A Footnote Is Where the Truth Goes: Episode 2

Fence Line Rescue · Season One · Episode 2 · Footnote’s turn

Animal shelter fundraising starts long before the first ask. It starts with a list.

[Editor note: IMAGE PLACEHOLDER: HEADER (16:9)] Caption: “I was not rescued. I accepted a transfer.”

Let the record show that I was not rescued.

I accepted a transfer. The sardines were a signing bonus.

The dog will tell you otherwise. The dog tells everyone everything. He is a beagle-basset with a nose like a metal detector and the attention span of a sneeze, and last time he told you this story. He told it well, for a dog. But he left things out, because he always does, and that’s what I’m for.

A footnote is where the truth goes when the main story is too busy to notice it.¹

The Shop

For nine years I lived in a used bookstore on a street of old brick storefronts downtown.

I had a radiator that clanked like a polite ghost. I had a window with good afternoon sun. And I had the Bookseller, who wore a hand-knit shawl in every season and smelled of paper and peppermint tea.

She named me the week I arrived. Whenever a customer sat in the reading chair with a book open on their lap, I would climb up and settle at the very bottom of the page, where the small print lives.

“Well, look at that,” the Bookseller said. “A footnote.”

It stuck. Most true things do.

I’m a tortoiseshell: black and ginger mixed together like someone couldn’t decide and wisely refused to. I have a soft ginger stripe down the middle of my face, green-gold eyes, and one white front paw, the right one, which I call my inkblot. I am small. I am not cute. I am precise, which is better and lasts longer.

The Last Night

The Bookseller grew older the way good books do. Slowly at first, and then all at once, the spine softening.

Her family lived far away. Then one spring they came, and there were boxes, and the shelves began to empty, one row at a time, the way a tide goes out.

She wanted to take me. I know she did. But her family’s building did not allow cats, and she cried about it into my fur, and I let her, which I do not normally permit.

On her last night, after the last box went out, she sat in the reading chair one more time. I sat on her lap. Neither of us read anything.

When she left, she kissed the top of my head and said, “Somebody will come. You’ll know them.”

Then the bell over the door rang, and the door shut, and the lock turned.

I climbed into her chair. It was still warm. I sat very straight and read the room one more time: the bare shelves, the dust in the window light, the outline on the wall where the clock used to hang.

It said: Thank you. Go on now.

I did not go on. I stayed. Someone had to mind the store.

[Editor note: IMAGE PLACEHOLDER: KEY MOMENT 1] Caption: “It said: Thank you. Go on now.”

A Quiet Winter

The Neighbor from the flower shop next door had a key to nothing, but she had an excellent arm.

Every morning she slid a little paper cup of food through the mail slot, and every evening a second one, and once, on a very cold night, a folded towel that smelled like carnations. She talked to me through the slot. She said things like, “You stubborn little thing,” and “I’ll keep coming, so you keep eating.”

I kept eating. She kept coming. That is, I’ve since learned, the entire foundation of nonprofit work.

It was a long, quiet winter in the stacks. I’ll leave it there.

The Dog at the Glass

Then, in spring, a dog put his nose against my window.

He was low and long and urgently tricolored, wearing a barn-red collar and a bandana with words on it. One of his ears stood straight up like he was receiving a signal from somewhere far away. He looked delighted to see me, as if I were the best thing he’d found all week, which, judging by his face, was a competitive category.

I looked at him like he was a typo.

Behind him, a woman in a canvas barn jacket crouched down to my level and said, “Oh, sweetheart. How long have you been in there?”

She came back the next evening, alone, and sat on the sidewalk outside the mail slot with a tin of sardines.

She did not reach for me. She did not call me “kitty.” She simply sat, and opened the tin, and waited, and talked about her day as though I were a colleague: a dog with a cough, a goat with opinions, a vet bill she was “choosing not to look at until Thursday.”

She came back the next evening. And the next. Fourteen evenings, by my count, and I count everything.

On the fifteenth evening the Neighbor from the flower shop unlocked the door with a key the landlord had finally sent over. The Director knelt in the doorway with the sardines and did not come in.

I considered my options. I reviewed her references. I walked out, ate the sardines, and stepped into the carrier on my own.

Let the record show: transfer accepted.

Processed

The Vet wore a ball cap low over his eyes and had the bedside manner of a cold doorknob. He also had very warm hands, which I noted for the file.

He weighed me (“light”), listened to my heart (“fine”), looked in my ears (“clean, considering”), and waved a little scanner over my shoulders. It beeped.

“She’s chipped,” he said. “Went through the city’s community-cat program years back. Somebody looked after this one.”

I’ve been processed by the city. Thank you.

The Coffee Can

The rescue, I discovered, was a borrowed barn on a few rented acres where the city simply stops, right on the line where Lexington decided long ago to leave room for horse country.

It had seven dogs in kennel runs (the row is called the Fourteen, for its fourteen runs; there is a chalk count on the end post of who has gone home, and it was not yet a large number). It had a senior basset named Duchess who regarded everyone as staff. It had a turtle named Professor, who lived in a tub in the office, said nothing, and was consulted on everything. It had a goat. We will discuss the goat when the goat has earned it.

It did not have an office manager. I appointed myself.

My findings, in order:

  1. The rescue’s finances were feed-store receipts in a dented coffee can.
  2. The schedule was a wall calendar in three different handwritings, all of them the Director’s, depending on how tired she was.
  3. The fence post by the barn door had rows of small scratched lines on it, one per day. The dog adds one every night. He would not tell me who they are for.²

I don’t judge. I audit.

The Administrator

Let the record show that the Administrator arrived on a Tuesday, wearing reading glasses on a beaded chain, a soft cardigan, and the expression of a woman who has seen a coffee can before.

She had been a school secretary for thirty-one years. She had seen everything. She had filed most of it.

She looked at the receipts. She looked at me. I was sitting on them, for warmth and for oversight.

“Well,” she said. “Somebody’s been keeping track.”

Then she opened her laptop, and I walked across the keyboard, and we went to work.

First, she said, a rescue needs one sentence that says what it’s for. Not a speech. One sentence a stranger can repeat.

The Director paced. The Administrator typed. I sat on the delete key twice to remove adjectives. By supper we had it:

We take in the animals who fell through the cracks at the edge of the city, and we get them home.

The Director read it out loud and had to go check on the dogs for a while.

Then came the paperwork to become a real nonprofit, pages and pages of it. The Administrator printed the draft bylaws and left them on the desk. I sat on them.

“Footnote,” she said. “Those are the bylaws.”

They’re warm. I’m reviewing them. Those are two separate findings.

The dog, wishing to help, brought me a sock.

I did not need a sock. I took the sock. Sometimes accepting help is the help.

Next came a bank account that was not a coffee can. Then a board. A rescue, the Administrator explained, needs a few people who aren’t the Director to share the weight and ask hard questions.

The hardest questions came from a retired banker in a cardigan and a bow tie, with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He sat on a folding chair in the barn, looked at the coffee can, looked at the seven dogs, and looked at the Director.

“I like you,” he said. “I like the mission. What’s the plan?”

Nobody had one yet. He agreed to chair the board anyway, “to make sure somebody keeps asking.”

He became the Board Chair. He has not stopped asking.

Why Nobody Has a Name

You may have noticed I don’t use human names. Neither does anyone else around here.

Humans have names, but they keep changing them depending on who’s talking. Mom. Honey. Doc. Ma’am. Hey-You-With-The-Truck. It’s very inefficient. So we call them what they do. It’s the only thing about them that stays put.

The animals keep our names. We earned them.

You can read about all three of us on the cast list (I wrote my own entry). The dog’s entry is mostly exclamation points.

People Who Said Yes

Here is the part the main story was too busy to notice.

One night, after the Administrator went home, I stayed on the keyboard. I had been watching the door for weeks, and the door is where help comes in.

The Neighbor who called about the dog on the roof. The Neighbor from the flower shop and her excellent arm. A man who dropped off a trunk full of old towels. A woman who drove two dogs to the Vet when the truck wouldn’t start. The feed store, which “lost track” of a bag of kibble in the Director’s favor.

The next morning the Administrator found a new file open on her screen. She typed a title at the top, because I cannot type titles. I can only type jjjjj.

People Who Said Yes.

Eleven rows.³

“Every one of these people goes on the list,” the Administrator said. “Forever. Whoever helped once is the likeliest person to help again.”

It doesn’t sound like much. It was everything.

A Call About a Horse

That evening the Director came into the office holding a piece of paper and her phone.

The paper was from the Vet. It was very long. I sat on it immediately, for everyone’s protection.

And the phone was ringing.

The Director listened for a long time. Her face did the thing faces do when good news and expensive news arrive in the same envelope.

“How tall?” she said. Then, “Fourteen what?”

She hung up and looked at the barn’s one empty stall, which had a hole in the roof directly over it.

“Footnote,” she said, “we’re getting a horse.”

I looked at the coffee can. I looked at the eleven rows.

We were going to need more rows.

¹ The dog’s version is accurate. It is simply a summary.

² I have a theory. I’m keeping it in a footnote until he’s ready.

³ The truth, in this case, was eleven.

[Editor note: IMAGE PLACEHOLDER: KEY MOMENT 2 → placed mid-story in “People Who Said Yes” in the paste; kept here as the master list.]

Next time: Parsnip arrives. He’s enormous. He’s very sorry about it.

How Real Rescues Do This

Animal shelter fundraising starts before the first ask

Footnote didn’t raise a single dollar this episode. She did something more important: she built the bones that every future dollar will hang on.

Lesson: build the bones before you raise. Donors, sponsors, and auction bidders all want to know the same thing: Is this group real, and will my help land somewhere safe?

  • Write a one-sentence mission. If a volunteer can’t repeat it at a feed store, it’s too long.
  • Make it official. File for nonprofit status, open a real bank account, and keep receipts somewhere better than a coffee can.
  • Recruit a small board that asks hard questions. A skeptic who says “What’s the plan?” is a gift, not a problem.
  • Start a supporter list on day one. Every towel, ride, and bag of food gets a row. The people who helped once are your future donors, volunteers, and bidders.
  • Track the “no” answers too. A different column, not a deleted row.

Groups that do this early are the ones that turn out to be the kinds of groups that are built for an auction later, when the bills get bigger.

Fence Line Rescue and everyone in it are fictional. The fundraising ideas are real.

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Author: Don

Posted On: October 12, 2026 @ 1:45 am