.
    "What do you suppose he is? He might be something very rare! How'm I going to find out? You think we ought to go back and ask one of the zoo men?"
    "Umm, nah," I say, chewing. "Probably find him in the encyclopedia."
    Ben squats on a log, and the log rolls. As he falls over backward I see two more lizards scuttle away. I grab one. "Hey, look! I got another. This one's bigger and browner."
    Ben is up and dancing again. "Oh, boy, oh, boy! Now I got two! Now they'll be happy! Maybe they'll have babies, huh?"
    He