Rescue At Cradle Lake

She stared and he thought he could see calculations happening behind her eyes.

‘That might be long enough,’ she whispered, and he thought she was talking to the lamb. She was hugging it close—two muddy waifs.

He wasn’t exactly pristine himself.

Whatever she was thinking, though, she didn’t expand on it. They drove for a couple of minutes in silence and he realised he didn’t even know her name

I’m Dr Fergus Reynard,’ he told her, into what had suddenly become a tense stillness.

‘I’m Ginny Viental.’

‘Ginny?’

‘Short for Guinevere, but I’m not exactly Guinevere material.’

Hadn’t Guinevere been some gorgeous queen? If that was the case…

But maybe she was right, Fergus decided. Maybe Queen Guinevere wouldn’t be splodged with lamb mud.

But there was definitely gorgeous underneath the mud.

‘I’m pleased to meet you, Ginny,’ he told her, figuring he should concentrate on keeping the truck on the slippery track rather than letting his attention stray to this very different woman beside him. It was a hard task. ‘Do you live around here?’

‘I used to live here,’ she told him. ‘I’ve just come back…for a while.’

‘Do your parents live here?’

‘They lived here when I was a kid,’ she said discouragingly. ‘I did, too, until I was seventeen.’

She wasn’t seventeen now, he thought, trying again to figure her age. She looked young but there were lines around her eyes that made him think she’d not had things easy. But something in her face precluded him from asking questions.

‘Oscar Bentley,’ he said cautiously, searching for neutral ground. ‘You’re sure it’s his lamb?’

‘I’m sure. The cattle grid’s on our property but he has agistment rights. Oscar was an ordinary farmer fifteen years back. Now he seems to have lost the plot completely.’

‘He’s hardly made a decent access track,’ Fergus muttered, hauling the truck away from an erosion rut a foot deep.

‘He likes making it hard for visitors,’ Ginny told him. ‘Why has he called you out? Unless that’s breaking patient confidentiality.’

‘I’m not sure there can be much patient confidentiality about a broken hip.’

‘A broken hip?’

‘That’s what he thinks is wrong.’

She snorted. ‘Yeah, right. Broken hip? I’ll bet he’s fallen down drunk and he wants someone to put him to bed.’

‘You know him well, then?’

‘I told you, I lived here. I haven’t been near Oscar for years but he won’t have changed.’

‘If you don’t live here now, where do you live?’

‘Will you quit it with the inquisition?’ she said, her voice muffled by the lamb again. ‘I hate the smell of wet wool.’

‘So don’t stick your nose into wet sheep.’

‘There’s a medical prescription for you,’ she said and she grinned. Which somehow…changed things again.

Wow, he thought. That was some smile. When the lines of strain eased from around her eyes she looked…beautiful?

Definitely beautiful.

‘Why are you here?’ she demanded, hauling her nose off the lamb as if the question had only just occurred to her and it was important.

‘I told you. I’m here as a locum.’

‘We’ve never been able to get a locum before.’

‘I can’t imagine why not,’ he said with asperity, releasing the brakes then braking again to try and get some traction on the awful track. ‘This is real resort country. Not!’

‘You’re seeing it at its worst. We had a doozy of a storm last week and the flooding’s only just gone down.’

‘It’s not bad,’ he conceded, staring out at the rolling hills and bushland and the deep, clear waters of the lake below. Sure, it was five hours’ drive to the nearest city, to the nearest specialist back-up, but that was what he’d come for. Isolation. And the rugged volcanic country had a beauty all its own. ‘Lots of…sheep,’ he said cautiously.

‘Lots of sheep,’ she agreed, looking doubtfully out the window as if she was trying to see the good side, too.

‘If you think sheep are pretty.’

She twisted to look over her shoulder at the morose-looking ewe in the back of the truck. As if on cue, the creature widened her back legs and let go a stream of urine.

‘Oh, yeah,’ she agreed. ‘Sheep. My favourite animals.’

He was going to have to clean out the back of his truck. Already the pungent ammoniac smell was all around them. Despite that, his lips twitched.

‘A farmer, born and bred.’

‘I’m no farmer,’ she said.

‘Which might explain why you were lying on the road in the middle of nowhere, holding a lamb by one ear, when the entire crowd from the Cradle Lake football game could have come by at any minute and squashed you.’

There was that grin again. ‘The entire crowd from this side of the lake being exactly eight locals, led by Doreen Kettle who takes her elderly mother and her five kids to the football every week and who drives ten times slower than you. The last of the eight will be the coach who drives home about ten tonight. Cradle Lake will have lost—we always lose—and our coach will have drowned his sorrows in the pub. There’ll be no way he’ll be on the roads until after the Cradle Lake constabulary go to bed. Which is after Football Replay on telly, which finishes at nine-thirty, leaving the rest of Saturday night for Cradle Lake to make whoopee.’

‘How long did you say you’ve been away?’ he asked cautiously, and she chuckled. It was a very nice chuckle, he decided. Light and soft and gurgling. Really infectious.

‘Ten years. But nothing, nothing, nothing changes in Cradle Lake. Even Doreen Kettle’s kids. When I left she was squashing them into the back of the car to take them to the footy. They’re still squashing, only the squashing’s got tricker. I think the youngest is now six feet three.’ She brightened. ‘But, then, you’ve changed. Cradle Lake has a doctor. Why are you here?’

He sighed. The question was getting repetitive. ‘I told you—as a locum.’

‘No one’s ever been able to get a locum for Cradle Lake before. The last doctor was only here because his car broke down here just after the war. He was on his way to visit a war buddy and he couldn’t get anyone to repair it. He didn’t have the gumption to figure any other way of moving on.’

Fergus winced. He’d only been in the district for a couple of days but already the stories of the old doctor’s incompetence were legion.

‘Your truck’s still operating,’ Ginny pointed out. ‘So why did you stop?’

‘This is the hospital truck. And I ran my finger down the ads in the medical journal and chose the first place I’d never heard of.’

She stared. ‘Why?’

‘I wanted a break from the city.’

She eyed him with caution. ‘You realise you won’t exactly get a holiday here. This farming land’s marginal. You have a feeder district of very poor families who’ll see your presence as a godsend. You’ll be run off your feet with medical needs that have needed attention for years.’

‘I want to be busy.’

She considered him some more and he wondered what she was seeing. His reasons for coming? He hoped not. He tried to keep his face expressionless.

‘So, by break,’ she said cautiously, ‘you don’t mean a break from medicine.’

‘No.’

She eyed him for a bit longer, but somewhat to his surprise she didn’t ask any more questions. Maybe she didn’t want him asking questions back, he thought, and he glanced at her again and knew he was right. There was something about the set of her face that said her laughter was only surface deep. There were problems. Real and dreadful problems.

As a good physician he should probe.

No. He wasn’t a good physician. He was a surgeon and he was here as a locum, to focus on superficial problems and refer anything worse to the city.

He needed to think about a fractured hip.

They were bumping over yet another cattle grid. Before them was a ramshackle farmhouse, surrounded by what looked like a graveyard for ancient cars. About six ill-assorted, half-starved dogs were on the veranda, and they came tearing down the ramp baying like the hounds from hell as the vehicle pulled to a stop.

‘I’m a city boy,’ Fergus said nervously, staring out at the snarling mutts, and Ginny grinned, pushed open the door and placed the lamb carefully on her seat behind her. She closed the truck door as the hounds reached her, seemingly ready to tear her to pieces.

‘Sit,’ she roared, in a voice that could have been heard in the next state. They all backed off as if she’d tossed a bucket of cold water over them. Three of the mongrels even sat, and a couple of them wagged their disreputable tails.

She swiped her hands together in a gesture of a job well done and then turned and peeped a smile at him.

‘You can get out now,’ she told him. ‘The dragons have been slain. And we’re quits. You rescued me and I’ve rescued you right back.’

‘Thanks,’ he told her, stepping gingerly out—but all the viciousness of the dogs had been blasted out of them.

But the dogs were the least of his problems. ‘Doc?’ It was a man’s voice, coming from the house, and it was a far cry from the plaintive tone that had brought him here in the first place. ‘Is that the bloody doctor?’ the voice yelled. ‘About bloody time. A man could die…’ The voice broke off in a paroxysm of coughing, as if the yell had been a pent-up surge of fury that had left the caller exhausted.

‘Let’s see the patient,’ Ginny said, heading up the ramp before him.

Who was the doctor here? Feeling more at sea than he’d ever felt in his entire medical training, Fergus was left to follow.

Oscar Bentley was a seriously big man. Huge. He’d inched from overweight to obese many years ago, Fergus thought as a fast visual assessment had him realising the man was in serious trouble.

Maybe that trouble didn’t stem from a broken hip, but he was in trouble nevertheless. He lay like a beached whale, sprawled across the kitchen floor. A half-empty carton of beer lay within reach so he hadn’t been in danger of dying from thirst, but he certainly couldn’t get up. His breathing was rasping, each breath sucked in as if it took a conscious effort to haul in enough air. The indignant roar he’d made as they’d arrived must have been a huge effort.

Ginny reached his patient before him. ‘Hey, Oscar, Doc Reynard tells me you’ve broken your hip.’ She was bending over the huge man, lifting his wrist. ‘What a mess.’

The elderly man’s eyes narrowed. He looked like he’d still like to yell but the effort seemed beyond him. His breathing was dangerously laboured, yet anger seemed tantamount.

‘You’re one of the Viental kids,’ he snarled. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m Ginny,’ she agreed cordially, and to Fergus’s astonishment she was looking at her watch as her fingers rested on the man’s wrist. Did she have medical training?

‘A Viental,’ the farmer gasped, and he groaned as he shifted his vast bulk to look at her more closely. ‘What the hell are you doing on my property? Why aren’t you dead?’

‘I’m helping Doc Reynard. Plus I pulled one of your lambs out of the cattle grid dividing your land from ours.’ Her face hardened a little. ‘I’ve been up on the ridge, looking over the stock you’ve been running on our land. Your ewes have obviously been lambing for weeks and at least six ewes have died during lambing. They’ve been left where they died. No one’s been near them.’

‘Mind your own business,’ he gasped. ‘I didn’t call Doc Reynard for a lecture—and I didn’t call you. I don’t want a Viental anywhere near my property.’

‘You called Doc Reynard to get you on your feet again,’ she snapped. ‘There’s no way he can do that on his own—without a crane, that is.’

‘Let’s check the hip,’ Fergus said uneasily, and she flashed a look of anger back at him.

‘There’s no difference in the length of Oscar’s legs. He has breathing difficulties but that’s because he won’t do anything about his asthma. He’ll have got himself into this state because he couldn’t be bothered fending for himself so he feels like a few days in the hospital. He does it deliberately and he’s been doing it for twenty years.’ She glanced around the kitchen and winced. ‘Though by the look of it, it’s gone beyond the need for a few days in hospital now. Maybe we need to talk about a nursing home.’

She had a point. The place was disgusting. But still…

‘The hip,’ Fergus reiterated, trying again to regain control.

‘Right. The hip.’ She sat back and pressed her fingers lightly on Oscar’s hips. ‘How about that?’ she said softly, while both men stared at her, astounded. ‘No pain?’

‘Aagh!’ Oscar roared, but the roar was a fraction too late.

Enough. He was the doctor and this was his patient. ‘Do you mind moving back?’ he demanded, lifting Ginny’s hands clear. ‘I need to do an examination.’

‘There’s no need. He’ll have stopped taking his asthma medication. Do you want me to get oxygen from your truck?’

‘I was called to a broken hip,’ Fergus said testily. He didn’t have a clue what was happening here—what the dynamics were. Her pressure on the hips without result had been diagnosis enough, but he wasn’t taking chances on a patient—and a situation—that he didn’t know. ‘Let me examine him.’

Almost surprisingly she agreed. ‘I’ll get the oxygen and then I’ll wait outside. I’ll take care of the sheep. Someone’s got to take care of the sheep. Then I’ll come with you to the hospital.’

He frowned. He wasn’t too sure why she intended coming to the hospital. He wasn’t even sure he wanted her. There was something about this woman’s presence that was sending danger signals, thick and fast. ‘You were going to walk home.’

‘He’ll have to go to hospital,’ she said evenly. ‘He’s drunk, his breathing’s unstable, and you won’t be able to prove he hasn’t got a broken hip without X-rays. How are you planning to lift Oscar yourself?’

‘I’ll call in the paramedics,’ he snapped.

‘Excuse me, but this is the last home and away football match for Cradle Lake this season,’ Ginny snapped back. ‘If by paramedic you mean Ern and Bill, who take it in turns to drive the local ambulance, then you’ll find they refuse absolutely to come until the match—and the post-match celebration—is over. Especially if it’s to come to Oscar.’

Which was why he had come here in the first place, he thought dourly. The call had come in and there’d been no one willing to take it.

‘That leaves you stuck,’ she continued. ‘For a couple of hours at least. Unless you accept help.’

‘Fine,’ he conceded, trying not to sound confused. ‘I’ll accept your help. Can you wait outside?’

‘Very magnanimous,’ she said, and she grinned.

His lips twitched despite his confusion. It was a great grin.

Get on with the job. Ignore gorgeous grins.

‘Just go,’ he told her, and she clicked her disreputable boots together and saluted.

‘Yes, sir.’

CHAPTER TWO

SHE went. Fergus did a perfunctory examination and then a more thorough one.

Oscar had no broken hip, but Ginny was right—the man was dead drunk. His blood pressure was up to one ninety on a hundred and ten and his breathing was fast and noisy, even once he was on oxygen. Fergus checked his saturation levels and accepted the inevitable.

‘I gotta go to hospital, don’t I, Doc?’ Oscar demanded, with what was evident satisfaction. His breathing was becoming more shallow now and Fergus wondered whether he’d drunk a lot fast just as they’d arrived—just to make sure. ‘I told you I got a broken hip.’

‘You don’t appear to have broken anything,’ Fergus told him. ‘But, yes, you need to come to hospital.’ He gazed around the kitchen and grimaced. ‘Maybe we need to think about some sort of permanent care,’ he suggested. ‘Unless there’s anyone who can stay with you.’

‘That’s not me,’ Ginny said through the screen door. ‘Or anyone in this district. This isn’t exactly Mr Popular here. What’s the prognosis?’

‘Mr Bentley needs help with his breathing,’ Fergus said, trying not to sound like he was talking through gritted teeth. He knew by now that the diagnosis she’d made had been spot on. ‘He’s not safe to leave alone. The ambulance will have to come out to collect him.’

‘I told you—they won’t come for at least a couple of hours.’

‘Will you stay with Mr Bentley until they come?’ he asked, without much hope, and she shook her head.

‘Nope. I’m needed elsewhere and I can’t stand Mr Bentley.’

‘I can’t stand you either, miss,’ the farmer snapped. ‘You and your whore of a mother. You and your family deserved everything you got.’

Ginny had opened the screen door and stepped inside, but Oscar’s words stopped her. She flinched, recoiling as if she had been struck. Her colour faded and she leaned back against the kitchen bench as if she suddenly needed support.

‘No family ever deserved what happened to us,’ she whispered, and she turned to Fergus as if she couldn’t bear the sight of the man on the floor. She swallowed, evidently trying hard to move on from his vicious words. ‘Obese patients like him are the pits,’ she said, ‘and if you leave him alone he’ll stay alive just long enough to sue. More’s the pity. So you need to take him to hospital. If neither of us want to sit here for a couple of hours, that means we use the back of your truck. I got the ewe out.’

‘You got the ewe out,’ he said blankly, and she managed a weak smile.

‘That would be the sheep, city boy. The one that was…well, making herself at home in the back of your Land Cruiser. I put the ewe and her baby in the home paddock.’ She glared down at Oscar with disdain. ‘I put hay in there, too, and I filled the trough,’ she said. ‘Much to the relief of the rest of the stock. You’re so off our property. I’d rather let the place go to ruin than let you agist on our place again. The dogs are starving. The sheep are fly-blown and miserable, and there’s a horse locked up…’ She broke off and Fergus saw real distress on her face. ‘I’ll get the RSPCA out here straight away,’ she whispered, ‘and I hope you end up in jail. You deserve to be there. Not hospital.’

Whew. ‘Ginny, can we keep to the matter at hand?’ Fergus said, trying to keep control in a situation that was spiralling. ‘We can’t take Mr Bentley in the truck.’

‘Sure we can,’ Ginny said, making an obvious effort to shove distress aside. ‘I’ve washed it out—sort of. A nice amniotic smell never hurt anyone. Maybe we could be super-nice and find a mattress. The back of the Land Cruiser is long enough to make an ambulance.’

‘But lifting—’

‘A stretcher won’t do it,’ she agreed. ‘We’d break both our backs. Hang on for a bit and I’ll find a door and some fence posts. And a mattress. Be right back.’

And she was gone, slipping through to the living room and the bedrooms beyond.

‘You gonna let her just walk though my house?’ Oscar roared—or tried to roar, but the drink and the asthma were taking their toll and he was losing his bluster. His roar was cut off in mid-tirade and the last words were said as a gasp.

‘I’m not sure what else to do,’ Fergus admitted. ‘She’s in control and we’re not. So you concentrate on your breathing and we’ll let Ginny sort us both out.’

His opinions were consolidated five minutes later while he watched, as Ginny attacked the kitchen door. She’d found a mattress and had it lying on the floor beside Oscar. She’d also found three cylindrical fence posts, each about three feet long, and now she was unscrewing door hinges.

‘Do you mind letting me in on the plan?’ Fergus asked, but Oscar chose that moment to retch and he had to focus on keeping the airway clear.

‘He took this too far,’ Ginny said briefly, glancing across at their patient with active dislike. ‘If you hadn’t been available he’d have risked dying. He’s played this too many times for the locals to take any notice.’

Fergus sighed. Doctors were trained to save lives, no matter how obnoxious those lives were, but it didn’t always feel good. Now he thought longingly about his beautifully equipped city hospital and his wonderfully trained nursing staff who’d cope with the messy bits that he was forced to cope with himself now. Back in Sydney, if a patient retched he’d step back and hand over to the nurses.

‘I’m good at woodwork,’ he told Ginny without much hope, and she smiled.

‘Not in a million years, mate,’ she told him. ‘I’m on door duty. You’re on patient duty.’

Finally the last screw holding the door to the hinge was released. The door fell forward and Ginny grunted in satisfaction as she took its weight.

‘Great. I was afraid it’d be solid. This is light enough to give us a bit more leverage.’

‘So now what?’

‘Let’s get it under him,’ she told him. ‘Is his airway clear?’

‘As good as I can get.’ Oscar was drifting into alcoholic sleep, which at least meant that they could work without abuse.

‘We’ll leave the oxygen on till the last moment,’ Ginny told him. ‘He’ll have to be unhooked for a bit while we load him into the truck. But we’ll work fast.’

‘Are you medical?’ he asked, bemused, but she wasn’t listening. She was sliding the door toward him, signalling him to shove the other end as close as he could to Oscar.

Then she hauled the mattress on top.

‘Put this pillow between his hips in case he really has got a broken bone,’ she ordered, and he stopped wondering whether she had a medical background. He was sure.

‘Now.’ Fergus was on one side of Oscar. Ginny was on the other with the door-cum-stretcher between Ginny and Oscar. ‘Roll him sideways as far as you can toward you,’ she said. ‘One hand on his shoulder, the other just above his hip. Don’t try and lift—you’re just rolling. And I’ll shove.’

‘Where did you learn to do this?’

‘I had a different childhood,’ she said. ‘I played doctors a lot, and moving patients was my specialty. Shut up and roll.’

So he rolled and she shoved and a moment later their patient was three-quarters on the door.

‘Great,’ she muttered, completely intent on the job at hand. ‘Now we slide. You do the shoulders, I’ll do the pelvis. Let’s keep those hips in a straight line.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he uttered under his breath, but he didn’t say it. Where did her knowledge come from? Even with knowledge, Oscar was huge. How could she do it?

She did it. Fergus was getting more and more gobsmacked by the minute. Her strength was amazing.

They now had their patient fully on the door.

‘Now we tie him on,’ she said, producing something that looked like frayed hay bands. ‘I’m not going to all this trouble to let him roll off.’

So they tied, sliding the ropes under the door and fastening them across his legs, hips and stomach. Oscar grunted a few times but he seemed to be intent now on his breathing—which was just as well. They completed six ties before Ginny declared them ready.

‘You’re not proposing to lift this,’ Fergus muttered, knowing that lifting only one end was beyond him.

‘Trust a man to think of brawn when there’s brains at hand,’ she told him. She disappeared briefly outside and came back carrying something that looked dangerously like an axe.

‘Hey! I’m not sure about operating here and axes aren’t my tool of choice,’ Fergus told her, startled, and she grinned.

‘This is a splitter for chopping wood. Or it’s a really neat wedge.’ She laid it sideways so the edge of the splitter lay under a corner of the door. She put her weight behind the handle and tugged it in a quarter-circle.

The splitter dug under the door and the corner rose.

‘I’ll keep shoving and you stick in a pole,’ she ordered and he was with her. The fence posts…. long cylinders, ready to roll, were lined up, ready to insert under the door.

‘I’ll operate the axe, though,’ he told her, seeing her strain to get the sedge further in. Enough was enough. He had to be stronger than she was.

He had to be something more than she was.

Whoever, whatever, the plan worked. Two minutes later they had three poles under the door. At first push the door started rolling, with Fergus and Ginny carefully manoeuvring it toward the back door.