By ten that morning I had reunited a divided slime, splinted a young dragon's wing, and eaten most of a biscuit. The slime was already trying to absorb its dressing. The dragon had gone home asleep in a fireproof shopping basket. I was entitled, I thought, to feel competent.
Then Mrs. Birk knocked on the surgery door with the handle of her walking stick.
"I've brought Crumpet," she called. "She won't come out of the barrow."
I knew Mrs. Birk. I knew her walking stick, her plum-colored coat with its enormous pockets, and her habit of saying an animal was "a bit off" when it needed immediate attention. I did not know Crumpet.
She lay in a wheelbarrow outside my green door, on a folded quilt. She was young, about the size of a large sheepdog. Her front half was lion: tawny paws, broad muzzle, round ears pressed flat. A cream-colored goat's head rose from between her shoulders, its short horns caught in the quilt. Her hindquarters were woolly, with black cloven hooves. Where a tail should have been, an olive-green snake had tied itself into a tight knot.
The lion coughed. The goat gave a small, miserable bleat. Inside the knot, the snake opened its mouth.
"How long?" I asked.
"She left her supper. Then she wouldn't sleep. I thought I'd better not wait for your afternoon hours."
I put the biscuit away.
We brought the barrow through the double doors and lifted Crumpet onto the padded examination table. Mrs. Birk took the heavy end without being asked. I was still trying to decide which end that ought to be.
"She doesn't bite," Mrs. Birk said.
The goat took the corner of my green apron in its teeth.
"Usually," she added.
I let Crumpet keep the apron while I examined her. Her lion's mouth was hot, her tongue pale. Each breath dragged in with a little rasp. Behind the left foreleg her body was stretched tight, and tapping it with a fingertip gave the hollow note of an overfilled drum.
Goat bloat. Familiar, urgent, treatable.
Except that a goat's swollen stomach ought not to be tucked under a lion's ribs.
I slid my listening trumpet against her chest. A heart beat fast beneath it. Air came and went poorly. Mrs. Birk stroked the lion's chin, and the next cough shook the whole table.
In the middle of it, something chimed.
I held still. I moved the trumpet lower.
"Would you lift her chin again? Gently."
Another cough. A tiny, clear ting.
Mrs. Birk's hand stopped.
"Her bell," she said.
Crumpet wore a red leather collar around the lion's neck. Its little brass loop was empty.
"When did it come off?"
"Yesterday. I looked under the dresser. She likes to get underneath and roll. I thought she'd caught it there."
The snake's head emerged from its knot. Its tongue flicked toward the empty loop.
"Which mouth would have eaten it?"
Mrs. Birk looked down at the snake. "That one follows it about. When it rings."
I laid my fingers along the base of the tail. The scales were cool and smooth, the muscle underneath rigid. Something hard shifted well forward of my hand. Crumpet coughed again.
I had removed plenty of objects from animals. Buttons from slimes, knitting needles from basilisks, one engagement ring from a dragon whose owner had wisely reconsidered the proposal. Usually I knew which end of the patient was connected to its stomach.
I opened the cupboard beside the table. In the light from its glass doors, bottles of sleeping draught stood in their tidy species rows. A lion's dose was easy. A goat's dose was different. The amount that would quiet a snake was different again.
Crumpet's pulse beat under my fingers at the lion's jaw and at the goat's throat, exactly together. Whatever I gave one head would circulate through the others. I shut the cupboard.
"Can you put her to sleep?" Mrs. Birk asked.
"I don't know a safe dose for her."
She watched me for a moment, then put her handbag under the table.
"Tell me where to stand."
I brought a soft stomach tube from its drawer and laid out the mouth guard, lubricant, and a bowl. Crumpet followed the bowl with the goat's eyes. It was the first hopeful thing she had done.
"Behind her shoulders, please. Keep her upright."
An ordinary goat could be relieved through a tube, provided you reached the right stomach. I eased the guard between the goat's back teeth. She tried to chew it. I waited for a swallow and fed the tube gently down her throat.
No gas escaped.
I let more of the tube follow each swallow. It continued to pass freely.
Mrs. Birk made a strangled sound.
The snake had lifted its head. Three inches of pink rubber protruded from its mouth.
For a moment we all looked at it, including the goat.
"Is that meant to happen?" Mrs. Birk asked.
"No."
The lion rasped in another breath. I stopped looking surprised and withdrew the tube.
I had expected the goat's throat to lead down into a goat's stomach. Instead it had led across into a snake. The tube had gone freely, without force. There had to be a fork, and I had taken the wrong branch.
I felt along the neck while Mrs. Birk supported the goat's head. Below its woolly throat, where the two necks met the body, I found the hard little bell. Lower and behind it was the drum-tight swelling. Along the other side ran the muscular cord I had traced forward from the tail.
The bell seemed to be covering the way into the stomach. If so, the tube had glanced off it and gone down the open tail passage.
I drew a working sketch on the back of an appointment card: goat above, snake to the side, stomach below. The lion swallowed, nudging the same hard lump against my fingers. I penciled her route into the sketch above the bell, with a question mark beside it. Mrs. Birk bent over the card.
"So her supper's stuck?"
"The gas from her supper. I think the bell is keeping it in. Her stomach is swelling against the lion's lungs."
Crumpet was breathing with her mouth open now. The goat had let go of my apron.
I angled the tube and tried again.
This time I could feel its tip through the skin, beside the bell instead of above it. I held the hard object steady with two fingers and waited through a swallow. The tube slipped past.
Warm, sour air rushed out into the bowl. It smelled of clover and something that had been behind a dresser for a long time.
Crumpet's flank softened under my palm. The lion took a deep breath, then another. Her ears came forward a little.
Mrs. Birk let out the breath she had been holding.
I kept my hand on the tube. "That's helped."
"Can we leave it in?"
"For a little while. We still need the bell."
There was room to move it now. I felt it shift beneath my fingers, freed from the pressure of the swollen stomach. It rolled, stopped, and settled at an angle.
The snake pulled its tail into a tight loop.
I fetched my longest retrieval wire, with its small rounded loop, and crouched by the table. The snake drew its head into the coils as soon as I approached. I reached to steady it behind the jaw. Its whole length tightened, hauling Crumpet's hindquarters sideways.
The lion scrambled with her front paws. I took my hand away.
"All right," I said. "All right."
Mrs. Birk caught the quilt before it slid off the table. Crumpet stared at me with the lion's eyes. The goat trembled. The tube was still venting, but an instrument would never pass safely through those tight bends.
"Does she always curl up like that?"
"When she's got nothing to hold. At home she wraps round the bedpost."
I had been trying to hold the snake still. It was trying to hold on to something itself.
I rested my bare forearm beside the coils, palm upward, and waited. The snake inspected it with its tongue. Slowly, a loop loosened. Another unwound. Its body crossed my wrist, wound once around my arm, and gripped.
The head lay on my palm. Behind it, the tail made a broad curve back to Crumpet's body.
"Like that," Mrs. Birk said.
We exchanged arms carefully. I wrapped a warm towel around hers where the scales would rest. She pulled the tall stool close to the table's edge and sat with the lion's chin in her lap and the snake supported on her left forearm. The goat leaned against her shoulder. She looked as though she had been fitted with an exceptionally awkward shawl.
"Comfortable?" I asked.
"No. Are we right?"
"Yes."
I put the guard in the snake's mouth and passed the wire down the now-gentle curve. My fingers at the fork told me when its tip arrived. A little maneuvering, a faint metallic scrape, and the loop caught the bell's top ring.
I drew back a fraction.
The skin beneath the goat's throat dimpled inward.
I stopped at once. The bell's rim had caught the wall of the passage. Pulling harder would pull that wall with it.
The snake tried to retreat. Mrs. Birk lowered her arm with the movement instead of gripping tighter. The coils held. Crumpet's lion head remained in her lap, breathing almost normally.
"Did you get it?"
"I've caught it. It isn't free."
"Oh."
I loosened the wire. The little dimple disappeared.
For years I had liked instruments that did one thing well. This wire caught things. That tube let air out. Neither had been made to turn a brass bell sideways inside a junction that belonged to three animals.
But the tube was already on the other side of it.
I looked at my fork on the appointment card. I could bring the tube's rounded end back up from the stomach and use it to lift the caught rim. The wire could draw from the snake's side. Two approaches to one small, badly placed object.
To do that, I had to stop venting. I listened to the lion's chest again before I moved anything. Air was entering both sides. Her tongue was pinker. We had earned a little room to work.
"I need her exactly as she is," I said. "Let the tail grip you. If she moves, go with her and tell me."
Mrs. Birk nodded. Her free hand rested against the red collar, clear of the goat's mouth.
I drew the tube back until its tip sat at the fork. I held it in my left hand, with two fingers resting against the throat to feel its position; my right hand held the wire without tension. With the tube I lifted beneath the edge of the bell.
It tilted the wrong way.
The goat gagged. I let everything slacken while she swallowed, keeping the loop on the ring. Crumpet dug one black hoof into the quilt. Mrs. Birk's stool creaked.
"Still here," she told her. "I've got you."
The lion's breath warmed her skirt.
I changed the angle of the tube. Not much. Enough to get its tip against the opposite side of the rim.
"She's pulling," Mrs. Birk said.
I lowered the wire with the snake's head. Waited. The tail's grip eased.
Then I lifted with the tube and drew gently from the side.
The bell turned under my fingertips. The rim came clear. This time, when I moved the wire, only the bell moved with it.
I did not hurry. I could feel every bend it passed along. Mrs. Birk kept the snake's broad curve supported, and Crumpet held her arm. At the mouth, I shielded the little backward-pointing teeth with the guard and eased the brass rim past them.
The bell landed in the bowl with a bright, ordinary ring.
Crumpet belched through the goat's mouth.
It went on long enough for Mrs. Birk to say, "Good girl," twice.
I slid the tube back into the stomach and let it vent until her belly was soft. Then I removed it and checked every mouth, listened to her chest, and felt carefully along the fork. Nothing caught. Nothing swelled. The snake flicked its tongue at my wire, which I put away before we had a second case.
Mrs. Birk's arm was shaking when I helped her lower it. I sat her in the chair by the stove and made tea. Crumpet stayed on the quilt beneath the table, where we could watch her. I checked her breathing between cups.
"Will she do it again?" Mrs. Birk asked.
I looked at the bell, drying on a cloth.
"Given the opportunity."
"I mean, is there something wrong with how she's made?"
I took a little time over that. Beneath the table, the lion was washing a paw. The goat had found a thread on the quilt. The snake was following the movement of my teaspoons.
"I haven't found anything that needs changing," I said. "But she should have another examination when she's grown a bit more. And we should keep small loose objects away from all her mouths."
Mrs. Birk nodded and put the bell in her coat pocket. Then she thought better of it and put it in her handbag, fastening the clasp.
For her last check before going home, I sat on the floor. Crumpet put her lion's head on my knee. I offered my forearm to the snake before reaching for the listening trumpet, and it wound around me in a firm, comfortable coil.
The goat tugged the apron. Just once, experimentally.
I listened beneath the red collar. A steady heart. Air coming freely. From the stomach, the unremarkable gurgle of digestion getting on with its business.
I could have got up then. Mrs. Birk had the barrow ready.
But Crumpet's round ears had relaxed against my knee. The tail loosened its grip without unwinding, and the goat rested its chin on my shoulder.
"Give us a minute," I called.