It was bad-but it could have been worse.

Swiftly, moving as a team with this strange new doctor, Jessie staunched the blood flow and X-rayed. Three of the metacarpals were fractured which meant that she’d have to fix the bones. There was necrotic tissue on the front of the pad and up the dog’s foreleg, as though infection had spread, but Niall was right. There was still circulation.

There was still hope.

Niall Mountmarche intubated the dog with skill, moving his obvious skills with human anaesthesia to the animal arena with thoughtfulness and intelligence. The questions he needed to know he asked before Jessie thought of telling him and she was left alone to concentrate on the wound.

It was enough.

She never could have coped with such a severely traumatised dog and vicious wound if she’d had to do the anaesthetic herself. Over and over in her head as she operated Jessie was offering silent prayers of thankfulness for this man’s arrival.

The dog would be dead without him.

It was a nasty piece of surgery, requiring all her skill.

The rotten flesh had to be cut away and dirt, grass and hay seeds carefully cleaned from the festering wound. It was a time-consuming task, made more difficult by the small number of blood vessels remaining viable.

Then the metacarpals had to be fixed into position with K-wire. If only one of the outer metacarpals had been broken Jess could have let it be but with three fractured the dog would lose function if they weren’t fixed.

A huge job…

Jess could amputate if she had to-but the shock of such radical surgery could be enough to kill an already weakened, frail animal. Even taking the trap from his foot without an anaesthetic might have been enough to send him over the edge.

At least the pad still had circulation because, miraculously, the rotten flesh hadn’t invaded the major blood vessels. Yet…Another half a day and it would have been too late.