Page 81 of Duty Preserved

The animal needed me. There was no one else. No one but me.

Suddenly, I noticed Donovan was beside me. I hadn’t called for him. He was just there, close enough that his arm nearly touched mine.

He didn’t ask what was wrong. He didn’t tell me it was safe.

“Antiseptic first,” he said. Quiet, level. “Then the forceps. That’s what you said.”

My own words. The sequence I’d run through while loading the kit, spoken back to me in his voice.

I took a step. The ground held. I took another.

He walked beside me until we were standing over the bull.

I knelt.

Up close, the infection was worse than the binoculars had shown. The tissue around the gash was necrotic, gray-green and slick, and the wound had deepened where the infection had eaten into the muscle beneath the hide. I uncapped the antiseptic and poured. My hands shook, and some of it ran over my gloves instead of into the wound.

Donovan steadied the bottle. One hand over mine, just long enough for my grip to firm. Then he let go, and his eyes went to the bull’s head.

“Breathing’s steady. Ears haven’t moved. He’s out.”

He stayed at my shoulder and watched the bull so I didn’t have to. Every shallow breath, every microtwitch of ear or trunk. He read it and reported it, and I kept my eyes on the wound because his were on everything else. When I needed gauze, he had it ready. When I reached for the irrigation syringe, it was already in his hand. He didn’t talk except to tell me what the bull was doing, and what the bull was doing was staying down.

My hands shook for the first three minutes. Then they finally steadied.

I debrided the dead tissue, working the forceps into the margins where the necrotic layer met viable muscle. I cut it free in strips. I flushed the cavity with antiseptic until the irrigation ran clear, then packed it with gauze. The long-acting antibiotic went into the thick muscle of the hindquarter. I checked the site once more. Wound clean. Drainage running. The tissue beneath was pink and alive.

“Done,” I said and sat back on my heels.

We backed off. All of us, putting distance between ourselves and the bull before the reversal went in. I loaded the dart, and Zayn placed it from thirty meters.

Then we waited.

The reversal worked faster than the induction. His ears moved first. Small rotations, testing the air. His trunk twitched. One foreleg drew up beneath him.

We stood by the vehicles. Baraka had the backup rifle across his arm. Zayn smiled seeing the job well done. I stood beside Donovan with my kit on the ground at my feet, and my hands were finally still.

I turned them over. The gloves were stained brown with antiseptic and tacky with fluid, but underneath, the fingers were steady.

“Does it go away?” I asked. I didn’t look at him.

“The shaking?” He was quiet for a second. “It just takes time.”

“You say that like you’re sure.”

“I am.”

“How?”

He wasn’t searching for the right words. He had them. He was choosing how many to let go.

“Losing someone changes the way you move through the work,” he said. “There’s no going back to who you were before you lost them. But you learn how to move forward with the new weight.”

He wasn’t guessing. He wasn’t offering advice from a safe distance. He was speaking from inside something that had changed him, but I didn’t know what it was.

I almost asked. The question was right there. What happened to you?

Unsurprisingly, he didn’t answer the question that I never asked.