The twenty-four-hour deadline expired with the arrival of heavy, unbending boot steps echoing down the main stone retaining wall trench.
Inside Dugout Seven, the transformation was nothing short of miraculous. The rotting, waterlogged wooden walkway planks had been ripped away and replaced with dry, split-pine timbers sprinkled with fresh burning lime powder. The air was clean. It carried the sharp, antiseptic scent of pine resin, boiled vinegar, and the warm, herbal steam from Arthur’s stone cooking pots.
Bruno, the sixty-two-pound sentry mastiff who had been twenty seconds from suffocation the last morning, was standing alert on all four paws beside his handler’s cot. The silver tracheostomy collar in his neck rose. Then he fell in smooth, rhythmic excursions, his tongue healthy pink. His amber eyes were bright and clear.
In the next-door recovery stall, Goliath the two-ton draft ox stood comfortably on his fractured foreleg. The silver-steel fixation plate and glass-fused fiery bone cement held the hand bone in rigid posture. The beast was peacefully chewing a bundle of dry mountain clover, his massive tail lazily swatting at nonexistent flies.
On the central zinc slab, Titus sat finishing his fourth head of crisp winter cabbage.
Pip was still perched majestically on the tortoise’s black glass-black dorsal ridge, sometimes leaning over to groom a stray speck of cabbage leaf from Titus’s nose. Titus didn’t mind. He merely blinked his slow four-second blink and swallowed another crunchy mouthful.
