Dakota smiles, and turns her head just slightly so that her lips rest against Kirsten’s palm. “I understand,” she murmurs, kissing the hand on her face.

“You do?”

The smile broadens. “I do.” Moving forward, she places the tenderest of kisses on Kirsten’s reddened lips, then pulls away. “C’mon. Let’s get ready for work.”

Grasping Kirsten’s hands, Koda pulls them both up to their feet. The young scientist steps forward and wraps her arms around Dakota’s firm body and holds tight for several moments. “Thank you,” she finally murmurs against the cloth covering Koda’s chest. She pulls back slightly, looking up at the tall woman. “Do you think that maybe…we would come back here again sometime?”

“Count on it,” Koda replies, kissing the crown of Kirsten’s hair. “Count on it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

KODA RUNS HER hands over the small cat’s body, pressing gently against her sides and abdomen. Despite her ordeal of the evening before, Sister Matilda’s black fur is glossy as a raven’s wing, her white bib and muzzle pristine. She has hardly stopped purring since delivering her kittens last night, and all her bones vibrate with the rumbling. Koda has given up on the stethoscope, resorting to the old fashioned method of counting her respirations and the beats of her heart by compressions of her ribs. She is pleased to find them close to normal; there is no real sign of trouble in the belly, either. The new mother’s uterus is a bit loose, but nursing her litter of six should help to firm it up without further intervention.

“All right, girl. Let’s get another dose of good old Penicillin in you, just as a precaution.” Koda leaves her lying on the exam table, small paws kneading the empty air, to fill a syringe from the vial in the countertop fridge. Compared to the bobcat, Sister Matilda is an ideal patient, content to stay where she is put and to accept human attempts at help with aplomb. Koda rubs her ears, then lifts her scruff and slips the needle in. The purr never misses a beat.

The evening before, she had cried with her distress, and so had little Daphne Burgess. Koda had accompanied the Sergeant to his home, made her initial examination, and brought cat and human family all back to the clinic. Sister Matilda’s labor had arrested several hours before, but there had been no blockage of the birth canal. Despite her small frame and enormous belly, so round she could hardly turn herself over without all four feet leaving the exam table, Koda had found no reason why she could not deliver normally. An injection of Oxytocin had started contractions again almost immediately, and within two hours she had become the happy mother of sextuplets.

Emphasis on the sex part: not one kitten looks like any other. One yellow longhair, one calico shorthair, one solid smoky grey, one black with white paws like his mother, one all white with a stubby Manx tail and one that looks suspiciously like a Maine Coon Cat. “Got around a bit there, didn’t you girl?” Koda remarks as she lays her back among her brood.

Briefly Koda inspects her other patients in the ward. A flop-eared rabbit with an infected eye is responding to treatment; a Scotty, survivor of an unfortunate encounter with a porcupine, looks morosely up at her over his still-swollen nose. She gives him a scratch between the ears. “Curiosity’s not just bad for cats, bro,” she admonishes him. At least it hadn’t been a skunk.

A tap sounds at the door of the ward. “Dr. Rivers? There’s an elderly gentleman here to see you. A civilian.”

“Tell him half a minute, Shannon. I’m coming.” Stepping in and out of the bleach basin without thinking, Koda pauses to run her hands under the tap. She has a fair notion who the elderly civilian is and an even better notion why he’s here. From the file cabinet by her desk in the cubbyhole designated as her office, she takes two file folders and a small, silver key. Fingering it gingerly, she drops it into her pocket. She has known for days that this moment would come. She hates it no less for being forewarned.

Judge Harcourt stands in the middle of the reception area. He fills the small space to overflowing, standing with spine straight as a plumbline in pinstriped suit and burgundy tie, his salt-white hair combed into waves that brush at his collar. “Doctor Rivers,” he says gravely as she pushes open the door. “I wonder if I might have a moment of your time.”

“Come on back,” she says, gesturing with the files.

Koda drags the chair from the examination room into the postage-stamp size space beside her own in front of her desk. “Have a seat, Fenton.”

He remains standing, silent, until she sits, then follows suit, taking his tobacco pouch from his pocket. Without speaking he loads the pipe, reaches for the lighter and pauses, his eyes darting around the room. “Go ahead,” Dakota says. “The nearest oxygen tank is two rooms over.”

He gives her a grateful look, and it is only when the fragrant smoke begins to curl up from the bowl that he says, “We have a problem.”

Koda snorts. “Just one? Thank you. What did you do with all the others?”

“We have a judicial problem,” he amends, giving her a sharp look beneath bushy brows. “To wit, the Dietrich family, specifically his son.”

“Let me guess. They want charges pressed.”

“The son certainly does. The wife is a mousy little creature who scarcely uttered a word. Either she’s the submissive fundamentalist sort, or she really doesn’t mind being a widow.” He shrugs. “Or both, of course.”

“Domestic violence?”

“It’s possible. Certainly the son seems very sure of his manly place in the universe, and at the moment he sees that place as his father’s avenger. The MP at the gate relieved him of a knife and pistol on his way into the Base. I spoke to him”—he grimaces as smoke streams out about the stem of the pipe, giving him the aura of an oddly domesticated dragon—“at rather unpleasant length. We are going to have to have what amounts to a preliminary hearing-cum-inquest, at the very least. If there were any such available, I would advise that impetuous cousin of yours to get himself lawyered up. Where is he, by the way?”

“He says the Colonel’s made him PLO for life—that’s Permanent Latrine Officer—but he’s actually working maintenance out on the flightline. She’s got Andrews, the other pilot involved, doing the same. Here.”

Koda pushes the files across the desk. “These are the Polaroids I took before and after I treated the two surviving victims of the leghold traps. You can see the results of the treatment in person.”

The Judge opens the folders, studying the harshly-lit, slightly overexposed color pictures. His expression does not change, but Koda marks the sudden clenching of his teeth on the pipe stem as he inspects the photos of the bobcat’s torn and bloody flesh, the tendons hanging loose though the bones beneath had remained, by some fluke, unbroken. Beside it is a second Polaroid, this one showing the wound cleanly shaved and stitched. The coyote’s involuntarily bobbed tail looks less serious, and the Judge cannot quite suppress a twitch at the corner of his mouth. “The Trickster tricked,” he observes, “and escaping with nothing but wounded dignity in the end. Appropriate.”

“Not quite nothing,” Dakota says quietly. “That wound was nastily infected. He could have gone septic and died.”

“You’re right, of course.” The Judge sets the folders down. “Are there other photographs?”

Of the wolf, Wa Uspewicakiyapi, he means. “No. Come out to the kennels, then we’ll open the freezer.”

Outside, Harcourt comes close to smiling again. The coyote lies on his back, forepaws crossed over his ribs in classic mummy fashion, snoring in the sun. His abbreviated tail twitches with his dreams, the wound healed over, leaving only a bare tip of skin to testify to his ordeal. The bobcat lies invisible inside the concrete block shelter at one end of her run, favoring shade for her siesta. But signs of her improvement are obvious. A much scuffed rubber ball testifies to her growing ease at chasing and pouncing; except for a few crumbs and a feather or two, her food bowl is empty. Harcourt shoots Koda a reproving glance, and she says, “She caught a pigeon.”

“Rock dove,” he corrects her absently. “At least that’s a good sign she can begin to fend for herself.”

“With luck I should be able to release both of them in a week or so. I’m going to wait for Tacoma to come back from the wind farm so he can help with her. She’s getting pretty feisty now that she’s doing better.”

“You mean uncooperative.”

Dakota grins at him. “With everyone but Tacoma, I mean she barely tolerates us. She’s picky.”

“And these—?” Harcourt gestures toward the run where the mother wolf lies sunning herself on the concrete, while her pup repeatedly flings himself up the incline of her shoulders and as repeatedly slides downward to bump his stubby tail on the hard surface. A sharp yap announces his frustration, but his mother barely twitches. Finally he trots around her, taking the long way at last, and settles down to nurse, nuzzling at her belly. She rouses, licks him absently, and resumes her nap.

“Wa Uspewicakiyapi’s mate and surviving pup. They’re almost ready for release, too.”

“Excellent,” he says, quietly. “Shall we go in?”

Shall we open the freezer, he means.

Koda feels a chill pass down her spine. She has not unlocked the unit since Kirsten brought her the keys, that day by the streamside. She knows what she will see and knows that, gash for gash and shattered bone for bone, she has seen far worse. The shock was in discovering what Tacoma had done; it is long past and keeps no hold over her. Stiffly her fingers close about the small bit of metal in her pocket. “All right,” she says shortly, and turns toward the door.