High Country Hero

by Ford, Holly

  Moving through the intersection at last, Lennie sighed. She still didn’t know nearly enough. There was no such thing as enough, not when she had the life of an animal that meant the whole world to somebody in her hands. She’d learned that much, at least. That, and to work with what she’d got. But where? Ten years from now, did she want to be at the Royal? In Sydney? London? The States? Should she work towards making partner? Or try to build something herself, a clinic she could run her own way? In which case, she could forget about buying a house…

  The traffic had crawled to a halt again. Lennie watched a skateboarder clatter through it.

  ‘Priorities,’ she said to Pesh. ‘We need to set some.’

  And the great thing—Lennie chewed her lip—the great thing was that with winter in Kimpton ahead of them, there wasn’t likely to be much else for her to do.

  Three

  Standing on the lawn of her grandparents’ house five weeks later, Lennie gazed at the cloud pouring over the ridge, a thick white pall obliterating the bush, the sky above it a faultless blue. The first time she’d seen it roll in like this, she’d gone running to her grandmother, thinking the next-door valley must be on fire. That would have been over twenty years ago, now. Back then, this place her grandparents had carved out in the foothills outside of Kimpton had been almost brand new, its cedar and brick a rich, bright brown, the manicured garden surrounding her still a work in progress.

  Over the course of the many, many school holidays that had followed—she and Julia flying in from Auckland, Melbourne, Wellington, wherever her mother’s research took them—Lennie had watched the house weather into the bush just the way her grandmother had always planned, silvery as the hunks of river driftwood that decorated the garden.

  She’d always loved coming here, always hated to go. When Julia was offered the chance to go to Antarctica, Lennie had been as excited about spending a whole year in Kimpton with Lois and Jim as her mother had been about spending one with the team at Scott Base. And when that year was up, Lennie had begged her mother to let her stay on at Kimpton High School for her final year. Her Kimpton friends had thought she was mad—she’d been the only one not in a rush to get the hell out of the valley.

  Now those friends were long gone, scattered all over the globe. She was the only one to come back.

  She glanced over her shoulder. In the kitchen window behind her, framed by the little pink blossoms of a wildly rambling rose Lennie could remember helping Lois to plant, her grandfather was pouring his Sunday night Scotch.

  What she’d told Sam was true. She’d been so happy growing up here. The rounds of the local farms with Jim, the chores of the season on the ten-hectare block—feeding out, lambing, drenching, trimming hooves, caring for the ever-changing line-up of sick, injured and orphaned beasts that seemed to come Jim and Lois’s way. And Lois waiting, always, when she got home. No dashing, no deadlines, no stress that Lennie could see. A day at the races was a major event, takeaways from one of the town’s two burger bars were a once-a-month treat, and the only things in the whole Kimpton Valley that ever seemed to go fast were the thoroughbreds on the Herrick track.

  In the house behind her, Lennie heard the radio come on, the thwack of a cricket ball and the roar of a crowd spilling out over the garden. She’d only been here one night, but already the rooftop bar Del had dragged her to after her farewell dinner in Sydney felt like a dream. Why did it always take leaving a city to make you do the things you should have been doing in it for years?

  Lennie bent down to scoop up the paunchy tabby cat who had been batting at the laces of her sneakers as he rolled on the grass. ‘Smudge?’ The old amber eyes regarded her evenly as she met his gaze. ‘What the hell have I done?’

  At the sound of her voice, Pesh, lying enthroned among the feature rocks at the top of the garden, got up and strolled down the slope to lean against Lennie’s legs. Lennie tucked Smudge into the crook of her arm and rubbed Pesh’s ear with her other hand. Sinking her fingers into the dog’s thick white fur, she pulled out a beech twig, and Pesh looked up at her with a wolfy grin. At least somebody was wholeheartedly pleased to be here. Then again, the charms of the Kimpton Valley were all new to Pesh. She wasn’t the one going backwards.

  •

  ‘Try not to lose any clients on your first day,’ Jim O’Donnell said, in the Central Vets lunchroom bright and early the next morning.

  Lennie clipped the name tag to her white coat. That stern look hadn’t fooled her since she could walk. ‘In which sense?’ she teased him.

  ‘Don’t scare them away.’ Draining his mug of instant coffee, her grandfather set it down on the table and studied her thoughtfully, those piercing eyes of his narrowing. ‘You’re far better qualified to be here than I am, you don’t need advice from an old barber-surgeon like me—’

  ‘Yadda yadda.’ Lennie rolled her eyes. God, she could murder a real coffee right now. Was there anywhere around here she could get one?

  ‘—but you’re not in city practice anymore,’ Jim continued. ‘Nobody coming through that door is looking for Harley Street, alright?’

  ‘Okay.’ Lennie pointed an ankle at him, displaying the low, block-heeled pumps she’d put on to please him. ‘Want to check my shoes?’

  Always wear good shoes. When she’d sat him down after graduation from vet school to ask his advice, that was what he’d told her. People trust good shoes. It’s a mark of respect for your profession.

  ‘Ten out of ten for footwear.’ Jim suppressed a grin before returning to his theme. ‘Just remember that rural people are realists. We haven’t forgotten the circle of life out here.’

  The Circle of Life? Lennie hid a smile of her own.

  Her grandfather seemed unaware of the reference. ‘Not everybody believes in postponing the inevitable. Especially if it costs them their life savings.’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘We need to be practical.’ Hauling his spare frame up from the table, he shrugged on his lab coat and straightened the tag.

  ‘I’ll do my best—’ she grinned ‘—Jim.’

  For a moment her grandfather stood looking at her, warmth growing in his eyes. ‘It’s good to have you here, Dak.’

  •

  Four hours later, already wishing she was back in her hospital Skechers, Lennie finished typing her notes and, returning her stethoscope to her top pocket, opened the door of the consult room to greet her last client of the morning. She was past expecting there to be an actual patient on the other side. So far, the only things with four legs she’d seen in the waiting room were the chairs. Her examinations had taken place on the trays of utes, in the cages of trailers, in the back of a horse truck…Anywhere but on the table. Seeing a working dog from Broken Creek Station next on the list, she was ready to be led back outside.

  Glancing up, her smile at the ready, Lennie stopped short. Occupying the waiting room were an elderly blind man and a semi-conscious huntaway dog so old she could barely recognise what it was. But those weren’t the first things she saw.

  ‘You,’ he said.

  He was sitting holding the huntaway in his arms, its bony head sticking out of the old duvet it was wrapped in. Lennie caught her breath. She could have sworn the waiting room was getting darker.

  ‘Hello, Mitch,’ she said.

  The blind man was sitting in the next door chair, his hand resting on the dog’s ear. On the periphery of her vision, Lennie saw his attention swing her way. Mitch’s eyes, still locked on her face, were filling with something she thought might be amusement. That muscle in his cheek played, but he didn’t smile. ‘You’re a vet?’

  ‘I’m a vet.’ Lennie let it sink in for a moment or two before she turned her attention to the sorry bundle he was holding. ‘This must be Peg, is that right? How about we bring her inside?’

  ‘How long has she been like this?’ Stethoscope to the dog’s chest, Lennie looked up at Mitch, the feeble flutter of Peg’s old heart in her ears.

  ‘She’s bee
n a bit off for a day or two,’ the old man said, the hint of a crack in his voice, ‘but nothing like this.’

  ‘This is Stan,’ Mitch told her. ‘Peg is his dog. Stan, this is Lennie.’

  For a moment, she was absurdly pleased he’d remembered her name. Then she remembered it was stuck to her chest.

  ‘You’re Jim’s granddaughter,’ Stan said. ‘The one who went off and did all those flash courses.’

  ‘Yes.’ Lennie frowned. ‘I mean, I am Jim’s granddaughter.’ She paused. ‘And I guess I have done some interesting courses.’

  She shifted the stethoscope, checking the dog’s lungs, already knowing what she was going to hear.

  ‘She wasn’t at the door when I got up this morning,’ Stan said. ‘She’s always at the door.’

  ‘Has Peg been vomiting lately?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Stan’s hand was moving over the dog’s head. ‘I had to pull her out of her kennel. She couldn’t get up.’ He paused. ‘I rang straight away. We got her in here as soon as we could.’

  ‘You did well,’ Lennie soothed. She shot a look at Mitch. ‘She’s got pneumonia.’ The expression on his face told her that he, at least, knew what that meant in a dog of Peg’s age.

  ‘Pneumonia,’ Stan repeated, his forehead creased with thought. ‘So what do we do about that?’

  ‘We hit it with IV antibiotics right now. I need to run a few tests, get a culture, work out exactly which nasties we’re dealing with here. And I’d like to take some chest X-rays, send them up to a radiologist, get a specialist opinion on what’s going on in there. My guess is that it’s aspiration pneumonia—she can’t swallow as well as she used to, and bits of her food are ending up in her lungs. We see it a lot in older dogs. If we can get the infection under control, the big thing will be to try and stop it reoccurring—we’ll have to keep her on antibiotics, manage the regurgitation with antacids, anti-emetics, look at her diet, the way she’s fed, what she sleeps on…’

  Remembering Jim’s lecture that morning, Lennie stopped. She was talking to an elderly disabled man who didn’t exactly look like he had a lot in the world. And this was a farm dog, not a fur kid.

  ‘Or…or we can decide that this is her time, and…’ Lennie wasn’t good at this part, never had been, even back in her general practice days when she’d had to give clients choices like this on a regular basis. She laid her hand on Peg’s ear. ‘We can choose not to put her through any of that. We can help her slip away.’

  Lennie waited, giving Stan space. There was a long silence. His face, when he spoke, was unreadable. ‘She’s suffering?’

  ‘She’s not great,’ Lennie told him. ‘She’s struggling to breathe, she’s got a high fever, she’ll be feeling confused and—and scared…’ Lennie squinted down at Peg’s paw, trying to knock back the tears.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stan said. ‘I don’t know what’s right.’ Still touching the dog, he turned towards Mitch.

  ‘What would you do if she was your dog?’ Mitch said quietly.

  Lennie swallowed. ‘I’d start the antibiotics.’

  He nodded. ‘Do whatever it takes. Right, Stan?’

  ‘Right. Peg’s always been a fighter.’ Stan brushed the back of his hand across his nose. ‘She’d want to get up again.’

  Lennie turned to the cupboards, trying not to show her relief as she reached for the carton of cephalosporins. ‘We’ll need to keep her in for a few days.’ Another night outside would be the dog’s last. ‘We’ll get her on fluid support and oxygen therapy, keep monitoring her temperature and her bloods until we’re sure we’ve got the infection under control.’

  ‘You want me to leave her here?’ Stan sounded far from convinced.

  ‘We’ll take the very best care of her,’ she told him. ‘I promise.’

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ Mitch said.

  It was the sort of voice, Lennie thought, you hoped an air traffic controller would have if you ever needed to be talked through landing a plane.

  ‘Krystal?’ Lennie stuck her head out the door, searching for the practice nurse. ‘Can you get a crate ready for Peg? She’s going to be staying with us for a while.’

  ‘Come on.’ Mitch put a hand to Stan’s shoulder. ‘Let’s get out of the way and leave these guys to do what they need to do.’ Busy drawing up meds, Lennie glanced at her screen as the two men headed for the door. ‘Is there a mobile number I can reach you on?’

  Mitch paused. ‘You can use mine.’

  ‘Okay.’ For some reason, she found herself not wanting to meet those brown eyes. ‘You can leave it with reception.’

  As the door closed behind him, Lennie stroked Peg’s shoulder, steadying herself as much as the dog as she clipped a forepaw ready for her needle, trying not to let her brain spiral back to the last time she’d watched Mitch Stuart leave a room. ‘Okay,’ she said softly. ‘There we go.’

  She’d been so certain she’d never see him again. So sure she’d put that night—that face—out of her mind. As the weeks had gone by, she’d dismissed the intensity of the attraction she’d described to Del as mostly imagination anyway, a cocktail of post-fight adrenaline and pinot noir, some crazy, primitive old-brain lust for the hero of the hour. The twist in her stomach right now told a different story.

  So what? Lennie admonished herself, guiding the IV line into Peg’s vein. So he’d walked back into her life as randomly as he’d done the first time. It didn’t change anything. Not for the better, anyway. If Mitch was working at Broken Creek Station now, if he lived in the district, that was just going to make things a little more awkward, that’s all. Oh god. Lennie squeezed her eyes shut. What if the woman who’d stung his conscience that night in the Glenmore pub was local too? What if Mitch’s somebody else was somebody she knew?

  No. No, she was making way too much of this. Broken Creek was over two hours’ drive away. And Mitch was probably just doing a few days’ contracting there, that was all. Maybe the station had a forestry block these days. It must be going on twenty years since Lennie was last there. They’d had plenty of time to grow one.

  The thought of the place, the battered yellow road sign pointing into the hills, took her back to her earliest memories of the Kimpton Valley. Broken Creek Station was part of its fabric, its folklore. She’d been on picnics there as a kid, hunted cockabullies in the braids of Broken Creek River, lain on her back in the station’s grass looking up at its big skies.

  Krystal opened the door. ‘Would you like me to take Peg through?’

  ‘Yes…’ Lennie gathered her thoughts. ‘Yes, thanks—I’ll give you a hand.’

  Four

  By five o’clock, Lennie’s first day at Central Vets was over. And so, she realised with a bit of a jolt, was everyone else’s. Exiting the consult room, she got a parting wave from Barbara as the receptionist locked the front door. Paul was already gone. Jim had left at lunchtime to see a horse and hadn’t come back. There was no new shift coming in, no 24-hour emergency care. No night nurse. Picking her way past Krystal, who was already mopping the floors, Lennie surveyed the crates in the clinic’s back room.

  Peg’s milky eyes, virtually sightless with cataracts in any case, were half-closed. They barely fluttered as Lennie squatted beside the crate door. The unnatural extension of the dog’s throat spoke volumes for how she was feeling. Lennie watched the uncertain rise and fall of Peg’s chest.

  The chart on the door suggested Peg was stable. She ought to be responding to the antibiotics by now. In spite of the evidence of Krystal’s neat stats, Lennie opened the crate and listened to Peg’s heart again. It was sounding stronger. Her temp was down. So why wasn’t she looking any happier?

  ‘She seems like she’s hanging in there.’ Krystal dropped to her haunches beside the door. ‘I bagged her just like you showed me.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Lennie agreed. ‘I might just keep an eye on her overnight. Could you give me a hand to get her into the truck?’

  Krystal shot her a knowing look. ‘She’
s a sweet old thing, isn’t she?’

  ‘What can I say?’ Lennie gave the nurse a rueful grin. ‘I’m a sucker for a sheepdog.’

  Leaving the small, flat grid of Kimpton streets behind her, Lennie headed into the early autumn evening, muscle memory taking over as she piloted the as-yet-unfamiliar Central Vets ute on a route she’d once known like the back of her hand. No harbour bridge to queue for, no lane changes to make—Lennie exhaled a deep, stress-free breath. There wasn’t even a traffic light, let alone a traffic jam. Once she’d cleared the willow-fringed town limits, she had the back roads all to herself.

  Within a few minutes, she’d crested the low mound of the Chalfont Crossing and the road had dropped into the narrow valley that had been Lennie’s home for what had felt at the time like forever. Bush-clad ridges jostled under the mountains to the west, the neat, dense ranks of the old Crown pine plantation rising to the right. In the seat behind Lennie, Pesh shifted hopefully. Further back, safely crated under the ute’s canopy, Peg lay without a sound.

  Lennie turned the ute into her grandparents’ drive, a short, well-groomed gravel climb to the house that, now Lois’s and Jim’s trees had grown up, was invisible from the road. Pulling up at the top, she checked her watch. Eight minutes door-to-door—now that was a commute she could get used to.

  Hopping out, she opened the gate beside the house and backed the ute up cautiously to the conservatory. On the other side of the glass, she could see her grandfather shaking his head as he unlocked the French doors.

  ‘Already?’ Jim peered into the back of the ute.

  ‘Her name’s Peg. Peg Solomon.’

  ‘Stan Solomon’s dog?’ He looked suddenly serious. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Pneumonia. It’s going to be touch and go tonight.’

  Jim nodded. ‘Fair call. Let’s get her inside.’

  Together, they settled Peg’s crate on the heated tiles that over the years had been a temporary home to everything from injured turtles to orphaned leverets. Having rehung the IV, Lennie checked the dog’s vital signs again. At least they weren’t getting any worse—that was something. There was a flutter of eyelids as she stroked Peg’s head. Leaving her in peace, Lennie closed the crate door. Pesh, long accustomed to watching over Lennie’s patients in the recovery room, lay down at Peg’s side.