Chapter 4: Breech

The heifer was backward, with one hoof out and the other leg folded, and the owner had gone white in the face.

Dena had the chains laid out on a clean towel.

I was in my coveralls with my hair wet from the shortest shower of my life, and Joss was beside me in yesterday's henley.

He had said nothing on the drive over except "Tell me what you need."

"Hold her head," I said.

He took the heifer's head against his chest.

He talked to her low, a steady nonsense of "easy, girl, easy."

She stopped thrashing.

I went in to the shoulder.

Calving is not delicate work.

I found the second leg, cupped the hoof in my palm so it would not tear her, and drew it forward.

Dena looped the chains.

"On three," I said, and we pulled with the heifer's push.

It took twenty minutes of grunting and swearing.

Then the calf slid out onto the straw all at once, wet and steaming and not breathing.

I cleared its nose and rubbed its ribs hard with a handful of straw.

Dena swung it by the back legs to drain it.

It coughed.

It sneezed, and a sound came out of the owner that was half laugh and half sob.

I sat back on my heels with my arms slimed to the elbow.

Joss let go of the heifer's head and looked at me over the top of it.

He didn't say a thing, and I knew exactly what his face meant.

Behind me, Dena said, "Oh my God."

I turned around.

She was staring at the collar of Joss's henley, which had slipped sideways.

A perfect crescent of my teeth was showing, purple at the edges.

"Doc," Dena said. "Is that a hickey?"

"It's a bite."

"On the Beta of the pack."

"Dena."

"I'm just saying. In eighteen years of friendship I have never seen you leave a mark on anything but a vaccine site."

Joss ran a hand through his hair, which did nothing to hide the grin on his face.

"She's got a good arm," he said.

Dena clapped one hand over her mouth and walked away, and I could hear her shrieking quietly into a feed sack.

The owner took his heifer and calf out into the pale morning, and the barn went still.

I stood at the trough and scrubbed my arms with the green soap.

Joss came up behind me.

He pulled his henley over his head and ran cold water over his forearms beside mine.

I tried not to look at his back.

I looked.

It was wide and sloped and strong, and my own teeth were not the only marks on it.

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