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 loudbecause 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.”
