Part 3
Ruth made his call before she could stop herself. His eyes shifted toward her. One paw came off the ledge, and he dropped low enough for the water to cover his mouth.
“Quiet,” Lena said.
Otis fought back up. Celia moved to see his chest, her light held low. Ruth pressed the wet binder against her stomach. The cardboard cover was softening beneath her fingers.
“He’s exhausted,” the veterinarian said. “And he’s frightened of moving off what’s holding him.”
Ruth could see that. Seeing it did not tell her how to bear another minute of it.
Owen checked the ramp from the keeper side. It had not shifted. Water trickled across its lower end, but the upper surface held clear. Lena had moved equipment away from the destination room and turned one of the work lights so it no longer shone into the lion’s eyes. She crouched where he could see an open space instead of three people watching him fail.
Nothing changed.
Behind Ruth, Fern called again. Otis’s left ear turned toward the sound.
Lena looked at her mother. “Can we bring Fern back into her night room?”
The crate remained docked to Fern’s upper bay. Reversing her movement would put the old lioness behind the mesh partition next to the spare room, where Otis could see and smell her through the route they had opened. It would also undo the one successful loading of the morning.
Ruth pictured the transport door closing, the neat signature on the sheet. She had been treating it as something finished. Fern was still here, still waiting for the animal they had taken from beside her.
“Yes,” she said. “That bay’s dry.”
Lena walked the gates with her. They verified the boundaries, secured the empty spaces, then opened only the route back from the crate. Fern turned at once. She moved slowly over the threshold, favoring the hip, and passed into her own night room.
Ruth thought she would go to her usual sleeping platform. Instead she followed the sounds to the partition beside the spare room. There she stopped, head low, and breathed through the mesh.
Otis could see her now.
For several seconds Ruth could not tell whether it mattered. His eyes were fixed in the same terrible way. Water shivered against his whiskers. Fern lowered herself along the partition, awkwardly, placing one foreleg farther forward than the other. She did not call again.
The younger lion’s nose moved.
Lena put her hand flat against the outside of the keeper barrier, a gesture meant for Ruth. Wait.
Otis turned his head toward Fern. He tried to shift his forequarters, lost his footing, and went under to his eyes. Ruth heard herself inhale. The lion found the ledge again, coughing, and stayed there.
Celia spoke into her radio, preparing the next medical steps and the help they would need if he could not move himself. Nobody offered Ruth a promise. Behind the veterinarian’s voice came the sound of another vehicle arriving on the ridge, responders stopping where Lena had told them to stop.
Ruth wanted more people in the room. She wanted fewer. She wanted Cal, who would have known where to put his hands on the machinery. She wanted to be twenty years younger, before she had learned how often wanting made no difference.
Lena said, quietly, “He hates an audience.”
Ruth looked at her.
“When he hurt his pad last spring. You were in the hospital with your knee. He wouldn’t cross to the treatment room if we stood here waiting. I had to go around the corner.”
“I read the notes.”
“That part wasn’t in the notes.”
It was not a rebuke. Lena was watching Otis. But Ruth saw, with sudden and unwelcome clarity, all the days her daughter had worked here while Ruth was elsewhere, all the small discoveries that had happened without her. She had thought of those days as time she had missed. Lena had been living them.
They withdrew from his immediate view. Celia kept the angle she needed through the observation window. Ruth stood against the wall beside her daughter and tried not to call, not to move, not to make herself the thing the lion had to answer.
There was a scrape inside the passage.
Then a heavy splash.
Ruth moved before she meant to. Lena caught the back of her raincoat, not hard, just enough. Through the narrow window Ruth saw Otis’s forelegs on the ramp. His hindquarters were still in the water. He hauled forward, stopped, and pressed his belly against the steel.
Fern rose on the other side of the partition.
Otis made one more effort. A hind paw found the lower edge. He dragged himself up into the room, turned sharply toward the lioness, and collapsed beside the dividing mesh.
Lena’s voice changed. “He’s through. Whole animal clear.”
Owen secured the opening behind him with the temporary barrier they had prepared. Two people checked it. The flooded passage was cut off from the dry room. Only then did Ruth realize she had been holding the construction binder upside down, rainwater running out of its plastic sleeves onto her boots.
Otis lay with his mouth open. Water dripped from his mane and spread around him. His flanks moved too quickly. Fern pressed her nose to the mesh near his head; when he shifted toward her, she stayed.
Ruth took one step closer along the keeper aisle.
“Give us room,” Celia said.
This time Ruth moved back without asking what she could do. Lena joined the veterinarian at the observation point. They talked about his breathing, about examining him once they could safely proceed, about what could still develop after the water. He was on dry concrete. That was what they had won so far.
The responders helped Owen control the water outside and bring in equipment through the cleared service route. Ruth fetched dry towels, clean coveralls, the portable heater for the keeper room. Someone asked where a shutoff was, and she knew. Someone asked for the location of the second medical cabinet, and she knew that too.
By the time the inflow began to ease, the rain had thinned to a noisy drizzle. Ruth stood at the dry end of the aisle with a towel she had carried there for herself and forgotten to use. Her jeans were wet through. Mud marked the elbows of her raincoat.
Lena came out of the treatment access, peeled off her gloves, and leaned her forehead against the wall.
“How is he?” Ruth asked.
“Celia’s staying.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Lena kept her forehead against the wall for another breath. Then she turned.
“He needs watching. There may be lung trouble. We’re not moving him today.”
Ruth nodded. The room in front of her seemed to get larger, then smaller. She sat on an overturned feed bucket because it was there.
For years she had told people to eat after a crisis, to change wet clothing, to get warm before they decided they were fine. She could not remember the next thing after sitting down.
Lena put a wrapped sandwich on her knee.
“Owen had them in the cab.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Half.”
Ruth opened the wrapper. Tuna. Cal had disliked tuna so much she had stopped buying it when they married. She took a bite and cried before she had swallowed, an ugly, inconvenient sound that made her reach for the towel.
Lena sat on the other bucket. She did not say that Otis would be all right. She took the uneaten half of the sandwich when Ruth handed it to her, and for a while they sat shoulder to shoulder, listening to the veterinarian move around the room beyond the wall.
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇