Chapter 10
Sloane
I’m losing the perimeter.
Not all at once. I’d notice all at once.
I have a plan for all at once. It’s happening the slow way, the erosion way, the way a riverbank loses ground to water so gradually you don’t clock it until you look down, and the bank isn’t where you thought it was.
One conversation at a time. One rancher asking for me specifically.
One morning in an apartment kitchen watching a firefighter make coffee wrong and feeling something entirely too domestic about it.
I’m a veterinarian. I understand slow-moving damage.
The fire season has made the clinic busy in a way I didn’t anticipate.
Smoke-inhalation cases first, three barn cats and a horse from a ranch near the southern drainage that got caught in the Elk Creek smoke corridor before the wind shifted.
Then livestock evacuations: a rancher named Morrison calling at six-thirty a.m. to ask if I can take four cattle overnight because the advisory area expanded.
I can’t take four cattle, I explain, and then I call the Breslin ranch, which has space, and I coordinate the transport, and two hours later everyone’s where they need to be.
I stop at the Breslin ranch on the way back to check on the Morrison animals and end up spending an hour on Duchess, who is colicky and opinionated and has decided that I am the only one she trusts to handle her.
There’s a difference between being useful and being needed, and I’ve been thinking about that distinction for two years without quite landing on it.
In Idaho I was useful—competent, professional, dependable.
In eastern Washington the same. Here something has shifted in the last few weeks: people aren’t calling the practice, they’re asking for me.
“I don’t let just anyone in,” the Breslin ranch hand says, watching as the cattle move through the gate.
“Animals are usually reasonable,” I say, which is something I believe and also a thing that applies to more of my life than I usually admit to.
By Thursday I have four clients who weren’t on my books two weeks ago, and all of them got here through the same channel: word of mouth from someone else I helped, a chain of referrals I didn’t start and can’t see the end of.
The Breslin ranch hand mentioned me to a neighbor with a sick goat.
The neighbor mentioned me to the Copper Ridge Grange newsletter.
Apparently there is a Grange newsletter with a veterinary recommendation section, which is a thing I didn’t know about and am mildly alarmed by.
The kid at the feed store asks me on Tuesday if I’m “the new vet” and I say no, I’m a locum, I’m covering for Dr. Fenn, and the kid says what’s a locum and I tell him it means temporary, and the kid says “Oh” in a tone that’s already storing the information.
This is how small towns work, I understand, the lateral network, each person knowing the right other person, the whole system running on trust built over decades I wasn’t here for. I borrowed some of that trust and now I’m not sure what I owe in return.
The practice is starting to feel less like someone else’s and more like something else I’m not ready to name.
I notice this when I rearrange the supply storage in the back room.
Dr. Fenn’s system made sense, probably, when she set it up, but it’s not how I think, and after eight weeks the mild friction of it has accumulated into something I’m tired of working around.
I spend twenty minutes reorganizing it. I step back and look at the result.
I catch myself thinking: I’d put the second exam table against the north wall, not the east. Better light.
I don’t have a second exam table. This isn’t my practice. There’s no decision to be made about second exam tables.
I have a contract until Dr. Fenn comes back. I have a system that works, and the system does not involve planning where to put hypothetical furniture in a practice that belongs to someone else.
I close the supply closet and go back to the records I was supposed to be doing.
The dog has been boarding with me all week.
The station has the Elk Creek standby situation, which means reduced non-essential personnel, which means someone has to take care of the dog.
He’s settled into the apartment the way he settles into every room—completely, without asking, as if the question of whether he belongs there has already been resolved and he was the one who resolved it.
He sleeps near the front door, some instinct about being available in case of emergencies.
He’s available. He’s been available since day one.
He’s the most available dog I’ve ever met.
I started calling him by name at some point this week.
Not the crew’s name or Ivy’s name or any of the names in the ongoing debate that apparently everyone in the station has an opinion about.
My name for him, the one that’s just between us, that I use when I say good morning in the morning and good night when I turn the light out.
I’m not going to say it out loud because naming things is a form of claiming them and I’m not doing that.
Thursday evening I’m doing records at the kitchen table, and I open the locum app.
The dog, from his spot near the door, raises his head.
“Don’t,” I say.
He gets up, crosses the room, and puts his head in my lap.
“You don’t get a vote. You’re a dog.”
He sighs. I’ve heard the dog sigh before, the editorial sighs, the pointed ones. This one has weight. This one is the sigh of a creature who has arrived at a considered opinion and wants me to know it. He is an extremely good communicator for someone with no words.
“I’m only looking,” I say. “I’m allowed to look.”
He sighs again.
“The Spokane practice is very well-reviewed,” I say. “It’s a good volume mix. It would be professionally appropriate.”
He puts more of his weight into my lap. He is a medium-sized dog so his weight is, in context, quite significant.
I close the locum app to appease the dog.
This is not the dog’s fault. This is not the dog’s victory either, I tell myself, though the dog looks like he might disagree.
The feed store kid is at the clinic on Friday because his mother brings in a rabbit with an embedded nail—nothing serious, a quick procedure, ten minutes of my time.
The kid is there watching with the expression of someone who’s been inside a hardware store and now has opinions about every type of nail.
“Does it hurt her?” he asks.
“Probably. But less than it would if we left it.”
“How do you know what hurts a rabbit?”
“You watch for the signs. Vocalization, flinching, changes in behavior. Animals are harder to read than people because they can’t say ‘this hurts,’ so you learn the language.”
He considers this. He’s maybe fourteen, serious-faced. “Did you have to go to school for as long as a human doctor?”
“Longer, for the medical portion. Less for residency.”
“That’s unfair. Animals can’t even tell you what’s wrong.”
“Actually,” I say, clipping the nail carefully, “that’s easier in some ways. People tell you what’s wrong and half the time they’re describing the symptoms they noticed, not the thing that’s causing it. With animals, you have to find the actual problem.”
He turns this over. “Is that why you like it?”
I don’t ask myself that question as often as I should. “Partly,” I say.
“Do you know a lot about, like, all animals? Or just some?”
“All of them, some. Some of them, a lot.”
He nods like this is useful information. I finish the clip, apply a small antibiotic, and put the rabbit back into the carrier. The kid watches the whole process like he’s taking notes.
“I’m thinking about being a vet,” he says, on the way out.
“Good,” I say. “Study biology. Don’t give up on math.”
I watch him, his mom, and the rabbit walk out. I stand in the empty exam room and then go to make coffee. It occurs to me on the way that I’ve been standing in this town long enough to be accidentally mentoring someone. This is data. I’m not going to examine the data right now. But it’s still data.
Hanna finds me on Saturday.
Not by accident. I’ve been around Hanna enough to understand that Hanna doesn’t do anything by accident.
She comes in with a kit-supply exchange, the official reason, some items the station medical kit needed restocked and some expired supplies coming back.
This is something Dr. Fenn has been doing for years.
Hanna leans against the exam table like she has all the time in the world, which is how I know she scheduled this.
“How’s business?” Hanna asks.
“Busy,” I say. “Fire season is brutal.”
“Are you managing okay? I know Dr. Fenn’s setup isn’t exactly intuitive.”
I pause for half a beat. “I rearranged the storage. Don’t tell her.”
Something moves through Hanna’s expression, subtle, calibrated, the tell of a person who is running scenarios in her head. “Did you.”
“It was practical. The original system made sense for her workflow, not mine.”
“Mm,” Hanna says, with a neutrality that isn’t neutral.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing. You rearranged the storage. You’re adapting the practice to your workflow. That’s—professional.”
“That’s what I said.”
Hanna lets it rest for a moment. She knows how to wait out a silence. “How long have you been doing locum work?”
“Two years.”
“Where before here?”
“Idaho, mostly. Eastern Washington before that.”
“Never anywhere twice?”
“Never anywhere twice. I did a placement in Wyoming when I was just starting out.”
Hanna nods. “What made you start moving?”
This is a question people ask sometimes, and I have an answer for it, something about wanting diverse clinical experience, learning different practice styles, the professional value of exposure to varied caseloads. The answer is technically true.
“I wanted the experience,” I say.
Hanna looks at me like she’s heard a technically true answer before.