Rib had settled in and was quite the gossip; he quickly spread the word that Harry had saved his life. In the evenings Harry could hear him croak all the way to his cupboard. Over the following days animals started to visit Harry. A Barn Swallow with a broken claw, an overweight bat with an upset stomach that was as round as a tennis-ball, a lizard who was lonely, and the next door neighbour's beagle, Muffy, who had a toothache.
Harry kept telling them he wasn't a doctor, and that he could only do little to help, but since he was a kind boy he tried his best. They gathered in the garden behind the Rhododendrons and they waited patiently each time, while he consulted the book. He fixed the claw with a toothpick and glue. He took the bat's history and learned about his love of food. Thinking of his cousin and his uncle who were both obese, and everything Aunt Petunia always did, Harry gently discussed overeating with the bat. He gave dietary advice, carefully reading the list of food bats were supposed to eat out loud, waiting for SSLL to translate.
The lizard, Bap, was beautiful. His body was jewel green and he had a bright red dewlap under his neck. He moved and talked quietly, like a gentleman. He told Harry that he couldn't find any other lizards that looked like him and he would love to start a family but didn't know how. Harry consulted the book, and together they figured out he was an Anole Lizard and native to Central and North America. No wonder he couldn't find any other lizards like him! He must have been brought in by lizard poachers, SSLL said. His habitat was bushes and trees, they read, and that gave Harry an idea. Just yesterday Scrits the squirrel had complained that her children were starting to act out without a father figure to look up to, and here he had a father looking for children to care for.
"Would you like to live in our oak tree?" he offered. "I'm sure Scrits wouldn't mind to share; it has lots of branches to choose from and I can make you a Papier-mâché nest if you want. We're all friends here and the more the merrier."
Bap moved in the very same day. He and Scrits made friends just as Harry hoped they would, and by the evening he was teaching the young squirrels how to skitter across the smallest branches while balancing a seed on their twitchy little noses.
Muffy presented a problem, because after all, Harry Potter was only five and not a dog dentist. He tried to tell the neighbour, Mrs Butt, about the toothache but like everyone else in the neighbourhood she didn't like Harry and chased him away before he could say anything.
"I like animals much better than humans," Harry told SSLL afterwards, and apologised to Muffy with the help of SSLL as their translator. In the end he came up with sort of a plan and wrote a letter, carefully explaining about Muffy's toothache. He didn't sign it with his name but wrote instead, 'from a concerned friend of all animals', using the dictionary for the bigger words. Muffy reported the next day that it had worked, and smiled a gap toothed smile, wagging his tail. SSLL translated his thanks.
"How do you know he said thanks?" Harry wanted to know. He had been watching the animals for days now and couldn't figure out how they talked. He was sure Muffy was thankful, but the beagle hadn't barked, he had only wagged his tail and flopped his ears.
Thinking on it now, he realised he rarely heard them make much sound besides for the odd peep and squeak and squaw. Not that he minded, because his aunt would quickly wonder what he was up to if her garden started to sound like a zoo, but he truly wished to know more. It was not that he didn't believe SSLL, he could see the animals were doing something to communicate, it was simply that he wanted to know what. Where other boys his age would want to know why the sky was blue or how the moon stayed in the sky, Harry wanted to know what his animal friends said. "How do you know what everyone is saying?" Harry asked where he knelt on the grass beside them.
"Animals talk in their own way," SSLL explained in his sibilant speech. "Most humans never realissse it. Those with dogs like Muffy here learn to figure out when they are happy because they wag their tails, right?"
"Yes." Harry had learned that one too. "And growling means they're angry, but how do you know what they're angry about if he doesn't make a speaking noise?"
"Sometimes animals don't want to make a noise," SSLL explained. "It could be dangerous for them, especially in the wild. So our language evolved differently than yours. Snakes, like me for instance, can speak two languages. The one you and I are talking now, and this one." SSLL stopped talking and slithered in place on the grass. Then he asked, "Did you understand that?"
"Understand what?" Harry asked. "All you did was move around! What did you say?"
"I said I was happy to be your friend."
"I'm happy to be yours too," Harry said.
They paused a moment to hug, SSLL slithering up to Harry's neck, and then SSLL went back to explaining on Harry's request.
"I was speaking with my body," SSLL said. "You see how Muffy's left ear flops up half way? That's his way to say thank you. Of course he barks and growl and huff also when he needs to, but he mostly speaks with his body, the twitch of his lip, the wiggle of his nose, paw taps, and many, many more tings. If you paid attention you can learn it too."
"I can?"
His mind filled to the brim with the new information, Harry looked wide-eyed at the animals around him. He thought about learning how to talk to them himself. This needed action! Excited, he jumped up, and SSLL slithered down to the grass.
"Hang on!" Harry told him, and rushed into the house.
His family was out for the day, taking Dudley and his mates to the cinema so he didn't bother with trying to stay quiet. He banged through the house and ran to his bedroom where he fetched a pencil stub and a half used school notebook. Fired up, he ran back and plopped down on the grass between his animal friends and said, "Okay, now tell it to me slowly. I want to learn the languages of ALL the animals!"
Everyone helped to teach him. Dab-Dab and Gub-Gub and Scrit and Rib and their new lizard friend, Bap, helped too. SSLL would start with the letters of their alphabets and while Harry wrote it down they would also demonstrate. They had class when it was sunny in the garden, and when it was rainy, in the garden shed, and whenever he could smuggle someone into his cupboard they held class in the night too. After a while Harry started yawning in the day and got dark circles under his eyes but he didn't pay any notice to that. By the end of the week he started to manage small conversations without needing SSLL's services as translator, freeing SSLL up to go find some tasty eats in the vegetable patch.
And through it all he helped out the animals in need. With the word spreading that someone was helping sick animals, not a day passed without one or two or three injured animals dropping in. He insisted each time that he wasn't a doctor or a vet, which he recently learned animal doctors were called, and could do a little bit only, but they all said a little was more than nothing.
Of course his new language skills wasn't all perfect, and he realised it one day when a small billy goat came to visit at tea time, asking for Doctor Dolittle. They were all behind the Rhododendrons, sipping tea from saucers—Harry had a cup—and eating jammy bread that he had snuck from the house, when a billy goat stuck his head over the hedge.
With an ear twitch and a horn shake and a bah-beh, the billy goat asked, "Is Doctor Dolittle in? I'm afraid I need help."
"There's no Doctor Dolittle here," Harry said, lowering his cup. "But come on in, maybe I can help?"
"You're Doctor Dolittle," Dab-Dab pecked out on the ground.
"The animals all call you that," Gub-Gub oinked, and Harry realised there must have been something lost in the translation. He was horrified at the confusion and wanted to fix it immediately.
"I'm not a doctor," Harry said. "Doctors have to study for ever and ever and I've only gone to school for one year!"
SSLL slithered over from where he had been coiling in the shade of a watermelon, to see what all the fuss was about. "Animals don't care about learning," he told Harry. "We don't go to school, do we? For us you are a doctor already."
No matter how he insisted that he wasn't a doctor, they all insisted right back that he was, and it might have turned into their first fight, had the billy goat not interrupted with a baaah-bah and a hoof stomp.
"I'm sorry but my time is short, the farmer will miss me soon," he said. "Can you help me? I'm going blind. I keep bumping into things and people, and I'll end up being dinner if old MacDonald realises."
Harry didn't want anyone to become dinner before their time, so he stopped his fuss and settled in to help Go-Away, which was the billy goat's name.
"Doesn't the farmer have a vet?" Harry asked while examining his eyes just like they did with him at the Ophthalmologist's office.
"He does," Go-Away baahed. "But the man is no good. He tried to put a poultice on my head. He simply refused to understand that I didn't have a headache."
"He tried?" Harry asked. He didn't know what a poultice was but made note of it to look it up in the dictionary later. "He couldn't even do that properly?"
"I didn't let him," Go-Away beh-behed with a twitch of the tail. "I kicked him in his you know where."
"Ouch."
"Don't worry. I didn't kick him too hard. So what's going on, Doc? Am I for the table?"
"You're not. You only need glasses and luckily I have an extra pair. Hang on, I'll go get it."
Harry had a few extra pairs actually. He kept them in a cardboard box under his cot. Some were old ones when his prescription changed, since he had been wearing glasses from the time he was one year old, and some were extras that needed some tape because his cousin liked to bump him on the nose and they soon broke. His aunt thought he did it on purpose and had grabbed a few glasses from the bargain bin the last time too, tired of taking him to get new ones. He fetched one that had a taped-up earpiece and took it outside.
"Where are you going?" Aunt Petunia called from the sitting room when he passed, nearly giving him a heart attack. "What are you doing? Stay out of the house!"
"Nowhere, Aunt Petunia! Yes, Aunt Petunia!" He jogged to the kitchen, snagging a slice of bread on the way in case the billy goat was hungry from his long trip.
"And stay away from animals—I can smell them on you!" she called after him. "You smell like a farm!"
"Sorry, Aunt Petunia!" he called and took care not to slam the door or she would come out to see what he was doing. Phew! He had thought she was out!
Go-Away was waiting impatiently right outside the kitchen door, and Harry moved the group to gather behind the Rhododendrons, out of sight, before he put his glasses on the billy goat. "There, how's that?"
"I can see!" he tapped with his hoofs, doing a little happy jump. "I won't go blind! Thank you, Doctor Dolittle!"
"I'm not—"
"Yes, you are!" said Dab-Dab.
"Yes, you are!" said Gub-Gub.
"Yes, you are!" said Scrits and her children.
"Yes, you are!" said Bap.
"Yes, you are!" said SSLL.
"Yes, you are!" said Rib.
"Yes, you are!" called Muffy from the neighbour's garden.
"Fine," Harry sighed. "But do keep in mind I am only five and can only do a little, not a lot."