Mira Thorn had three nights to save a species, and something in the dark was eating her clock. She crouched at the base of the cypress where the last breeding pair of eyed raptors had built their nest. The female lay flat on the platform of woven roots, her ribs working too fast, the cluster of glowing eyes along her brow ridge dim. The male paced a tight circle above her and would not stop. Mira had been a swamp vet for nine years. She had never had patients she could not afford to lose until now. Last night she had found prints in the mud at the waterline. Six pads, then six more, in a stride too long for any cat she knew. Tonight she heard it before she saw it: a slow wet push through the reeds, circling. She killed her lantern and listened. The thing moved in a wide ring around the cypress, testing the ground, working closer. If it reached the female before sunrise, the male would fight it and die, and the nest would end. She had hauled in coils of bracken brush that afternoon, the kind with hooked thorns that locked into fur. She had piled it in a half ring on the land side and left the water side open, because she could not cover both and the water side was deeper and harder to cross. She had guessed. Now she would learn if she had guessed right. The sabercat came from the water. It rose out of the channel in one long motion, too many legs folding and unfolding, tusks pale against the black of it. Mira's hands shook on the flare. She waited until it was three strides from the trunk, then struck the flare and threw it low. The cat flinched sideways, into the thorn wall. The hooks caught. It twisted, dragged the brush with it, snarled, and the more it fought the deeper the thorns set. It backed off the bank and slid into the channel and was gone, pulling a tangle of bracken behind it. Mira stayed on her knees a long time before she climbed to the nest. The female was still breathing. The male had not moved from his circle. On the trunk above her head, four fresh claw gouges ran down to the wood, where the cat had reached before she lit the flare. It would come back, and next time it would come from the land side, and she had used the brush she had. She thought of the researcher who came when she could, who had sat two hours and written nothing, and she understood for the first time that the woman had been saying goodbye. Mira was not ready to say it yet. She started planning the next night before the sun came up.

By dawn the female was worse. Her ribs jerked instead of swelled, and the glow along her brow had narrowed to thin pinpricks. Mira climbed the cypress and lifted her down in a sling of wet cloth. The male screamed once and followed at a low run, then stopped at the edge of the clearing where Mira had set up her work. He would come no closer to the cage. She laid the female inside the slatted wooden pen she used for swamp patients, packed moss under the head, and latched the door so the male could watch through the bars. She had hauled the old x-ray unit out from the back shed a year ago and never moved it back. It ran off her generator and threw a clear picture onto its glass screen. Mira positioned the female on her side and triggered the plate. The image came up green and gray. The lungs were not clean. A pale web spread through both lobes, fine as lace, thickest near the throat. Not fluid. Not blood. Something with shape. Something growing. She had seen that pattern once, in a marsh dog that had denned under a rotting tree. Sap spores. The dog had died in two days. Mira pulled on gloves and opened the female's beak. Inside the soft tissue at the back of the throat she found a smear of pale milky residue, sticky between her fingers. The bird had been breathing it in for days, maybe weeks. The source was somewhere the pair perched often. She left the female in the cage with the male pressed against the bars and walked the nest ground in widening circles. She found it forty paces from the cypress: a dead tree wrapped in a thick strangler vine, the bark split, pale sap weeping from every crack and pooling at the roots. Tiny holes pocked the trunk where the spores vented. The wind from the channel carried straight through it to the nest. Mira stood with her sleeve over her mouth and counted the drip points. Twelve. The pair had been roosting downwind of a slow poison. She went back for her axe and a bucket of clay. She could not move the nest in a day. She could cut the vine, seal the vents, and buy the female air. She worked through the morning, hacking the strangler free in wet ropes, sealing each weeping hole with packed clay, then dragging the cut vine to the channel and sinking it with stones. Her arms shook by the end. Her shirt was streaked with sap she did not want to touch her skin. That evening the female's breathing eased. The glow along her brow lifted from pinpricks to small steady lights. She was not healed. The web in her lungs was still there, and Mira had no drug for it. But the female would see another night, and the male had stopped pacing. Mira sat by the cage and started a list of what she would need to pull the spores out before the third dawn.

Mira sat by the cage and watched the female's ribs settle into a slower rhythm. She had just started her list of supplies when she heard the wet crackle of leaves at the channel's edge. She turned. Something was moving through the reeds where she had sunk the cut vine. A fox stepped out into her work area. Moss grew along its back in thick green pads, and small mushrooms rose between its shoulders. Its eyes burned white. It nosed the bank where the vine had gone under, then turned toward her open tool chest. The chest sat on raised wooden legs near the cage, lid propped, the brass latches catching the late light. Inside lay her clean gauze, her sealed jars of saline, the bottles she meant to use on the female's lungs. Sap streaked the fox's muzzle already. If it climbed in, every jar lid, every cloth would carry spores. Mira stood slowly. The male raptor went still against the bars and watched. She did not have time to drive the fox off twice. She needed it gone, and she needed it to stay gone while she worked through the night. She stepped sideways toward the chest, keeping her body between the fox and the cage. The fox lowered its head and pushed its nose under the propped lid. Mira's hand closed on the gourd rattle hanging from the chest handle. She had made it last winter for snakes. Clay-sealed shell, swamp stones inside, a corded loop. She lifted it off the hook and shook it hard once, close to the fox's ear. The sound cracked across the clearing. The fox jerked back and snapped at the air. Mira stepped forward and shook the rattle again, lower, sharper, driving it toward the channel. The fox bolted into the reeds. She followed three paces and shook the rattle a third time at the bank, where the cut vine lay sunk under stones. Then she went back, closed the chest, and dropped the brass latches shut. She tied the rattle to the latch ring so any nudge would set it off. She checked the chest for sap. A smear ran across the lip of the lid where the fox's muzzle had touched. She wiped it off with a rag and burned the rag in her fire pan. Inside, the jars were clean. The gauze was clean. She had kept the supplies. But the fox had shown her something she had not planned for: the sunk vine was still venting under the water, and anything that drank or fed at that bank would carry the poison back through her camp. She sat down by the cage with the list in her lap and crossed out two lines. The vine had to come out of the channel before morning.