Part 2
Warm air stung Nora’s face as feeling returned to her cheeks. She kept one hand on the wheel and held the other near a vent until her fingers would bend, then switched hands. Behind her, the blankets made an occasional dry rustle.
“Stay with them,” she whispered. “They need you.”
She tried to judge the wolf’s breathing in the mirror. Sometimes a bend in the road hid the movement of her ribs, and Nora would find herself holding her own breath until she could see it again.
The pickup slid on two separate stretches of ice. Each time she corrected, waited for the tires to catch, and forced herself to bring the speed down. The urge to hurry was almost unbearable. So was the memory of what hurrying couldn’t undo.
After the second slide, she heard the hospital monitor again, though the only sound in the cab was the heater. Caleb’s hand had relaxed inside hers before anyone spoke. Her husband had stood near the wall, looking down, while she tried to get someone to understand that the child in that bed was hers.
She blinked until the highway returned.
The pups had stopped trembling. Nora didn’t know whether the warmth was helping or whether their bodies had simply run out of strength. She kept checking them, looking for anything she could recognize as improvement.
By the time the lights of Brenley appeared, she had decided she would not leave the clinic without three living animals. She knew wanting something that badly offered no protection. She wanted it anyway.
Dr. Owen Kessler was cleaning an examination table when the pickup pulled into the lot. The clinic offered round-the-clock emergency care, and on that quiet evening he had been hoping to finish the ordinary work before the next call.
A woman opened the driver’s door before the truck had quite settled on its suspension.
“Help me get them inside!”
He reached the vehicle carrying a towel, expecting an injured dog. When she opened the rear door, he stopped with one hand on the frame.
A wolf filled the floor behind the front seats. Two pups lay wrapped above her.
For an instant Owen looked from the animals to the woman, taking in her soaked pants, the snow packed into her cuffs, the hand she couldn’t keep steady on the door.
“I’m getting a stretcher,” he said. “Don’t try to lift her again.”
As he turned, he added that the wildlife department would have to be notified.
“Call whoever you have to,” she said. “Just treat them.”
They brought the mother in first. Owen moved quickly now, directing Nora where to stand and what to hold. He had treated trauma cases for fifteen years, but the sight of those pups arriving in a civilian’s pickup took a moment to put in its proper place.
Then the thermometer gave him something concrete to work with.
The adult’s temperature was just under ninety degrees. A wolf should have been around a hundred and one. Her gums were dry, her circulation poor, and beneath the thick coat her body was alarmingly thin.
“She’s been feeding them from reserves she couldn’t spare,” he said as he prepared warmed fluids. “There isn’t much left.”
Nora stood with her arms tight around herself, listening to the small sounds of equipment being opened.
Owen placed an intravenous line and arranged controlled warming around the wolf. He checked her heart rhythm, then turned to the pups. Both were dangerously cold, their blood sugar depleted. The smaller one had a troubling noise in his lungs.
“Pneumonia,” Owen said after listening again. “Caught early enough to treat, I hope.”
He estimated that they were about eight weeks old, an unusually early litter. Nora watched him fit the little bodies into warmed bedding and adjust their support. When he asked her to step out so he could work, she moved as far as the wall.
“I won’t get in your way.”
He looked at her, then at the open space he needed beside the table.
“All right. Stay there.”
She slid down until she was sitting on the floor.
The next hours passed in pieces: a drawer closing, the click of a pump, Owen reading numbers and writing them down. Nora learned the pattern of the mother’s breathing so closely that every interruption brought her to her feet.
Once, the wolf’s body tightened and jerked against the warming blankets. Nora reached Owen before she knew she had moved, catching his arm.
“Stop it. Please, stop it.”
“I need that hand.” His voice came out sharper than he intended. He freed his sleeve, adjusted the treatment, and checked the monitor. “Let me work, Nora.”
She backed away immediately.
A few minutes later, without looking up, he said, “I’m sorry I snapped.”
She shook her head. Her eyes never left the table.
The wolf’s heart rhythm steadied late that evening. Owen checked the reading twice before he let himself reduce the frequency of his movements around her. Later, the pups’ temperatures began holding where they should. Their bodies relaxed into the bedding without the frightening limpness they had shown in the truck.
Near midnight, the mother opened her eyes.
Nora, seated against the wall again, stopped breathing for a moment. The wolf surveyed the unfamiliar room. Her gaze paused on Nora, then moved to the clear warmed enclosure where her sons slept against each other.
She kept looking until one of them shifted.
Then she let her muzzle settle onto the folded towel beneath her head and slept.
Owen finished a note, put down his pen, and sat on the floor a little distance from Nora. His knees cracked. He made a tired face at the sound, then rubbed both palms over his eyes.
“They’re through the worst part,” he said.
Nora drew her sleeve across her face.
“The department is sending someone in the morning. Once they can travel, they’ll go to a licensed rehabilitation center.” He waited. “I need to be sure you understand. They can’t come home with you.”
She looked almost puzzled by the warning.
“I only wanted them alive.”
Owen studied the raw skin above her wet cuffs. He had already heard where she’d found them and how long she’d dragged the adult through the snow. He couldn’t make that effort fit the quiet woman now sitting beside him.
“You could have called from the truck and waited,” he said. “A lot of people would have.”
For a while, Nora said nothing. Owen thought she might not answer at all.
Then she told him about the cross.
“My little boy was hurt there. In our car. Three years ago tonight.” She held her hands together so tightly her thumbs had gone pale. “He died at the hospital. I was the one driving.”
Owen lowered his eyes. He started to speak, stopped, and rested his forearms on his knees.
Nora watched the wolf sleeping within reach of her pups.
“I couldn’t bring him back,” she said. “I could get them here.”
The clinic blinds made narrow stripes across the reception floor when Denise Alvarez arrived the next morning. Nora was standing at the counter with a paper cup of coffee she hadn’t drunk. Owen came out of the treatment area to meet the wildlife officer.
Denise had spent nearly eighteen years answering calls about injured animals and people who had become attached to them. Her jacket was still damp at the shoulders, and her expression softened when she saw Nora. The folder in her hand remained closed.
“Owen’s sent us their records,” she said. “The center has space for the family. We’ll arrange secure transport and continue treatment there.”
Nora set the coffee down.
“The small one still sounds terrible when he breathes.”
“He’ll have veterinary care.”
“The mother could barely lift her head last night.” Nora moved toward the recovery-room door, then stopped in front of it. “They aren’t going today.”
Denise glanced at Owen.
He came around the counter, choosing his words with more care than he had during the night.
“I wouldn’t clear them for transport yet. Stable doesn’t mean resilient. The female needs continued monitoring, and the pup’s lungs concern me. I want seventy-two hours.”
Denise opened her folder and checked the notes. She asked two short questions about temperature and fluids, which Owen answered without looking at Nora.
At last she clicked her pen.
“I can authorize that on your medical recommendation.” Then she faced Nora. “Three days. After that, if he clears them, they leave.”
Nora’s shoulders lowered a fraction.
Denise didn’t let her stop listening.
“And you won’t be able to follow them there. No visits. Their chances of release depend on keeping their distance from people. An animal that can’t learn that may spend its life behind a fence…”
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