The thoughts you have before you fall asleep are unsaved files on a computer before a storm.
The blackout comes. The screen goes dark. You can’t ever get back what’s lost.
What am I thinking, right before a Change? I can’t be sure. Maybe there’s evidence of what I tried to do—sunscreen applied too late or the blinds half drawn. It hasn’t happened since I joined the Air Force. Military life’s very ordered. You don’t forget what day it is.
I can see why Toby liked it. Even though it got him killed.
One hundred scrubs of the brush.
That’s how many you’re supposed to do. Nothing can make human skin sterile for long; the bacteria come oozing out of their hidey holes and recolonise your hands before you’ve even picked up a scalpel blade. But it’s important to do your best.
I watch my boss, Bradley. He squirts a bit of chlorhexidine on his hands, squelches it around for a second or two and then rinses. He turns off the tap with his elbow. Without ever touching the scrub brush, he’s snapping on a pair of latex gloves, grinning at me over his grey beard.
‘Come on, Jess,’ he says. ‘We’ve got six dogs to do this morning.’
I don’t say anything. I’m a freshly minted graduate, one month into the job, while Bradley’s been practising for thirty-seven years.
Everybody loves him. He can spay a bitch in eight minutes flat. None of the dogs ever get infections. It’s all about speed, according to him. Less time under anaesthetic. Less time with the abdominal cavity open. Less time searching around in there, doing unintended trauma.
Speed might do the trick for a rural mixed practice, but I want to be a specialist surgeon one day. I am methodical. Maybe that makes me slow.
By the time I get gowned up, Bradley’s already got his spay hook around one horn of the dog’s uterus.
‘Here you go,’ he says. ‘Follow it down and bring the ovary out.’
There’s two things holding an ovary to the inside of a dog’s abdomen. One of them is a ligament. You want to tear through the ligament with your fingers. The other one is an artery. You don’t want to tear that one. If you tear it, you’re in trouble.
Big trouble.
And when you’re new to surgery, they feel the same. Like digging your gloved hand into a warm basin of spaghetti and grabbing two identical strands of it. You don’t yet have the instinct for how much pressure to apply, or which direction to angle. Your heart’s in your throat, wondering if you’ve pulled too hard. Is the patient’s blood pressure normal? Are her membranes a little bit pale?
The ovary feels like ravioli in my hand. I pull. I stretch. It abruptly comes away. I bring it up towards the tiny incision that Bradley has made; an incision I feel is too small to properly examine the abdomen for an upwelling of blood.
Of course, Bradley doesn’t have to do any examining, because there’s never an upwelling of blood when he desexes a dog. He could do it blindfolded.
‘Great, great,’ he says. ‘Here’s the clamps.’
He shepherds me through two more, then leaves me to do the other three dogs by myself while he goes off into the countryside to scrape some tumours off the eyes of half a dozen Hereford cattle.
The last dog is an enormous, overweight golden retriever. I search desperately through fat for the ovaries. Every time I think I’ve found them, my hand comes up holding globs of fat. It takes forever for me to clamp and tie them.
When I’m finally finished closing the abdomen, I look up to discover a stranger in the doorway: a short, heavily muscled man in military camouflage.
‘Where’s Brad?’ the man asks.
‘Out on a call,’ I say.
The man runs a roughened palm over his salt-and-pepper buzz cut.
‘I’ll wait in his office,’ he grimaces. ‘Black tea with two sugars.’
He clomps off towards the office. I suppose he’s mistaken me for a nurse, but then, I’m wearing a surgical gown. Maybe he’s a mate of Bradley’s, but this is a staff only area, and I sure as hell didn’t go to university for five years so I could serve up black tea with two sugars.
I take a deep breath, count to ten, take off my mask and gloves and sit down at the computer to write up the surgeries.
The dog was new, they said. When they’re new, they make mistakes.
They needed more dogs than they had. Their metal detectors were suddenly useless. The new IEDs had no metal or electronic parts. Instead of hacksaw blades coming together to complete the circuit, detonating the shell, graphite blades were used with ammonium nitrate. The Australian commanders had a choice between uncertified contractors and dogs that hadn’t finished their training, and the troops were getting shirty with all the waiting around.
That dog should never have been there.
By the time I’m finished with them, no bomb detection dog is ever going to make a mistake like that again.
Bradley arrives, out of breath, in his overalls, smelling of cow.
‘Tia says Sergeant Scott is here. I came as fast as I could. Did you make him a cup of tea?’
‘No,’ I say, looking up from the computer.
‘Listen, Jess. The Air Force account is the most lucrative one that we have. If we lose it, we’re out of business. We bend over backwards for them, okay?’
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’ll make the tea.’
‘No, no. I’ll make it. I want you to go through the records of all the military working dogs we have on file. Put together an ice box with all the vaccinations that are due. I’m going out to the base in a couple of hours. You can meet me there after your consults.’
When I look through the files, I find thirty German shepherds who’ve been given exemplary care. Their teeth are cleaned yearly under anaesthetic. State-of-the-art nutrition and parasite control is institutionalised. The dogs are fully immunised for duty in South-East Asia and the Middle East. They each have a service number, but their names are taken from defunct gods or warriors of legend: Ares, Odin, Ghengis.
All of them are undesexed males.
The handlers are almost all male, too, except for LAC Nadia Lucas. Her dog is MWD Ripper.
I try to imagine how it would be working with an entire squad of Sergeant Scotts, and salute Ms Lucas’s fortitude.
Tia ducks her head around the corner.
‘There’s a poodle in consult one,’ she says. ‘Needs a heartworm injection.’
When I go into the consulting room, the white standard poodle crouching on the table coughs nervously.
‘Hi Nan,’ I say.
‘Hello, dear,’ my grandmother beams.
‘Hi Peppe,’ I say.
Peppe cowers.
I hold him gently while I examine him. He’s got a dodgy heart. Through the stethoscope, the murmur is obvious, and his lungs crackle as he breathes with all the retained fluid in them. His pulse is pathetic and when I push on his gums, it takes forever for the pinkness to come back.
I don’t say it, but I don’t think heartworms could make his heart much worse than it already is. His teeth are terrible, too. Nan feeds him soft tinned food. There’s great black and orange chunks of calculus around his molars.
‘Nan,’ I say, ‘if bacteria get into his bloodstream because of his rotten teeth and end up in his kidneys, that could be the last straw for him.’
Nan’s expression turns miserable. ‘It’s my fault, isn’t it?’
I tactfully ignore the question. ‘He can’t have an anaesthetic for a dental because of his heart,’ I say, ‘but I can try to crack some of that tartar off just while he’s sitting here on the table.’
She tries to hold him for me, but at the sight of the tartar removing forceps, Peppe goes berserk.
I talk quietly to him while I try to peel back his lips. ‘Peppe, it’s fine, everything is fine. I’m just going to scrape some muck off your back teeth. It’s a little bit cold but it doesn’t hurt. Good boy, Peppe. Good boy.’
But it’s no use. He’s stressing too much, throwing his head around. I send him home with Nan before he can turn blue and keel over.
I wish the animals could understand me. I wish I could show them that I wasn’t going to hurt them. And if I was going to hurt them, give them a needle or manipulate a sore joint, well, it would only be for a bloody good reason.
If only they knew, I could take so much better care of them.
I used to wonder about the last thoughts of the victims.
There’s transmission. That happens to the strong ones. For the rest, there’s the slow sickness and death. You can’t tell from looking which one it’s going to be. If you set out deliberately to make a human into a wolf, in all likelihood the only thing you’re going to make is a human into a corpse.
We’ve all had our little slip-ups. You can’t dwell on them. The important thing is, there’s less of us, now. One day, there’ll be none.
We’re all pleased by that. Almost all. Someone will occasionally go on a rampage, but the Council finds them and puts them out of their misery. One new werewolf could be a mistake. Ten new werewolves, well, it’s a death sentence, and that’s getting off lightly, because where there’s ten new werewolves there’s a hundred dead humans.
Funny thing is, it isn’t the wolf in them that makes the mad ones want to infect others. It’s the human.
The side that feels loneliness like a kick in the gut.
I get that.
Shit, I miss Toby so badly.
The barking can be heard from the far end of the runway.
‘They get loads of exercise,’ Tom says. ‘It’s a big perimeter. We patrol the base with the ground defence personnel. Day or night. Rain, hail or shine.’
I’m listening to the charismatic handler but not really hearing him. My knuckles are white on my seatbelt as he comes around a bend and floors the accelerator into the straight. The airfield is flat and grassy. Speed limit signs read one-tenth of Tom’s current velocity.
‘There’s a stop sign,’ I say weakly.
‘Oh yeah,’ Tom says. He swerves off the road to avoid the twin speed humps designed to force ground vehicles to stop and check for air traffic. The car shudders through the grass, crosses the perpendicular runway, hits the grass on the other side and swerves back onto the road.
Tom points at some buildings in the distance, outside the base itself.
‘There’s a vet surgery over there. Way closer than Brad’s. We used to take the dogs there. Heaps cheaper, too. But the vet was scared of the dogs. Used to examine them from the other side of the room with his back up against a wall.’
‘Not very thorough.’
‘He was on holiday, one time. One of our dogs got bit on the face by a black snake. We took him out to Brad’s. We couldn’t muzzle the dog without covering up the bite. Brad marched right up to him and grabbed his head to have a proper look. Impressed the hell out of Sergeant Scott.’
‘I bet.’
‘He started sending all the dogs to Brad, even when the other vet came back from holidays. We had some mean dogs, then. Sure couldn’t have used them for crowd control. They were vicious, mongrel things. The meanest one was Hurricane. He went in to have his teeth cleaned and Brad knocked him out for it. Only, Hurricane wasn’t completely knocked out.’
‘What happened?’
‘Oh he ripped a hole in Brad’s stomach. Twenty-eight stitches they gave him at the hospital. We liked Brad before that, but after that he was a goddamned hero.’
So that’s what it’ll take to impress Sergeant Scott. Twenty-eight stitches. Well, I’m not planning on getting bitten, but neither am I going to vaccinate any dog I haven’t given a proper examination.
Tom pulls into the parking lot beside the kennels.
I carry the cooler with the vaccines and heartworm preventative over to the trestle table where Bradley’s set up the paperwork.
The handlers bring their dogs out and form two lines. The barking doesn’t stop.
‘They’re excited,’ Tom says, ‘because of the muzzles. They only wear them for two things. One of them is getting checked by the vet.’
‘What’s the other one?’
‘Attack training. When they practise on real people.’
The first dog in my line is the only one that isn’t barking. He’s sleek, alert, and slightly bigger than the others.
His handler is a tall, dark-haired woman with John Lennon sunglasses and a peaked camouflage cap.
‘This must be Ripper,’ I say. ‘Would you mind holding his head while I listen to his heart?’
‘He won’t move,’ Nadia Lucas says, loosely holding the end of the leather leash. I start to smile and tell her to do it anyway when I’m struck by the fact that Ripper is standing, unnaturally immobile, in the perfect show position.
He’s wearing a muzzle. It can’t hurt to try. When he moves, then I can ask Nadia to hold him.
I check his eyes, his ears and his lymph nodes. I part his thick fur and palpate his abdomen. I listen to his chest, take his temperature and feel his pulse.
Ripper doesn’t move.
Shaking my head in wonder, I ask Nadia to take off Ripper’s muzzle and hold back his lips so I can see his teeth. Nadia gives a little derisive snort before complying. Ripper’s teeth are perfect. I give the injections and send them away.
‘Nadia’s brother,’ Tom whispers to me, ‘was in the infantry. Got blown up in Afghanistan. The bomb sniffing dog tried to pick up the IED. Nadia wants to transfer to Darwin to train bomb dogs but she’s got to finish her basics here first.’
‘She’s got Ripper trained pretty well.’
‘Nobody knows how she does it. It’s not just Ripper. She can control any dog. Sergeant Scott won’t pass her, but.’
‘Why not?’ I hiss back at him, but then Sergeant Scott’s at the head of the line with a dog that’s straining towards me, hyperventilating, salivating and pawing at the ground.
‘This is Stormy-Boy,’ the Sergeant informs me. ‘Son of the famous Hurricane. You heard about Hurricane?’
‘Yes,’ I say. My heart gallops with the primal fear most people feel on confronting a snarling wolf, but this is it. I force myself to smile. This is my moment to show I can do the job.
Scott seizes the dog by the collar, getting it in a headlock while I make my observations. There’s not much use trying to take Storm’s temperature while he’s overexcited. I pull on a glove and squeeze some lubricant onto a finger.
‘You finished yet?’ Scott barks over his shoulder at me.
‘Got to check his prostate,’ I reply, seizing the dog’s tail.
As soon as I insert a finger, Storm goes ballistic. It’s all Scott and Tom can do to keep holding him.
‘That’s it, we’re done,’ the Sergeant says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I haven’t finished.’
‘You bloody well have.’
‘I’m sorry, but this is an entire male dog and he only gets checked once a year. He could die if he’s got a tumour and it’s been missed this time around.’
There’s laughter in the line behind Scott.
Wolf-whistles.
Bestiality jokes.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ the Sergeant says, bending back down to tackle the dog, whose whites are showing around its crazed eyes.
The new vet’s so green.
Going through the motions like she knows what she’s doing, but would she know an abnormality if she felt one?
Let’s just hope she had good teachers that took her out of the lab and into the world. Because you can’t work out what living tissue feels like if you’ve been taught with textbooks and virtual reality any more than a dog from outside the ADF that’s been taught to retrieve mail packages full of drugs can work out not to bring a land mine back to its handler.
When all the dogs are vaccinated, Bradley claps me on the shoulder.
‘Good job, partner,’ he says. ‘We’ve finished early.’
Sergeant Scott comes up and shakes Bradley’s hand.
‘It wasn’t easy or cheap, but we’ve implemented all your recommendations, Brad.’
‘I can tell. The dogs are in excellent condition.’
‘I’d like you to come out and give another talk on first aid in combat situations. We’ve got some new handlers that missed out on the last one.’
‘I noticed. The woman. Nadia? Pretty good, is she?’
Scott turns immediately sour.
‘Women,’ he says, as though I’m not even there. ‘She’ll be knocked up and out of the squad in no time. There’s no point teaching them anything. They’re gone before you know it.’
I take the return ride to the surgery in Bradley’s car.
‘How was that, then?’ he asks, full of good cheer.
‘I don’t think much of Sergeant Scott,’ I say. ‘Tom’s alright.’
‘Give the Sergeant a break,’ Bradley says. ‘He hasn’t been well.’
‘What’s wrong with him? A carrot up his arse?’
‘You could say that. He’s got cancer. An osteosarcoma arising from the fourth vertebra of his tailbone. They can’t excise the tumour and get clean margins without leaving him with permanent faecal incontinence and a high likelihood of recurrent infections.’
‘Oh,’ I say in a small voice.
‘It was picked up on a yearly prostate check. Apparently his GP, a new graduate, missed it the first time around.’
‘What’s going to happen? Will he try surgery anyway?’
‘No. He said he’d rather die with dignity, though I don’t think it’s going to be dignified either way. They were looking at Tom for his replacement, but the kid keeps getting into drunken brawls at the local and being demoted.’
I think: That explains why he hates me. Also, Nadia should be the one to replace Sergeant Scott, but there’s no point even saying that aloud.
It’s never going to happen.
News Flash: The old bastard’s going to kick the bucket.
But I haven’t finished with him yet.
He thinks he’s keeping me back out of spite, because he’s jealous of what I can do. In fact, he’s still got plenty to teach me. A day’s going to come when I’ll want to teach others to train bomb detection dogs. Problem is, nobody but a werewolf has the skill of being able to put images directly into a dog’s mind, to calm them down or stir them up just by thinking at them.
I need to know all of Michael Scott’s little tricks, his devious ways, the things he feels so deeply in his bones that he’s forgotten he ever had to learn them.
I’ve decided to take the chance. He’s dying anyway, right? And if it doesn’t work, well, I’ll tell the others it was an accident. There’s certainly no love lost between us.
The phone wakes me.
It’s 2AM.
The full moon hangs, huge, outside my window. I live in a unit above the veterinary surgery. It makes being on after hours duty that much more bearable. When people’s cats start vomiting in the middle of the night, all I have to do is crawl into my clothes, sink a cup of coffee and stumble down the stairs.
The call centre connects me to the client. It’s the RAAF.
One of the dogs is distressed, restless and panting.
I tell them to bring it straight down.
Fifteen minutes later, Tom lifts Ripper out of the back of the doggies’ truck and sets him down on the paved driveway. He’s unsteady on his feet. Neck extended, he retches uncontrollably.
‘He’s in a bad way,’ Tom says. ‘Nobody knows where Nadia is. Sergeant Scott isn’t answering his phone, either.’
The alert, obedient dog that I vaccinated at the base is gone. Ripper, despite trembling legs that won’t hold him up, growls and lays his ears back as I examine him on the treatment room table. Tom holds the dog’s jaw shut with one hand and hugs his chest with the other. He’s got a weak, thready pulse and pale membranes.
‘It’s serious,’ I say.
‘He got a clean bill of health yesterday.’
I panic, wondering if I missed a life-threatening heart problem in my examination. All the dogs were barking and jumping around. Except Ripper. If any dog had been checked properly, it was Ripper.
‘Put on the lead suit and gloves,’ I say. ‘I’m going to need him lying down on his right side on the x-ray table.’
Radiographs clearly show the displaced, air-filled pylorus.
‘It’s gastric dilatation and volvulus,’ I say. ‘We mostly see it in big, deep-chested dogs like German shepherds and Great Danes. Plenty of room in there to move. The stomach expands and twists. Air can get in but it can’t get out. A bunch of different blood supplies get cut off. I’ve got to get his stomach untwisted or he’ll go into shock and die.’
‘Right now?’
‘Right now. First thing is to see if I can get a tube down his throat and decompress that way. Then I’ll go in and sew his stomach to his abdominal wall so it can’t get twisted again.’
He shuffles around a bit in his combat boots, starts to say something, decides against it, and then says it.
‘You don’t want to call Brad or anything?’
I do, in fact, very much want to call him. But I happen to know he’s interstate.
‘I’ll need a nurse,’ I say, ‘to monitor the anaesthetic. I’ll call Tia. But first I’m going to get Ripper on some IV fluids, get his blood pressure up a bit. You can help me place the catheter. Hold up his front leg.’
‘Brad doesn’t usually shave the leg,’ Tom protests. ‘It takes ages to grow back and the boss doesn’t like them to look sick when they’re on patrol.’
‘Hair removal,’ I explain, mercilessly clipping a long rectangle of fur, ‘gets rid of a lot of dirt and bacteria, decreasing the amount of muck that’s going to get pushed into Ripper’s bloodstream when I stick the needle in. It also increases visibility for finding the vein, which will be flat and almost undetectable because of his shockingly low blood pressure.’
‘Oh, right,’ Tom says, brightening. ‘Just so I can tell that to Sergeant Scott. If he ever answers his phone.’
The phone rings in his office but he doesn’t get up.
He started to bandage the bite, but halfway through he keeled over on the couch in the lunch room, breathing deeply.
I sit back on my haunches in the open doorway. I howl at the painfully beautiful moon.
The dogs go crazy. I’m distantly aware of the danger. If anybody else comes, they’ll be easy prey, unless I’ve got a thing for them, and I haven’t got a thing for anybody, not even Tom. He looks too much like Toby, and he’s done a tour of Afghanistan as well. Every time I look at him, I wonder why Toby got blown to hell and Tom didn’t.
It’s difficult to hold thoughts in my head. I let them drift away before an onslaught of scents and sounds: frogs in far hollows, machine parts being oiled and turned, boots in long grass. The small, sleepy, feathery smell of swallows under the eaves. The musk of the male dogs, their urine, the meat on their breath from the evening meal.
You don’t Change for a while, you forget the clean, cutting enhancement of your senses. The joy of being alive. But the price tag is too high. I feel the thrill but then I remember that boy who followed me out of the club. All he wanted was my phone number. He was too shy to ask for it in front of my friends. The dancing had been frantic; I’d sweated most of my SPF 30+ away and forgotten to reapply.
That boy was the same age as Toby when he died. When they both died. Maybe he had a sister, too, who loved him. Maybe she’s hollow inside, like me.
The moon sets and I’m naked in the dark.
It’s cold.
Nadia arrives first thing in the morning.
Sweeping past the staff only sign, she goes unerringly to the cage where Ripper is sleeping.
I follow her, bleary-eyed.
‘What have you done to him?’ Nadia asks.
‘Surgical rotation and permanent gastropexy,’ I say.
At least, I hope that’s what I’ve done. It was my first one and I’m not sure I’ve stuck the stomach on well enough. But I did my best.
Ripper wakes and whines and thumps his tail at the sight of his handler.
‘Good,’ Nadia says. ‘That’s good.’
I’m startled by the praise. For a moment I wonder if she’s talking to Ripper and not me.
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here,’ she says.
‘Tom was good with him. He should be able to go back to the base after he’s finished that bag of fluids. I’ll get the invoice printed out and give you a copy of the treatment record for Sergeant Scott.’
‘Sergeant Scott isn’t well. I took him to hospital earlier this morning. I’ll be looking after things until he gets out.’
‘Oh,’ I say uncomfortably. ‘I hope he’s better soon.’
‘He won’t be. You know a new grad missed his tumour the first time around?’
‘Bradley told me,’ I say. ‘I suppose everybody makes mistakes.’
It was a mistake. An accident.
When I came home from school, the big brick house was empty. Our parents were doctors. We didn’t see much of them. Toby was six years older than me. He looked out for me. Cooked a mean mushroom omelette.
Wednesday nights were footy practice, though. He wasn’t home. I got my bike out and went riding in the cul-de-sac with the other kids from the street. We rode on all the front lawns except for Mr Heery’s, because he put a rope around it and put mean letters in our letterboxes if we went under it.
When we got bored we started daring each other to go under the rope. I went the furthest. All the way to Mr Heery’s front door. It crashed open and he stared down at me, peeled-grape eyes in a pickled face with crazy white hair everywhere.
‘Nadia Lucas,’ he said. ‘As loved and wanted as bird shit on a barbecue.’
I ran away from him instinctively, springing over that rope like a gazelle while the others laughed and melted away to their houses.
My house was still dark. The street lights came on. I could smell onions cooking in the house next door. The full moon came up and I didn’t go inside. I sat on the doorstep, holding the handlebars of my bike, getting angrier and angrier. I was loved and wanted. It was just that my parents were busy and important and Toby had footy practice.
I got so worked up that I decided to put bird shit on Mr Heery’s barbecue. I scraped some off the top of our front fence with a steel kebab skewer, climbed under Mr Heery’s rope, advanced up his manicured lawn and sneaked down the side of his house.
The tall side gate had a bolt that only opened from the inside, but my hand was small enough to fit through the wire.
When I opened it, a huge white dog knocked me down. It went for my throat. I stuck the skewer into its open mouth.
Mr Heery was brain damaged. His family waited two years before they pulled the plug and he died.
I should have died, too. Toby stayed in hospital with me for a week.
‘You’re strong,’ he said to me. ‘You’ll make it.’
And I did. In a manner of speaking.
It seems like déjà vu.
The shrill phone at 2AM. The RAAF base on the other end. I think: It must be Ripper. He’s got another GDV. I did something wrong and now, a month later, the adhesion has failed.
‘Which dog?’ I ask huskily, pulling on my clothes with the phone jammed between shoulder and ear.
‘Oh, it’s not one of the working dogs,’ Nadia Lucas says. ‘It’s my dog. Mike. He’s got a lump I’d like you to look at.’
‘What sort of lump? Is it painful?’
‘It’s not painful.’
‘Maybe you could bring Mike in first thing tomorrow.’
Nadia’s voice turns cold.
‘No. He needs to be seen right now.’
I hesitate. I recall what Bradley said about bending over backwards for the Air Force, even if this isn’t a military working dog.
‘I’ll see you soon,’ I say.
I shuffle down the stairs and unlock the clinic, flicking on a few lights and eliciting a few plaintive whuffs and miaows from hospitalised snail-bait-guzzling puppies and overnight boarding cats. I check their drip lines and litter trays and pet them as I pass. One of the computers has to be booted up to give me access to the file.
Mike doesn’t have one. Nadia’s never brought him to us before.
I line a few things up in the consulting room. Clippers, for shaving the lump. Cotton balls soaked in alcohol, for swabbing it. A needle and syringe for aspirating some cells and microscope slides on which to spray them. A cigarette lighter to fix the cells onto the slides. Stains for giving them colour. Maybe I’ll see bacteria. Maybe fat. Maybe cancerous white cells, the blood of a hematoma or the clear fluid of a cyst. I figure any dog of Nadia’s will sit quietly while I take all the samples I need.
He explodes through the front door, heavy head fringed with brown and grey fur, yellow eyes gleaming. Nadia follows with the leash wrapped around her forearm, red-faced and thin-lipped.
I open my mouth to speak, but Mike launches himself at me. The leash snaps taut. His back arches. He lands on his side and immediately starts to roll, front paws scrabbling at his muzzle.
‘He’s going to get that off,’ I observe.
‘Sit!’ Nadia shouts, hauling on the leash. Mike’s the size of an Alaskan malamute, but the stick-thin limbs, straight tail and long muzzle are all wrong. If I didn’t know it was impossible, I’d swear he was a timber wolf.
‘One moment,’ I say. I go to the surgery, where a thick, goose-feather quilt has been spread lovingly over the heating pads on the table, ready for a new patient.
When I get back to reception, Mike is still rolling and clawing at his face.
I throw the quilt over him and lie on the thrashing shape. Nadia gets the idea and joins me on the floor. I ease the edge of the quilt back so that his nose is poking out.
‘Where’s the lump?’ I ask.
‘On his tail,’ Nadia replies.
We switch places.
The lump is hard and immobile. That’s not good.
‘Can we carry him into the consulting room?’
‘You’ll have to sedate him.’
‘I don’t know if a sedative will touch the sides, frankly.’
‘Then knock him out.’
‘I need his weight and his vital signs.’
He is forty-three kilos with a heart like a horse. I give him an intravenous anaesthetic and between us we shift him to the consulting room table.
Nadia’s phone rings.
‘I have to take this outside,’ she says, taking her sunglasses out of her pocket, leaving me alone with the anaesthetised dog.
I shave the lump on his tail. I swab it and let it dry. When I insert the needle, the lump feels crunchy inside, like bone or calcium deposits.
The dog’s head whips around. Its teeth graze my hand as I jerk back. The snap of his jaw still resounds in the room as the shaggy muzzle lowers itself back to the table, succumbing to the drug, eyes closing.
I stare at the shallow laceration across the back of my knuckles. I scrub the injury with iodine, thinking of Hurricane and Bradley’s twenty-eight stitches. I’ve gotten off lightly and should have been more careful.
Still, I don’t like to muzzle a dog while he’s under. Gingerly, I replace the pulse oximeter probe on his tongue, waiting for it to read his heart rate and oxygen saturation levels before turning to the microscope slides.
I hang up the phone.
The night air has a tang. The temptress moon hangs in cloud-pillows. I go to the car to check the weather forecast. We’ve still got an hour. I slap more sunscreen onto the places where Mike’s fur has rubbed it thin.
What could have been my biggest mistake ever has turned out just as I planned. Even if it was a bit tough to catch him and bring him in before the Council caught wind of him. I’ll explain to him later what’s happened and why.
There’s no time for that now. I march back towards the clinic.
No mistakes tonight.
‘So chop it off, then,’ Nadia says.
I blink at her over the microscope.
‘But I need the cancer to be staged by the pathology lab. I need to take a biopsy first. X-rays of the long bones. What if it’s spread to the tail from somewhere else?’
‘I can’t afford all that,’ she snaps. ‘Just cut his tail off, will you? He’s sleeping now, isn’t he? I don’t want to get charged for two anaesthetics.’
‘It’s not like carving a roast,’ I reply hotly. ‘I can’t do it here in the consulting room. I’ll need a nurse to monitor the anaesthetic, if I’m going to surgery, and everything costs twice as much after hours as it would in the morning.’
‘I’m a trained vet nurse. I’ll monitor the anaesthetic.’
‘You?’
‘Yeah. I quit my job at the animal emergency centre and joined the Air Force when my brother was killed in action. So. I’ll set up the rebreather with isoflurane and check the system for leaks, okay? Get going! I’m due back at the base in an hour. You’ve got thirty minutes to finish the surgery.’
‘You’re joking,’ I say, but she isn’t.
It takes five minutes for me to fill Mike up with antibiotics, get him intubated and properly positioned in ventral recumbency on the table. It takes another five minutes for me to get his tail clipped and prepped. Five more for me to scrub in.
‘He’s taking twenty breaths a minute,’ Nadia says, emptying a scalpel blade into my sterile instrument pack. ‘Heart rate’s good. No blink. No swallow. Chop, chop!’
I make a double V incision in the skin distal to the transection site. The lump is attached to the bone, to caudal vertebrae IV. I’m going to remove number III as well, leaving number II and the levator ani muscle attachment intact, so there’ll be no incontinence or herniation.
It takes me ten minutes to carefully dissect through the soft tissues. There are two big arteries to ligate and six smaller ones.
I use dissolvable suture material to tie off the median and lateral caudal arteries and veins. It’s more difficult to isolate the smaller blood vessels.
‘Bing,’ Nadia says. ‘Time’s up, Ben Carson. You’re not separating Siamese twins, here. Cut, damn it. Cut, cut, cut.’
‘I can’t just cut,’ I shout at her.
She brandishes the cautery wand.
‘Cut! Before I do it for you!’
I slash through the joint. The tail comes away. Without touching anything else, Nadia sears the six bleeding blood vessels until the bleeding stops. I’m aghast at the charred, dead areas she’s created.
‘Is that how you did it at the emergency centre?’
Nadia’s already opening packets of suture material over my pack.
‘Close it up already. And I don’t mean plastic surgery. Just make sure it’s going to heal cleanly.’
I glare at her, but Bradley did say it was all about speed. I pick up the needle and forceps.
He changes back just as I’m tucking him into bed.
When I get home, I bury what’s left of the tail in the back garden.
A week later, I’m handing my Amex over the front counter of the vet surgery when Bradley catches sight of me. He comes over to ask me about Sergeant Scott.
‘How’s Mike doing?’
‘Pretty good,’ I say. ‘They did a scan and the cancer’s gone.’
‘Gone? You mean shrinking.’
‘No, I mean gone. Tailbone too. Like they all just magically dissolved.’
Most folks with tailbone problems don’t have the luxury of turning into dogs. Even if they did, most folks don’t know that the fused caudal vertebrae stuck on the end of a human sacrum has a direct anatomical equivalent in the dog which is much easier to access.
There are no werewolf vets that I know of.
Something is happening to me.
Peppe sits, calm and relaxed, on the table while I clean his teeth. Not just with the forceps but the scaler and polisher. Through the whining of the dental machine and the dampness of its cooling water spray, I extend to him my reassurance and, as pack leader, my insistence on compliance. He extends to me his trust.
When his teeth are clean, I scrub up for surgery. Without bothering about the scrub brush, I squeeze some chlorhex onto my hands and squelch it around for a bit.
It’s all about speed, really. And I don’t think I will go into surgical specialisation. I can do more good here, in a community like this one.
Besides, Bradley and Nadia are really good teachers.