Part 3
Ruth reached for the pencil, then left it with him. She told Daniel where Otis usually looked before putting his weight on his back legs. He added the observation beneath his initials and asked her to show him again the following morning.
She stayed past lunch. Fran called while they were putting the food equipment away, and Ruth let the phone ring until Tessa looked at her.
“I’ll call her from the car.”
“She’s probably already brought the chair.”
“Then it’ll be there when I get home.”
Tessa turned back to the sink. There had been a time when she would have laughed at that answer, pleased to belong to the little group whose work excused everything else. Ruth found the absence of the laugh irritating for the entire drive home.
Fran had left the chair under her porch roof, with the loose seat tied in place using a grocery bag. A note tucked beneath the knot said, Tuesday would be fine. Ruth read it twice, as though Fran might have hidden a complaint in the handwriting.
She carried the seat cushion inside, using both hands as the therapist had shown her. The chair frame would have to wait for help. Before going to bed, she laid out her refuge clothes and set the alarm for the hour she’d used before retiring.
On Tuesday morning, Dr. Cole met them at Otis’s yard. The veterinarian had examined him under anesthesia six weeks earlier, adjusted his arthritis care, and followed the keepers’ daily reports since. Nothing in today’s discussion made those records useless, she said, but Ruth’s description added something they should have had from the beginning.
“We’re asking him to do more than walk into a room,” Cole said. “New surface, new sightlines, different people, a changed routine. We need to watch all of it.”
Ruth stood beside her. Otis rose for Daniel, ate, and moved with the same careful hindquarters she’d seen yesterday. Cole watched the whole sequence before asking another question.
She made no promise that familiarity would solve his difficulty. Nor did she treat his age as a reason to stop trying ordinary adjustments. She set limits for the sessions and reminded them which changes would require a call rather than another attempt.
At the new passage, Ruth kept one hand loosely against her coat. Daniel stood in the position marked on the drawing. He had changed the order of his preparations so that he wouldn’t have to leave Otis halfway through to fetch something.
Ruth noticed that. She intended to tell him later.
Otis approached, sniffed, and stepped forward. Daniel waited. The lion lifted a hind foot, placed it down again, and turned his head toward the old yard.
“Give him a second,” Ruth said.
Daniel was already giving him one. At Ruth’s voice, Otis turned toward her instead, moved out of the passage, and came along the fence to the place where she stood.
“There you are,” she said automatically.
She heard the welcome in her own voice too late. Otis rubbed the post beside her, and Daniel stayed at the feeding position with his hand motionless against his leg.
Tessa ended the session. Cole remained to watch Otis return to the familiar shelter, then spoke briefly with Tessa about the care plan. Nobody scolded Ruth, which left her searching for somewhere to put her explanation.
“He was having trouble with his back foot,” she said.
“I saw it,” Daniel replied.
“I didn’t want you to rush him.”
“Was I?”
Ruth looked toward Tessa. The head keeper was listening, but she didn’t step in to answer for either of them.
“No,” Ruth said.
Daniel nodded once. “If I’m missing something that puts him at risk, tell me. Otherwise, let me finish before you tell me what I could’ve done differently.”
He picked up the empty bucket and carried it toward the feed room. His shoulders were level. Ruth would have found it easier if he had stomped, or said something young and foolish that she could reasonably object to.
“Your setup was better,” she said as Daniel reached the door.
He turned.
“You had everything where you could get it. I used to keep walking back for the cloth.”
Daniel glanced at the bucket. “That’s why I moved it.”
She had thought he was changing things because he hadn’t understood her system. She let him go without explaining that.
Tessa asked her to come around the outside of the new building. Otis was back in his familiar yard; from the protected staff aisle, she pointed along the solid screening.
“You disappear here.”
Ruth followed the line with her eyes. A keeper at the farther feeding position was hidden from the entrance by a corner of screening. The arrangement reduced visual disturbance and gave the animals privacy; on this particular approach, it also removed the person Otis had been following before he could reach the room.
“I looked at the floor plan,” Ruth said.
“So did I.”
Tessa crouched to look from lower down, then stood and brushed grit from her knee. The clearances were adequate. The floor had traction. Those facts had occupied both women when they reviewed the building; neither had described the sightline from the position of a lion following a familiar keeper.
“We can have the installer assess that section,” Tessa said. “See whether the screening can change without touching containment.”
Ruth looked toward the yard. “You should’ve asked me to walk it with you.”
Tessa’s mouth tightened. “I did. You said the doorway was plenty wide, and you had to finish the west rounds.”
Ruth remembered the email. Worse, she remembered being faintly pleased that the project couldn’t quite proceed without her opinion, even when she didn’t make time to give it properly.
“I should’ve insisted on a full review,” Tessa added. “I signed it off too.”
They stood in the aisle a moment longer. From the feed room came the sound of Daniel knocking mud from the wheels of the cart before bringing it inside. Ruth had shown him that in his first week, tired of cleaning the same tracks off the floor.
“Tomorrow,” Tessa said, “I need you helping him from somewhere Otis can’t see you.”
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