by L. E. Horn
I ducked into the house to change into something that didn’t stink of vet clinic, stepped into waterproof hiking boots, and grabbed my walking stick along with Keen’s leash. During daylight, I often ran through trails I’d made in the bush but running at night would risk a twisted ankle. A walk would have to satisfy Keen.
The pastures around the house had devolved into areas of dense bush with the occasional clearing, a haven for wildlife. I headed down a familiar trail that would take me on a three-mile loop. Some practical-minded planner had long ago devised a grid system for the prairies, an effort that had chopped Manitoba’s rural land into mile squares. It destroyed the natural drainage in many places, but the marsh behind Peter’s property was untouched. My trails meandered without interruption, albeit a little damply.
The moment I stepped into the bush, I breathed in crisp night air, and the day’s troubles dropped a notch. The slight breeze smelled of the spring melt, of the damp, rotting refuse of winter—too early yet for the scents of rebirth. My breath coalesced in a plume as I watched Keen bound along the trail, her spotted coat blending into the dappled shadows cast by the moonlight. Even though I didn’t trust the light enough to run, I set a brisk pace, using the walking stick in rhythm with my strides.
We’d covered the first mile when something howled. Keen froze in her tracks ahead of me, body stiff and ears erect. I stopped to listen, frowning. Coyotes frequented this area—big, healthy ones. I ran alongside their footprints all winter and they often howled at night. At this time of year, pairs were attending to pups in their dens, emerging to express their love to the moon. Later in the summer, the youngsters would join with their shrill voices.
This sounded deeper and hoarser than a coyote. And when Keen came to me with her tail hanging low and her gaze uncertain, I snapped on her leash. She rarely left my side, but those tricksters excelled at luring dogs to their deaths.
Another howl—this one closer to us. Again, subtly not a coyote. Wolves? My thoughts slid to the torn bison, and my heart picked up rhythm. Maybe it hadn’t been humans that killed them.
I told myself I wasn’t worried, but I couldn’t help but react to a third cry from yet another direction. Lonely, wild, savage—I shivered and sensed the fine hairs of my arms and neck stand on end. Keen cowered against my knee, and I could feel her trembling. Just like she had in that bison field . . .
I paused and considered turning around, when all hell broke loose.
Something big moved toward us—the crashing and cracking of branches made it sound as large as an elephant. Bear? As I backed away, a move supported by a frightened Keen, a form leaped from the dense bush and barreled straight into me.
It sent me flying as though I weighed nothing. Somewhere in the confused thrashing of limbs and frantic snorting, I identified my attacker as a deer—a buck, with the twin fuzzy buds of new antler growth. I don’t know if he outweighed me, but his adrenaline ran high enough to negate any margin of advantage.
Eyes bulging and nostrils flared wide in terror, the buck thrashed to disentangle himself, his razor-sharp hooves narrowly missing my face. I rolled beneath and away, hearing Keen’s shrill bark somewhere above me. With a final punch of a hoof in my gut, the animal launched itself back into the air and disappeared.
Panting, curled up in pain, my only thought was for Keen. As I became aware of the various places that hurt, I uncurled enough to look around. Keen crouched near my feet, facing away. She growled. My gaze slid past her, and my heart stopped.
A creature stood on the path about twenty feet from Keen’s nose. My brain noted the pricked ears and pointed snout and tried to place the silhouette. I first thought coyote, but as I acknowledged the color and the scale, that idea flew out the window. The animal was huge and black, and as I watched, it bared its long, gleaming teeth.
Wolf, my brain said. Yet something about it wrestled with that identification. Fresh out of school, I’d helped a colleague at a game farm and handled wolves up close. The proportions seemed off in this animal. The slant of its eyes and high forehead didn’t mesh with what I knew. From the heavy bones of the face and legs, I was sure it was male, and by the set of its ears and the glaring eyes, it looked royally pissed to have lost its dinner.
It snarled and stepped closer. Keen made a strange half yip, half growl. From where I lay, I could see her hind legs trembling and her posture crouched low. But flat on the ground I was defenseless, and she refused to desert me.
I had fallen with a leg bent beneath me, and now I used it and both arms to lever myself to a crouch. The wolf animal slid its amber gaze from Keen to me, and the assessment in those eyes kicked my brain back into gear. Down, I was easy prey. I need to get up.
I straightened slowly to prevent triggering an attack. My movement, however, seemed to give Keen the courage to dart ahead, her growl changing to another shrill bark. The animal’s ears, oddly long for a wolf, flattened to its broad skull, and I knew my dog was about to die.
I flung myself forward to bury Keen beneath my body and threw an arm up between me and the four hundred pounds of muscle and fangs coming at us. At least, I figured that was what the bastard weighed when he hit me like a freight train. Teeth slashed at my arm, but before the powerful jaws could close, something else clobbered the enormous wolf from the side, hard enough to drive all the air from its lungs in a rasping grunt.
With an arm around Keen, I dragged us away from the snarling and snapping jaws. Two creatures now blocked the path. Though similar in build, the new arrival was much smaller and paler—it might have been brown, although the moonlight washed it gray. Something about it screamed female. She had her tail to me, facing down the bigger canine, growling low in her throat.
The black wolf—they had to be wolves, what else could they be?—bristled, raising its head and tail, and the smaller animal shrank in on itself, but when he weaved to evade her, she stepped into his path.
A soft crackle of shifting branches announced that they were not alone. I squinted, and barely deciphered the shadow of a third animal in the bush off the path. Was there an entire pack of them? Again, my brain flashed images of the carnage in that bison pasture. Another rustle had my gaze skipping through the darkness, searching for movement. More wolves? Or the settling of bushes in the wake of the deer? Real or not, the unseen watchers made me shiver.
The shadowy newcomer uttered a deep wuffing sound, as though to add its opinion to the vote. Opinion? These weren’t humans, they were wolves. I gave myself a mental shake and gathered Keen. My arm throbbed, but I lifted her like she weighed nothing. With my arms full of quaking dog, I left my walking stick where it lay and backed away from the wolves.
Two pairs of oddly shaped eyes watched me go, the third animal, and the remainder of the phantom pack, stayed out of sight. The black wolf no longer seemed as interested in me or Keen. I turned sideways, glancing ahead to see the dips in the ground, then back to ensure that the wolves remained where they were. When I looked back one final time, they had gone.
* * *
Being a vet had its perks, but I didn’t expect treating myself to be one of them. The long, shallow gash on my forearm needed ten stitches. I did them myself, one-handed and awkward with a shaking hand, before taking pills. An extra shot of antibiotic should hold me until the pills could take effect.
With that, I went to bed. I awoke the next morning feeling hungover and disoriented. A hot shower revived me somewhat before I called the clinic.
“Running late,” I told Ardyth, our receptionist. “I’m going straight to my first call, then I’ll be in.”
“No problem Liam,” Ardyth said. “I’ll let Darlene know.”
Darlene was my daytime partner at the clinic. Two other vets worked the evening shift, between the four of us we kept everything rolling pretty much twenty-four, seven.
An indeterminate period of time later I found myself in a stare-down with a ram.
“Isn’t he a lovely color,” Darice Weston crooned. “They
call it shaela.”
Robust horns curled off the ram’s black face. I obediently shifted my gaze to the blue-gray shade of his fleece.
“Very nice.” I brushed the dirt off myself and prepared for round four of herding the sheep into the barn. Or round five. To tell the truth, I’d lost track.
Darice, a substantial woman in her fifties, dabbled in wool. She’d acquired a flock of Shetland sheep in an astonishing array of colors—a fact somewhat lost on me as I searched the mass of woolly bodies for a single limping form.
Daily up-close-and-personal experience had made me appreciate that vets should charge by the hour—I do as much wrangling as doctoring. Some clients round up their animals before I arrive, but just as many wait for me to participate in the rodeo. When I recently commented on it to Darlene, she’d offered her opinion. “They like to watch you. The women, anyway. Hell, maybe the men too. So get a buzz cut or rub dirt on your face. Don’t shower, maybe that’ll work. Or not—some appreciate that rugged look.”
Although her reference to my appearance made me squirm, I’d laughed at her usual pointed observations. In fairness to my clients, there exists normal time, around which the world revolves, and vet time, which often runs hours behind. Animals don’t get injured or sick on schedule; vets squeeze emergencies in between appointments. Having your prized bull—or in this case, ram—bashing apart your barn while you wait for the vet tends to discourage clients from containing the patient before your arrival.
Abandoning all thought of my day sticking to a schedule, I peered into the flock of twenty for a woolly girl with a sore foot.
“What does she look like?” I asked, blinking mud from my eyes. It didn’t help, they felt as though I’d thrown an entire sandbox into them, and my head had begun to ache ominously. I hoped I wasn’t coming down with the flu. With some effort and little enthusiasm, I focused on the task at hand.
I hadn’t been able to determine the ewe’s identity through observation, since the flock, led by their butthead—the name fit—leader, bolted from zero to sixty every time we tried to move them.
“She’s the moorit, at the back.”
“Moorit is?”
“Deep brown. Pink tag.”
I spotted her as she lifted her head for a better look at me. Getting my hands on her meant squishing the flock—sheep tended to do things as a unit—into a small area; in this case, the barn. So far, they’d outmaneuvered us, evading the barn door to which this pen connected. New to ovines, Darice didn’t have a proper handling arrangement. I considered myself fortunate they were in the paddock and not out in the twenty-acre pasture.
Which made me think. “Have they been out on pasture?” I asked her.
“Yes, although there isn’t much grass for them to eat, yet,” she replied.
“Might be an idea to bring them in every night,” I suggested. “There’s wolves in the area. Ted Andreychuk lost a couple of bison two nights ago.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “I could shut them in the barn. I’m getting a donkey from Walter in a week.”
“Good.” Donkeys made excellent predator control for livestock. I thought of the shredded bison and swallowed. “Guardian dogs are another possibility,” I suggested. “Not sure how a donkey would do against a, um, cougar or wolf.”
She looked uncertain, while I spread my arms wide and brandished a shepherd’s crook as I approached the flock. Sheep are prey animals, and as such, they move away from pressure. If one applies enough energy at the correct angle, they should go wherever you wish.
In theory, anyway.
I did everything right. I placed a portable fence panel on one side of the door to help channel them through, then advanced on the animals on the diagonal. I kept my energy high enough to encourage movement but not so much to panic them into bolting and used the stick to direct them. When they eyed me, I waved the crook in a circular motion, and those closest backed away. That’s it . . . me, big bad wolf; you, keep moving.
It was an unfortunate thought, and it led to others—flashes of intestines lying in the mud. Which distracted me at a key moment. Still, any self-respecting flock of sheep would have traveled in a cluster toward the barn door and through it. They began to shift in an orderly fashion, but the ram—who possessed the unlikely name of Humphrey—lowered and shook his head.
“Nooo” I said, refocusing in an instant. “Don’t you . . .”
Humphrey backed up a step.
Crap.
I stretched my arms wide, shook the stick and waved my free hand in time to my suddenly pounding heart. For added emphasis, I bared my teeth and growled.
Too late.
Humphrey came at me. His flock split in two, one half leaping in a tight circle, the other bolting around the paddock’s outer circumference in a well-choreographed distraction maneuver. Humphrey weighed in at only a hundred pounds, but he possessed sufficient mass to propel that battering ram at me with knee-obliterating force.
Meanwhile, the distraction squad was pelting the circumference of the paddock as Humphrey charged at close to light speed—in any case, too fast for rational thought. While the little voice in my head screamed, “RUN,” something odd happened. It was as though time ground to a halt, and I saw him approach with startling clarity and in slow motion. I had time to crouch, sidestep, and grab him by the horns.
It wasn’t something I’d ever done before, and as time reverted to normal, it shocked me to have a firm grip on the struggling animal.
“Oh, don’t do that!” Darice called, as Humphrey’s momentum spun me in a circle. “You’re not supposed to handle their horns in spring!”
Confused as much by my success as her words, and not wanting to damage Humphrey, I let go. The ram shook his head once more as he rejoined his ladies, and the entire group gathered again along the fence.
At no point in the process did I detect anyone limping. I sighed, wiping more mud off my hands and onto my coveralls. I figured I was fast descending to “rugged.”
“I’ll get more oats.” Darice stomped toward the feed room located at the far end of the building. The grain strategy should have worked. We’d tried it first, dumping the feed in the barn, but only the greediest had fallen for it. Those hadn’t included Humphrey or the lame lady with the pink tag.
I looked over at my truck where a face hung over the half-opened window and a tail waved.
When my gaze met Keen’s, she gave a short, sharp bark that I interpreted as, let me out, I can help! I leaned on the crook and wiped sweat off my forehead; did my furry friend possess any latent herding instincts? I glanced over at Humphrey, who stared at me with a triumphant gleam in his beady eyes.
Minutes later, I had Keen on a leash. Darice appeared with her second bucket of grain and regarded my new strategy with alarm.
“Dr. Liam”—in her hesitancy, she lingered on the “L” in my name—“is she trained?”
Liam was actually my first name. My real last name was lost somewhere in the series of foster homes in which I grew up. I’d used Erikson since I was seventeen. With my clients, I liked to keep things casual, but, like many, Darice couldn’t help attaching the honorific.
I grinned at her as she chewed on her lip. “Nope.”
“I don’t want anyone hurt.” Any sheep, she meant.
“She’ll stay on the leash,” I promised.
Darice looked as though she might faint. Keen, on the other hand, vibrated with anticipation and began to bark at the sheep. As I exchanged glances with my woolly opponent, it wasn’t so much fear I saw as resignation. I was no longer an annoying, clumsy two-legger. I had friends with power.
Keen’s arrival was viewed with jaundiced eyes. The ewes clustered tightly around Humphrey, waiting for his judgment. He snorted, tossed his impressive head, and led his girls into the barn. His swift capitulation surprised me; so much so, I almost forgot to shut the gate behind him. I bent to pet Keen.
“It might be an idea,” I told a wide-eyed Darice, “to get yourself a dog.
”
3
By the time I made it to the clinic, I knew I had a fever. I barely kept my eyes open as Darlene ran through the afternoon’s clients. Finally, after repeating the results of a dog’s bloodwork at least twice, she fixed me with her piercing blue gaze and put her hands on her substantial hips. “Your car accident victim from last night is doing fine, and I can handle the rest of your appointments, including—thank you—Walter’s damned donkey. Go home.”
I pictured Walter Friesen’s donkey, also known as “Fang.” The animal was a local legend. He had a metabolic condition that necessitated frequent hoof work and a personality that required tranquilizing. I was pretty much the only one who would do the deed.
I would owe my colleague big time for this. But as I considered hauling my feverish ass out to Walter’s farm, a wave of dizziness almost drove me to my knees.
Darlene tossed her unruly mop of brown curls and gave me a look that could intimidate even Fang.
“Okay, okay, I’m going.” I collected Keen from the outdoor kennel she stayed in while I was working the clinic. She’d been reluctant to separate from me and now stuck close to my leg as I wobbled my way out to the SUV.
Peter’s distinctive beater truck was missing from the driveway when I arrived home. My body poured sweat as we entered through the back door that led to my suite. I grabbed juice from the fridge, sank onto the couch, and unwrapped my arm.
The fever made me think bacteria had taken root in the wound, despite my precautions with the antibiotics. I expected the injury to be red and inflamed, but it was neither. In fact, it looked pink and healthy, with the skin already knitting.
