Part 2
“At least six hours,” Sam said. “Maybe eight.”
Nora released his sleeve and went through the service gate. There would be time to decide what his unsent message meant and what her unasked question meant beside it. In the ditch, Iris’s pulse was fast and thready beneath Nora’s fingers, and the trapped cub’s hind paw appeared again with the next contraction.
Marnie fitted oxygen over the lioness’s muzzle while Nora found a vein and started warmed fluids. They kept to Iris’s back, clear of her jaws and abdomen, and slid an insulated pad beneath the mud-soaked side of her body. Across the holding fence, Bishop paced every foot they moved.
The portable ultrasound screen filled with gray arcs and interference from wet fur. Nora found the obstructing cub low in the pelvis, its body lying crosswise behind the visible leg. The heartbeat was present but slow. Higher in the abdomen, two more spines overlapped beneath Iris’s ribs.
“Three that I can see,” Nora said. “The low one is losing ground.”
Sam stood outside the gate, already holding the sanctuary map in a clear plastic sleeve. “Clinic road is cut at the creek. Water took the approach on this side.”
The surgical building lay less than a mile away. Between it and Iris, the flood had made that distance unusable to any wheeled trailer.
“Ridge firebreak?” Nora asked.
“The tracked hauler can make it. It’ll be rough.”
“Then smooth it.”
Sam’s face changed, not much. “I can drive the route or I can stand here while you tell me how.”
Nora looked down at the weak rhythm on the monitor. Under ordinary conditions she would have argued about the grade, the turns, the tie-down points, and who had inspected them last. “Drive it. Call when the bed is locked.”
He ran toward the maintenance shed.
Marnie glanced at Nora without raising her head from the fluid line. She had heard both versions of the exchange and was wise enough to leave them where they were.
They moved Iris onto a rigid stretcher without rolling her weight across the lodged cub. Theo opened the transport crate and fixed the oxygen tubing and monitor leads through guarded access ports. Bishop struck the divider once as the stretcher rose—not a charge, but a blow heavy enough to make the wire sing.
“Easy, Bishop,” Sam called from the hauler as he came around the bend.
Bishop could not know the words. He stopped pacing at the sound of Sam’s voice.
The low tracked machine was used for hauling fence posts through mud. Sam had stripped its bed, bolted the crate rails into place, and covered the metal deck with stall mats and folded blankets. It would not give Iris a gentle ride, but it would give the team a route.
They winched the locked crate onto the rails. Nora and Marnie took the protected rear platform, where they could watch the monitor and reach the oxygen and fluid lines without opening anything. Theo drove a truck around the long south road to meet them at the clinic if the track failed.
Sam eased the hauler uphill. Wet oak branches scraped its roll cage, and red water ran down the firebreak in narrow sheets. Nora kept one hand on the crate frame and the other near Iris’s line. Each time she was tempted to tell Sam where to place a track, she looked instead at the pulse number and let him do the work she had assigned him.
At the steepest turn, the right track slipped half a foot. Sam stopped rather than fighting the machine, backed onto firmer ground, and took the outside edge. The delay cost seconds. A failed climb would have cost the cub and perhaps Iris.
“Good,” Marnie said, watching the monitor recover from the jolt.
Sam did not answer. The hauler crested the ridge.
Dr. Warren Pike waited at the clinic loading bay in surgical scrubs beneath a canvas raincoat. He had driven in before the creek rose and had spent the night helping with storm injuries in the smaller-animal ward. At sixty-two, he had the habit of taking in the patient, the exits, and the people before he put his hands to work.
He checked Iris’s gums through the crate panel, listened to Nora’s findings, and looked at the fetal tracing.
“How long obstructed?” he asked.
“Unknown. More than six hours is possible.”
“Any active bleeding?”
“Not externally.”
Warren nodded toward the treatment bay. “Then we find out inside.”
The clinic had doors built around transfer crates rather than people. Once the outer bay sealed, the team moved Iris onto the low surgical table. Heat panels glowed above three fleece-lined baskets at the neonatal station; clean blankets and spare equipment waited in the warming cabinet.
Warren examined the swollen tissue around the trapped limb. “We are not getting this cub out safely through the birth canal.”
Nora had reached the same conclusion in the ditch. Hearing it aloud made the choice final. “C-section.”
“And if the uterus is torn?”
“Do what keeps Iris alive.”
Warren held her gaze for one beat. “You take the cubs. I take her.”
Sam watched from the window after changing out of his soaked jacket. His red target disk rested against the wall beside him, leaving a wet crescent on the floor. Through the secure corridor beyond, staff were opening a path so Bishop could be shifted from the west pen to the recovery yard next to the clinic. No one tried to move him yet.
When Warren opened the abdomen, dark blood welled around bruised tissue. The uterus had not fully ruptured, but pressure from the misplaced cub had thinned one section until it had begun to split.
“There,” Nora said, seeing the angle.
Warren worked the cub free without pulling on the trapped leg. Its body was warm when he placed it in Nora’s hands, heavier than she expected and utterly still. She carried it to the warming table. No breath moved the narrow ribs…
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