Page 11 of Duty Preserved

The Grévy’s zebra was already standing, which was a good sign. She let me lift her hind hoof without a fight, and that told me more than the wound did. Fewer than two thousand of these zebras were left in the wild. When one let you handle her without sedation, she was telling you she felt safe, and that meant she was healing.

I crouched in the straw and turned her leg toward the light coming through the open door. She’d come in four days back, the morning after we’d flown home, with a gash down her cannon bone that had gone deep and dirty over a stretch of leg with almost no soft tissue to spare. There’d been no closing a wound that filthy, so I’d cleaned it, packed it, and left it open to mend from the inside.

I’d spent the first two nights sure we’d lose the leg and the animal with it. She’d torn it wide on a splintered branch when she’d gone down, running from something.

Most of the time, that was a death sentence we had to watch be carried out. You didn’t intervene on every injured animal in a conservancy. You often had to let nature do what nature did, even when it was brutal, because that was how the system worked.

But a Grévy’s zebra wasn’t most animals. With so few left, every single one mattered more, and losing her to this when we could have treated it felt too much like negligence. So we’d fought.

Now the wound was clean. It had a healthy bed of new tissue where the worst of it had been, the swelling was down, and she could put her weight on the leg evenly. She stood for me, ears turning, more interested in my braid than in what I was doing to her.

“You’re going home,” I told her. “You hear me?”

I set down the hoof, and the zebra flicked an ear at me. I smiled at her.

“One day, I’m going to beat you here,” Alyson said from the doorway.

“I’ll believe it when it happens.”

She came in with two mugs and held out one over the rail of the pen. “Daniel says he’ll be here in ten. I give it twenty.”

“That’s generous.”

“I’m a generous person.” Alyson leaned on the rail and looked down at the zebra. She had her phone in her free hand, already angled, already filming. I’d stopped trying to have a conversation with Alyson that didn’t also include her phone about six months ago. It was just part of her, the same as the coffee and the way she could make a stranger on the internet care about an animal they’d never touch. “Oh, she looks good. Really good. Say something medical for the internet.”

“No.”

“Sarah, my followers have been watching this animal’s vitals since she came in. They are emotionally invested. Give them something.”

“She’s granulating well and bearing weight evenly.”

“Boring. Accurate, but boring.” Alyson tipped the phone toward the animal and dropped her voice into the bright, warm register she used for anyone who wasn’t standing in front of her. “When she came in, we didn’t think she’d make it. Look at her now. That’s our Dr. Calloway.” She lowered the phone and looked at me over the top of it. “You should let me put your face in one of these sometime. People would lose their minds.”

“People would scroll right past.”

“That is genuinely the saddest sentence I’ve ever heard a beautiful woman say, and I’ve heard a lot of them.” She took a sip of her coffee and looked at the zebra again. This time, it was a professional assessment, not filtering for social media content. “She’s weight-bearing well. Are you thinking we’ll release her today?”

“If her group’s somewhere we can reach. She’s not going to mend any faster in a pen.”

“Agreed. Grévy’s do worse the longer you keep them in. I’d get her out before she starts pacing.” Alyson put her phone in her pocket and looked at the leg properly. “She looks ready.”

“Listen to you. Letting go.”

Alyson put a hand to her chest. “Growth.”

“It’s medicine, not a breakup.”

“For you, those are the same thing.”

I ignored that, mostly because she wasn’t exactly wrong. Saying goodbye was hard.

Daniel came in a few minutes later with his shirt half buttoned and his hair doing something optimistic. He crouched at the rail to bring his eyes level with the wound before he said anything.

“That’s granulating better than I thought it would,” he said. He tilted his head, not touching her. “You keeping her on antibiotics?”

“Long-acting shot when she goes out. Covers her through Thursday, then she’s done.”

“Nice work.” He straightened, found Alyson’s coffee on the rail, and drank half of it before she could stop him. “So can we release her somewhere with a view? Everybody deserves a nice morning. Where’s her group?”