The Wolf Border(47)
While unconscious, the pair are weighed, checked over, blood samples are taken. A section of their abdomens is shaved and cleaned. They are laid out on their backs, their hind legs splayed. Both are moulting, leaving hair on the sheeting and the suits. Their heartbeats are monitored on a Doppler. Alexander works calmly, opening a clean wound in Ra, parting the sides of flesh, inserting the transmitter. The devices will be kept away from vital organs and muscles, Merle’s uterus.
Deep enough? he asks.
Yes, great. Just so long as it doesn’t travel to the skin and irritate.
He tucks the implant inside, secures it, stitching the inner lining tidily, then closing the outer with a subterranean line that will be harder to chew out. He repeats the operation on Merle. Though the technique is new, it is clear he is used to performing such procedures on site; he is efficient but unhurried, his gloves barely stained red. Sweat gathers on his brow, rolling down his temples. She feels beads slide down her back under the plastic material. The surgery is brief, twenty minutes in all.
You must have taken Home Ec in school, she jokes. Embroidery?
Oh, yes. And I can make a mean stuffed pepper, too.
Stuffed with what? she asks.
With pepper.
He cuts the last thread. He gives each animal a shot of precautionary antibiotics. They turn them on their sides, pack away the equipment and remove the blindfolds, then leave the enclosure, disinfecting on the way out. Within a minute or so the wolves come round, stand woozily, shake, and move about. Ra sits and licks his belly. Merle sniffs his underside; he hers. Iodophor. Something has passed while they were asleep, but what? They investigate their small territory but find no intruders. They drink from the well stream, lope back to the bushes, and lie down. There seems to be no inhibition of movement or negative effect.
Come and have a coffee and we can check the signals are right on the receiver, she suggests.
I never say no to coffee or good signals, Alexander says.
He might be flirting with her, she can’t tell. They make their way from the wolfery to the office. The pair are checked regularly over the next week for altered behaviour, infection, inflammation; they lick at the wounds for a day or two, but seem as normal. Their blood work comes back clean.
Later in the week, Rachel swims in the river with Huib and Sylvia. The heat has become massive, almost solid, the fan in the office stirring turgid air, and there seems no better way to cool down. Her bump is properly declaring itself: taut, shiny, the belly button beginning to malform and nub outward, the linea nigra appearing. The pool is not cold, but cool, exquisite. The valley’s rocks over which the water has travelled have been warmed; patches of the river are warm, too. The slate bottom electrifies the water, renders it exotically blue, like something from a rainforest or a lagoon. Further up are waterfalls, in deep, shadowed gulleys, the miasma of their spray jewelled by sunlight. Everything smells of minerals: green and reedy. Sylvia and her brother Leo bathed here as children, she tells them. Huib, too, has discovered the spot, a short hike from the stone bridge near the wolfery, and has been using it regularly. Still, the place has a feeling of gorgeous secrecy.
They have become a team lately, the three of them, now splashing about, laughing, floating on their backs like lidoists. Rachel watches the other two jumping from the buttress of a rock into a frothing ghyll, fearless of anything beneath the surface. Sylvia is slender, pale-limbed, nothing too womanly protrudes; her collarbones are like vestigial fins, her hair slicks down her back as she surfaces, aesthetic, Piscean. Huib, whatever his proclivities or restraints, seems not to be appreciative of such a body, at least not beyond having an enthusiastic swim mate. They have become unlikely friends.
Huib, there used to be an eel, Sylvia says, sitting on a flat rock next to the pool. An ancient one, six hundred years old. I could always make it come out. It’s down here.
She points into the water below. She slips back in, submerses, skims along the bottom of the pool, and takes hold of his ankle. Huib kicks away and she chases after. They lark about and Rachel enjoys their silliness. The camaraderie reminds her of Chief Joseph.
She lies back against a rock, lets her feet float up. Her T-shirt sticks to her bump. The water feels terrifically supportive, soothing. The baby kicks softly, then seems to sleep. Is this how it feels to be floating in amniotic? she wonders. Her body relaxes; her mind drifts. Who would not be glad of coming here? She has not left Annerdale in weeks. Skimming over the river, less than a wingspan from the pool’s surface, are giant dragonflies, striped yellow and black, or vein-thin and green. One lands for a moment on the rock next to her, bonded, forewing and hind wing flickering, such delicate mesh it seems evolution can go no further.
She suddenly wishes Alexander were with them, imagines him arriving and stripping off down to nothing, his pale bull flesh, cock draped between his legs, leaping in and a tremendous splash washing through the pool. The erotic invitations of summer. Or perhaps Lawrence, though he was never a great swimmer; he and Emily are in Spain for two weeks, unnecessarily – England is almost as hot. She is glad to have these new companions in her life. She gets out and dries off. The sun burns her shoulders. Her skin smells of the river, a fragrance that is intimate somehow, reminds her of sex.
Back at the cottage she sits out in the garden with an enormous salad. She cannot stop eating avocados, radishes. House martins spurt into the mud nests under the eaves, folding their crescent wings only at the last moment. In the evening, forest bees bump against windowpanes, get into the house, and have to be put out under tumblers. She applies cream to her sore shoulders and thinks of Binny, almost fondly: summers in her damp cheesecloth blouses, and the big blue pot of Nivea cream that she and Lawrence were savagely coated with when sunburnt.