Forty-Three

Nora did not move either.

She had worked on dogs that wanted to kill her, and she knew what that looked like. The lips came back, the ears went flat, and the whole body tightened toward the spring. This animal showed none of it. His ears were up and his mouth was closed. He looked at her the way a patient man looks at a door he has been waiting on for someone to open.

“Okay,” she said, very quietly. “Okay. I see you.”

One ear turned toward her voice.

She made herself look at him as a vet. Her legs had other ideas, but they could wait. A big male grey wolf in Montana went a hundred and ten pounds, maybe a hundred and twenty. The record animals out of Alaska and the Yukon ran to a hundred and seventy-five. She had read that in school and never expected to need it. The wolf in her straw was bigger than that. She had spent eight years guessing weights across corrals, and her eye said two hundred pounds as plainly as it would have said so about a calf.

“There is no such thing as you,” she told him.

He blinked.

The wound was on his right side, which was the side turned up to her. It began at the point of the shoulder and ran back along the ribs to the last one, a long open tear with the hide peeled away from it, black in the lamplight where it was not red. The straw under him was soaked. There was more blood matted in the fur of his left haunch, the one he was lying on, and from the way he held that leg she thought there was damage there as well.

He had been bleeding for hours. She could tell that from the color of the oldest blood and from his gums, which showed pale grey-pink when he panted. Nothing in this barn had done that to him. He had brought it in with him.

She took one step toward the pen. He did not lift his lip, so she took another. At the rail she stopped and breathed in, because her nose would tell her more than the light would.

She got blood first, and wet fur, and the sharp rank smell of an animal in pain. Under that she found the thing she had not been able to name from the door. He smelled of cedar, the split heartwood of it, and of cold stone, the way a creek boulder smells in winter when the water is low. It was a clean smell and a deep one, and it did something to her that she had no explanation for. Her shoulders came down. Her breath went all the way to the bottom of her lungs for the first time since the lights had gone out. It felt like a hand laid flat between her shoulder blades, steadying her.

That frightened her more than his teeth did. She pushed the feeling aside to think about later.

“Here is where we are,” she said, and her voice came out almost normal. Talking to patients was a habit she had never tried to break. “The power’s out. The road’s going under. The phone might work, and I could call Fish, Wildlife and Parks and tell them I’ve got a wolf the size of a pony in my barn. Nobody is driving six miles up this creek tonight. And if a warden did come in the morning, he would look at that side of yours and go back to his truck for a rifle. He’d be right to. That’s the book answer.”

The wolf laid his head down on the straw, slowly. His eyes stayed on her.

“You’ll be dead by morning anyway if I leave that open. You know that, don’t you? You’ve about run out of blood to lose.”

She heard herself and almost laughed. Thirty years old, and she was asking a wild animal for his opinion.

But he had come in under her rail and lain down in her clean straw. He was a patient in her barn, and Nora had never yet walked away from one.

“All right,” she said. “Don’t go anywhere. I mean that as a joke. Stay.”
***
She ran to the clinic, as near as a person could run in snow to the shin. Inside it was black and already cold. She put a match to the fire she had laid, because she would need warm fluids and warm hands. Then she picked up the telephone on the desk. There was a dial tone. She listened to it for three seconds and hung up.

The drug cabinet was on the far wall. To reach it she passed Doc Teague’s old oak desk, and her headlamp slid over the bottom right-hand drawer, the one with the brass lock. Every other drawer in the building opened. That one never had. She had asked Doc about the key on closing day, and he had patted his pockets and said it would turn up. It hadn’t. She had rattled that drawer perhaps ten times in twelve weeks and had promised herself a locksmith when she had a spare sixty dollars.

She went past it tonight with barely a glance and unlocked the cabinet.

“Two hundred pounds,” she said aloud, pulling vials. “Call it ninety kilos. And I’m dosing you like a dog, because nobody ever wrote a dose for whatever you are.”

She did the arithmetic on the back of an invoice and then did it again from the other direction, the way she had done since her first year out, when a decimal point had nearly cost a rancher his best bull. She drew ketamine and xylazine into a single large syringe, with a second, smaller one of ketamine for the vein once he was quiet enough to let her find it. She wanted him fully under. Nobody could put a needle through the hide of a conscious wolf forty times and keep all her fingers.

The dart pistol was on the top shelf in its case. She looked at it and left it. At ten feet a dart would hit him like a thrown hammer, and he was hurt enough. She took down the pole syringe instead, six feet of aluminum with a spring-loaded needle at the end, and fitted the big syringe into it.

She packed the rest into two totes. She took clippers and spare blades, three liters of saline that she set by the stove for a minute to take the chill off, and scrub. She took a surgical pack, extra needle holders, suture in two weights and gauze by the armload. An IV catheter and tape went in, and antibiotic, and something for pain. The propane heater from the lean-to went under one arm with a fresh bottle.

She did not bring the fresh gas for the generator. The vaccines would keep for a few hours in a cold building, and the wolf would not.
***
He was where she had left him. He lifted his head when she came in. She thought his eyes took longer to find her than they had before, and that worried her.

“I’m back,” she said. “I brought drugs. You’re going to like them.”

She lit the heater and set it at the pen rail, where it would throw heat across him without cooking the straw. She laid out a clean tarp. Then she picked up the pole and let herself into the pen and stood with the gate open behind her.

“This is the part where you could take my arm off,” she told him. “I’d like it on the record that I asked you not to.”

She went in along the wall, slowly, toward his hindquarters. He turned his head to follow her and did nothing else. The muscle of his right hip was toward her, thick and unhurt. She set her feet, said, “Little sting,” as she had said to ten thousand animals, and drove the needle home.

He flinched. A sound came up out of his chest that she felt through the soles of her boots. It was a low sound, and she could not have called it a growl. It stopped. He put his head back down on the straw and let out a long breath, and she would have sworn on her license that he had decided to let her do it.

She backed out, shut the gate and looked at her watch. It was a quarter past ten.

“Ten minutes,” she said. Her knees had gone loose, and she sat down on an upturned bucket. “Bolus, you can come down. He’s not interested in you.”

Bolus stayed where he was.

She watched the wolf’s ribs. His breathing slowed, and his head lay heavier on the straw. The ear that had tracked her every word stopped tracking. At eight minutes she spoke and got no flicker. At ten she went in, crouched by his head and touched the corner of his eye with one fingertip. He gave a slow blink, and he did not try to bite her.

“Good man,” she said. She did not notice the word until afterward.

Up close he was even bigger. His foreleg was as thick as her wrist and forearm together. She clipped a square over the vein, slid the catheter in on the first try, taped it and gave the second syringe slowly, watching his breathing until the last tension went out of his jaw. She checked his eye again and got nothing. She counted his heart with her stethoscope against the unhurt side of his chest. It was strong and slow, a little fast for the blood he had lost, and steadier than she had any right to hope.

Then she hung a bag of fluids from a nail on the pen post, turned the headlamp to its brightest setting and looked properly at what she had.

It was bad, but it was clean. The long wound had been made by teeth. Something had caught him at the shoulder and ripped backward while he twisted away, and it had opened hide and the muscle under it for better than a foot and a half. She could see the pale curve of two ribs at the deepest part. Nothing had gone through into the chest, and no rib was broken. The haunch, when she eased his leg up to see, had four deep punctures and a half circle of smaller ones.

They were bite marks, and she knew jaws. The spread between those canine holes was as wide as her spread hand.

“Whatever did this to you was your size,” she said slowly. “And the angles don’t match. It was more than one.”

Wolves fought over ground, and a pack would kill a stranger. She knew that much. None of it explained why there should be several two-hundred-pound wolves in the mountains above her house, and she filed that question beside the feeling of the hand on her back.

She clipped first. The clippers were battery-run, and she went through all three blades taking the thick coat back four inches on either side of the wound. The fur came away in dark handfuls, with a silver underlayer that was softer than she expected. She scrubbed the skin. She flushed the wound with a full liter of warm saline and then most of another, working the stream into every pocket, picking out pine needles and grit and one piece of bark with forceps. He had come a long way with that side open, through timber and downhill.

She began to sew.

The muscle came first. She closed it in a deep layer of absorbable suture, bringing the torn edges together bite by careful bite and tying each knot down flat. She worked on her knees in the straw with the heater hissing at her back and her breath smoking in front of her. The wind leaned on the barn until the old timbers creaked. Every few minutes she stopped to check his gums, his eye and the rise of his ribs, and once to give him a little more ketamine when a hind foot twitched.

She had always loved this part of the work. The mess went away under her hands a half inch at a time, and what had been a ruin started to look like an animal again. Her fingers got cold and then stopped mattering. She thought about nothing but the next stitch.

The skin was last. She used heavy nylon in simple single stitches, each one tied off on its own, so that if one failed the rest would hold. She counted them aloud, mostly to keep herself awake.

“Twenty-two. Twenty-three. You’ve got good skin, I’ll say that. It holds a stitch.” Her voice had gone hoarse. “Thirty. Thirty-one.”

The last one went in just behind the point of his shoulder. She tied it, cut it and sat back on her heels.

“Forty-three,” she said.

Her watch said a quarter to one. It had taken two hours, almost to the minute.

She flushed the punctures on his haunch and left them open to drain, because a sewn-up bite wound only turned into an abscess. She gave him the antibiotic and the painkiller under the skin and pulled the catheter when the fluid bag ran dry. Then, because he was out and she would never get the chance again, she looked at the rest of him.

His teeth were clean and unbroken, the teeth of an animal in his prime. His pads were scuffed raw. Above his left eye a thin white line ran through the fur where the hair had grown back colorless over an old cut. She lifted that eyelid with her thumb to check his pupil. The eye under it was grey with green in it, like lichen on rock. She had expected yellow.

“Somebody’s been at you before,” she said, and smoothed the eyelid down.

She dragged clean straw in around him and packed it against his back. There was a horse blanket on the tack-room hook, a heavy green canvas one left over from whoever had last kept a horse here. She shook the dust out of it and spread it over him from neck to tail and tucked the edge under his feet.

She ought to have gone to the house then. There was a stove there, and a bed, and a door that locked. But she had a patient coming up out of heavy anesthesia in a cold barn, with a body weight she had guessed at. If he stopped breathing at three in the morning she meant to be there.

“I don’t leave patients,” she said. “You’ll have to put up with me.”

She turned the heater down and moved it back from the straw. She pulled four bales off the stack and laid them end to end outside the pen, six feet from his nose with the rails between them, and put a second, smellier blanket over herself and her coat. It was past one when she switched off the headlamp.

The dark was total for a moment, and then the heater’s small orange glow came back to her eyes. She could hear the wolf breathing, deep and even, and under the storm she could hear his heart too, if she listened for it. She had always been able to hear things like that. She had quit mentioning it to anyone a long time ago.

The smell of cedar and cold stone filled the barn, stronger now that the blood was washed away. Her body did the same thing it had done at the rail. Everything in her eased, as if she had been carrying a full bucket for years and somebody had taken the handle.

That’s the adrenaline wearing off, she told herself. It’s one o’clock in the morning and you are very tired.

There was a thump on the bales by her feet, and then a heavy warm weight walked up her legs and settled on her stomach. Bolus had come down at last. He tucked his paws under him and stared through the rails at the blanket.

“I know,” Nora murmured. “I don’t know either.”

She was sliding toward sleep when the thought came, and it was clear enough to open her eyes again.

The woodshed stood open on the uphill side of the yard, and he would have reached it first, coming down from the timber. The hay shed was open too, and it was nearer the creek. A hurt animal crawled into the first cover it found. This one had passed both of them in a blizzard. He had crossed her whole yard, put his nose to a gap in a door that dragged, and gone straight to the one pen in the barn that was bedded for a patient.

He had not stumbled in here. He had walked into this barn on purpose, as if he knew it.
***