Challenging Dr. Blake Read online

  ‘They’re magnificent,’ Signy breathed, watching the birds glide effortlessly and gracefully to near the top of a very tall conifer to settle themselves on a branch. ‘They belong here. We don’t.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Connie said.

  Back at the car, Dan reached in for a pair of binoculars and trained them on the two immobile birds in the distant tree. ‘Take a look,’ he said, handing the binoculars to Signy and standing beside her. ‘They look even better close up.’

  Focusing the glasses on the head of one of the birds, Signy could see the thick white feathers of the head that contrasted with the darker body. The tail feathers, too, were white. The fierce, proud head, the yellow, watchful eyes that seemed to see everything at once in the forest around, the hooked beak, all filled her vision. She could also see the talons that grasped the branch of the tree.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ she whispered, as though the bird might be disturbed by her words. ‘I’ve never seen a bird like that. It’s somehow…magical.’ She found herself smiling up at Dan, her antagonism momentarily forgotten. When he smiled back at her she felt a very rare moment of total empathy, as though the world had shifted for a few seconds into a state of perfect synchronicity.

  ‘Yes, it often seems that way,’ he said.

  His words broke what seemed like a strange, momentary spell, and she looked away from him, automatically handing the binoculars to the other nurse. ‘Have a look, Connie,’ she offered.

  When they had stowed their gear, Connie got into the back seat. ‘You can have a chance to appreciate the views from the front seat, Signy,’ she said.

  Dan seemed aware of her reluctance to sit with him, and gave her a small, wry smile. They drove back part of the way they had come earlier, then branched off on another small, rutted track.

  ‘My patient who’s having the baby is along here,’ he said. ‘She had an ultrasound at the hospital recently, which shows that all is well so far. Many of the original immigrants to this part were from England and Scotland, her ancestors among them. Her name’s Kathy Lahey, and she’s thirty-four. Sometimes she comes up to the hospital, sometimes I see her here.’

  The Lahey house was very similar to the Georges’, made of wood covered with wood siding, the roof shingled with cedar. It was small and unassuming. After they had rung the doorbell, a woman appeared with two young children at her side who stared at them from the doorway.

  ‘Oh, Dr Blake! Great to see you,’ the woman said. ‘It’s good to have visitors.’ She was short and slight, fair-haired, heavily pregnant.

  Kathy was intrigued to be introduced to someone from England as her grandparents, she explained, had been emigrants from there. Many of their countrymen had cleared the land, built the communities here.

  ‘You make me feel very welcome.’ Signy smiled. ‘I feel inspired to read more of the history.’

  ‘It’s not a very long history,’ Kathy said. ‘We’re relative newcomers in the wilderness when you compare it with Europe.’

  When a routine examination had been done, they all had another cup of coffee, while the two children, about seven and five years old, Signy guessed, looked on shyly.

  ‘The ultrasound is normal,’ Dan explained.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Kathy said. ‘I think this will be my last baby. Three’s about all I can handle.’

  As they were taking their leave, Dan’s cellphone shrilled, breaking incongruously into the silence of the land that surrounded the isolated dwelling.

  ‘Ah, the voice of the future,’ Connie commented, while Dan answered it.

  ‘Dan Blake here,’ he said, as they paused at the bottom of the house steps, while Connie and Signy shouldered the bags of equipment. He listened, frowning, his face serious, concentrated. ‘Yes…How bad is it? Right…Well, we’re leaving here now on our way back. I can be there.’

  The two nurses waited expectantly. ‘Bad news, Dr Blake?’ Connie said.

  ‘Yes. Let’s get going,’ Dan said, starting off back to the vehicle, reaching to relieve them of some of the equipment as they went. ‘It looks as though we might not get back to Kelp Island tonight. They need help at the hospital, from all of us. Two men were attacked by a cougar farther up the coast, and they’ve been brought here by plane. They’re at the hospital now.’

  ‘Oh, heck,’ Connie said. ‘What sort of a state are they in?’

  Signy remained silent as they stowed the bags quickly in the car and got in themselves. She wasn’t exactly sure what a cougar was, and didn’t want to appear ignorant. She knew that there were wild coyotes, fox-like creatures, in the province that attacked pets and small dogs in human communities.

  ‘They’ve lost blood from multiple lacerations, but fortunately no damaged eyes or mutilation of faces, just a lot of claw marks, apparently, from being mauled,’ Dan said tersely as he backed the vehicle out of the parking space and turned around to make their exit. ‘Unfortunately, the only staff surgeon in the place is in the middle of something, so Max and I are going to have to deal with those two cases in the operating room. There’s a shortage of nurses in the OR as well, so I think that you two will have to help. If you want to, that is.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Connie said. ‘Just as well we’ve got interim employee status here, isn’t it?’

  ‘How about you, Signy?’ Dan turned an enquiring look on her.

  ‘Yes.’ Signy echoed her assent, feeling shocked by what had happened.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She added rather hesitantly, ‘I’m not quite sure what a cougar is.’

  ‘A big cat,’ Connie said.

  ‘With very big teeth,’ Dan added, ‘and very sharp claws.’

  ‘Is this a common occurrence?’ Signy said, trying to picture it and failing.

  ‘It’s rare that they attack humans,’ he said.

  Sitting next to him, Signy looked quickly at his serious profile, then away again, as he concentrated on the driving. As she was observing him in his work here, she could imagine what he would be like working with World Aid Doctors, getting a sense that he would be very careful about the decisions he made. Again, she began to feel the glimmerings of some serious unease about some of the decisions she herself had made…

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘WE COULD really use a plastic surgeon here,’ Dan said very quietly to Signy as they bent over the patient later in the operating room as he lay on the table there, a gentle snore coming from his parted lips. ‘Not to mention an anaesthetist.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Signy agreed, as she swabbed a neck wound, a jagged tear, with sterile gauze.

  Both she and Dan were scrubbed for the case, while one of the full-time nurses at the hospital was the other registered nurse in the room—the circulating nurse. It was a small room, currently quiet and relatively peaceful after the initial rush of getting the frightened and dehydrated patient onto the operating table, an intravenous line put in to give him fluid and a painkilling drug, the wounds cleaned. Fortunately for the two men, help and first aid had come fairly quickly, as there had been other people in the area of the attack. Max, assisted by Connie, was operating on the other man.

  Because the only two anaesthetists in the hospital were already engaged in other operations, their patient had to have the intravenous sedation, plus local anaesthetic injected into each wound, rather than a general anaesthetic, which was preferable. It was very time-consuming as Dan had to inject each wound several times before he could clean and stitch it without the young man feeling any pain in the deeper tissues, which would, no doubt, jerk him awake. They had been there, cleaning and stitching, for twenty minutes. It would be a long time before they finished this painstaking task. There were lacerations and bite marks on the face, neck and shoulders.

  ‘Cougars go for the back of the neck when they attack,’ Dan said softly, so that their patient, heavily sedated as he was, wouldn’t hear. ‘That’s how they attack animals. They jump, throwing their full weight onto the intended victim’s shoulders to knock him do
wn. Hence the pattern we see before us.’

  ‘It’s…incredible,’ Signy whispered. The man, in his mid-twenties, whose name was Clark Jakes, wouldn’t be disfigured, but would have scars on his neck and a few on his face. ‘It’s a miraculous escape. This claw mark just missed the carotid artery.’ She referred to the long gash in the neck that Dan was carefully suturing. They had very carefully cleaned and irrigated each wound to prevent infection.

  ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘A fraction of an inch deeper and he would have been a goner, I suspect.’

  Dan didn’t sound very English then, Signy thought inconsequentially as she shuddered mentally. Although not able to conjure up an adequate picture of a large cat attacking a man, she could picture blood pumping from a major artery in the neck.

  ‘A good thing there were two guys together, and not just one,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘That cougar will be hunted down. There’s always the possibility that it has rabies, so we have to treat for that.’

  Signy cut the end of the fine black silk thread that he was using to suture, noting that he was making a good job of neatening up the jagged wound, which he had first trimmed with very sharp surgical scissors. As though tuning in to her thoughts, he said, ‘Suturing a wound like this isn’t the same as sewing a nice clean cut made by a scalpel, is it? World Aid Doctors gives us plenty of practice in this.’

  ‘Mmm,’ she agreed. They were getting altogether too chummy for her liking; she would relax too much and end up liking him next, she told herself with exasperation.

  No…He really wasn’t the sort of man she liked. Too self-contained…or something. Too much in control of himself, maybe that was it—thoughtful and decisive though he was, which she found herself half admiring. She thought of what Connie had said about him—that he’d chosen his work over the woman with whom he’d lived. And then there was the case of Dominic, of course—dear, sweet Dominic, with the wonderful sense of humour in adversity. A sharp pang of grief hit her again, as it did at unexpected moments. If only the clock could be put back, how differently they would do certain things.

  Perhaps she liked a certain vulnerability in a man. Really, she wasn’t sure what she liked, hadn’t analysed it too much. What she felt at the moment was that Dan wasn’t very much like Simon who, she could see now with sudden clarity, had always taken what had been offered to him as though it had been his due, expecting and taking thoughtlessly all good things that were offered and freely given. It was odd how sometimes, when your mind was engaged on other things, you had a revelation about a particular thing that you weren’t really aware had been on your mind.

  She hadn’t listened too attentively at the time when Connie had been telling her and the others nurses in her hut about Dan. Now she could imagine him giving all of himself to something he believed in. He was very professional, totally focussed. Once in a while she caught a brief glimpse of the English boy he must have been. Then the vision closed over and she saw a hard-headed professional who, for all his compassionate side, would clearly not allow himself to be in a position to make a mistake. Gradually, a picture was emerging. What picture was he getting of her? she wondered.

  As a newcomer to this part of the world she was at a distinct disadvantage, her knowledge of the terrain and wildlife minimal. But, then, that was the situation for them when they went to a disaster zone in the course of their work—they had a very short time in which to read about the place they were going to, then it was a question of adapting quickly. It was all part of the training and the job. Nonetheless, she wished that for once the shoe was on the other foot.

  Signy wondered why she was focussing so much on Dan. It must be because he was the first person she had met in the organization when she’d arrived here. She’d been thrown into his company, and he had a link with Dominic.

  ‘We’ll put a pressure dressing on that for the time being,’ he said, breaking into her thoughts, ‘while we get onto the next bit.’

  ‘I have one ready here,’ she said, placing a thick pad of gauze and cotton wool over the part they had sutured to prevent oozing of blood, although most of the small bleeding vessels had been tied off with catgut or coagulated with a cautery.

  When they had applied the final dressings, Clark Jakes opened his eyes and mumbled something. Signy stripped off her soiled latex gloves and took his hand in hers. ‘The operation’s finished, Mr Jakes,’ she said reassuringly, squeezing his hand. ‘Everything’s all right.’

  ‘Where…?’ he muttered, turning his glazed, unfocussed eyes on her face.

  Signy kept hold of his hand, recalling the words that a patient had said to her once when she’d been a student nurse: ‘Your hand was like a lifeline to me, Nurse, when I was very, very frightened.’ Yes, she could imagine how that warm, human contact could mean so much when you were alone to face a fear, especially before and after an operation.

  ‘You’re still in the operating room in Brookes Landing Hospital, Mr Jakes,’ she said, speaking slowly. ‘We’re going to take you out now. Squeeze my hand.’

  He responded with a hard squeeze. ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘You’re more awake than I thought you were. We’re going to move you onto a stretcher now.’

  ‘His family’s waiting in the ICU waiting room,’ Dan said. ‘I have to go up to speak to them.’

  ‘I can imagine what they must be feeling,’ Signy murmured, understanding only too well the feeling of sick fear that was experienced when someone you cared about was involved in an accident or was seriously ill. All other considerations became meaningless.

  By the time the patient had been wheeled on a stretcher to a recovery area and they themselves were back in the OR, Signy felt exhausted, running on adrenalin. ‘What I could use now,’ she said to the other nurse, ‘is a good cup of tea, followed by a litre of orange juice.’

  ‘Maybe we can oblige with that.’ The nurse laughed.

  ‘We’ll have to see about getting you and Connie a room here for the night,’ Dan said, divesting himself of his soiled surgical gown, having taken time to write up a record of the surgical procedure in the patient’s chart. ‘There are usually a few rooms for medical staff and nurses who have to be on call or otherwise stay.’

  ‘Don’t count on it,’ the nurse said. ‘We’ve put up a lot of family members just lately for sick kids.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘We’ll go back to the staff dining room by the kitchen when we’ve finished up here, after I’ve seen the family, and get something to eat.’

  ‘That’s music to my ears,’ Signy said, loosening her surgical mask and letting it dangle around her neck. ‘Too much has happened in too short a time.’

  ‘Not much of a retreat for you so far,’ he said, an apologetic note in his voice. He ran a hand through his untidy hair, drawing her eyes to his face, his hard, masculine mouth, the eyes serious with concentration, the nose…

  ‘Oh, we take what comes,’ she said, looking away while privately hoping that she would end this course feeling rested rather than more stressed. ‘It’s been…exhilarating, actually,’ she added truthfully.

  ‘Great,’ he said, giving her a slightly surprised look. ‘I’ll see you later in the dining room, and maybe Maggie at the front desk can look into the room situation.’

  ‘Yes…thank you,’ she said. Once again, when he had gone out of the room she felt oddly relieved, as though she could now relax. She didn’t know why.

  ‘Give me a hand to clear up this room,’ the nurse said, ‘then we’ll go in search of that cup of tea. Shouldn’t take long. There’s nothing else booked for this room.’

  ‘That sounds wonderful.’

  ‘Isn’t he a QT?’ The nurse, who had introduced herself as Sal, grinned at Signy as she jerked her head at the door through which Dan had departed.

  ‘Um…QT?’ Signy said, as she started to clear up the room, putting her used instruments together in a bowl, dismantling her equipment.

  ‘Cutie,’ Sal said.

  ‘I wouldn�
��t exactly call him that.’ Signy laughed. ‘Al-though I don’t really know him, of course.’

  ‘Oh, a lot of the girls are after him,’ Sal said knowingly, deftly bagging laundry. ‘But after his split with Marianne Crowley he hasn’t really looked at anyone else. She must have been off her rocker to let him slip through her fingers.’

  ‘Don’t know her,’ Signy said with a shrug. ‘I’ve just been here a very short while.’

  ‘I don’t like her,’ Sal said confidentially, as though Signy had been around there for years. ‘Too pushy. One of those bossy types who thinks the sun rises and sets on them. You know, very focussed on the self.’

  Again they chuckled together. ‘I’ve known a few of those,’ Signy agreed.

  ‘Sure you have,’ Sal said. ‘They’re a world-wide breed. They have an “I” or a “me” in every sentence. Always looking out for number one.’

  ‘If she’s so awful, why would he have been interested in her?’ Signy asked reasonably.

  ‘She set out to get him,’ Sal said emphatically. ‘She’s an attractive woman, and in a place like this a man may not meet too many women he could really go for. He’s not immune. But in the case of Dan Blake she slipped up.’

  ‘Think so?’

  ‘Know so.’

  When the two of them entered the dining room later, Connie was already there, ensconced at a table, sipping tea, a sublime, far-away look on her face.

  ‘Ah…’ She spotted Signy and waved. ‘How’re you doing? Weren’t those cases something else? Those poor guys, eh? They’ll have nightmares, I guess, for a long time to come. I can imagine it—scared to go out in the sticks on your own or without a shotgun.’

  ‘Yes,’ Signy said feelingly. ‘I can hardly believe it—it seems sort of unreal to me.’

  ‘Well, it would. You’d better believe it,’ Connie said.