Part 3
Nora cleared the cub’s mouth, adjusted the tiny head, and gave a careful breath. The ribs rose beneath her fingers, fell, and stayed still.
“Again,” Marnie said. She stood close enough to pass what Nora needed and far enough not to steal room from her hands.
Nora breathed again and worked a warmed towel along the cub’s spine. Behind her, Iris’s monitor marked a rhythm too fast for comfort. At the window, Sam stood motionless beside the wet red disk.
The cub jerked once. Its mouth opened without sound, then a ragged cry scraped into the room.
Nora continued until the cub managed its own uneven breaths. Marnie moved it to the first warmed basket and tucked rolled towels around its body.
Warren had already reached the second cub. This one arrived with a heartbeat strong enough to feel through the wet fur and a furious protest before Nora finished clearing its face. The third was smaller and slow to pink, but its paws began to flex after several minutes beneath the heat.
Three cubs lay breathing under the lamps. The first pushed blindly against its towel ring, searching for the body and milk that should have been there.
“Iris?” Nora asked.
Warren did not answer immediately. Bruising darkened most of one uterine horn, and blood gathered again each time he tried to close the damaged section. What had looked like the beginning of a tear was longer on the inner surface, where hours of pressure had reduced living muscle to tissue too fragile to hold sutures.
“I can keep trying to preserve it,” he said, “but every attempt costs blood she doesn’t have.”
Nora looked at Iris’s face beneath the breathing circuit. The roadside park had used her for litter after litter, though no complete breeding record had survived the seizure. Cedar Hollow had never intended another pregnancy. Saving the organ would not return anything Iris needed; losing more blood could take away the life already waiting around her in three baskets.
“Remove the damaged uterus,” Nora said.
Warren nodded once. “Marnie, tell me before the pressure falls, not after.”
The room became quieter as the decision narrowed everyone’s work. Marnie called changes in Iris’s vital signs. Nora moved between the cubs, warming the third and checking the airway of the first.
When Sam’s radio signaled that the secure lane was ready, he picked up the red disk and left the window. Through the interior panes, Nora watched him take Bishop through three connecting gates, rewarding him only after the recovery-yard latch closed. The male stopped beneath the narrow roof with water dripping from his mane and his face turned toward the clinic wall.
He could not see Iris. The building’s ventilation carried the scent of her fur and blood, along with disinfectant and the unfamiliar cries from the warming baskets. Bishop walked the length of the wall, returned to the same place, and lay down with his chest against it.
Nora watched through the interior pane until the first cub cried again. Bishop’s ears lifted, but he stayed at the wall. She turned back before she could give the movement a human explanation.
Iris’s blood pressure steadied in small increments. Warren tied off the last bleeding vessel and began a slow examination of the remaining tissue before completing the surgery. The danger had not passed, but it had become a problem hands could work on rather than one that kept widening.
Nora checked the cubs against the ultrasound estimate. “Three,” she said. “That was all I could separate on the screen.”
“An estimate isn’t a count,” Warren replied.
Late-pregnancy images overlapped. One spine could hide beneath another, and a large patient did not offer the clean angles of a diagram. Everyone knew this. Still, the three baskets under the lamps had made the number feel settled before any cub was born.
Warren ran his hand along the remaining horn high beneath Iris’s ribs. His fingers stopped.
“Marnie, hold the light here.”
Nora heard the change in his voice and brought the portable ultrasound without being asked. Warren indicated a place above the surgical field. The first image showed only crowded curves and shadow. Nora changed the probe angle until a narrow spine appeared where the uterine horn folded back on itself.
It did not move.
She searched along the small rib cage. A pulse flickered, vanished in interference, and returned at a rate much slower than any of the newborns under the lamps. Warren looked at her over his mask. “There’s your fourth basket.” The heartbeat faltered again…
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