It was late in the day when the large patient ambled through the hospital doors, aided by a petite younger-looking woman. The larger of the two was a massive, squat bovine, shaggier and hairier than any bovine Aaron had ever seen. She had large horns that swept out from the sides of her head then curved upwards, making her look even taller. She was dressed in a brick-red muumuu that contrasted her dark fur. The lady helping her was at least a foot and a half shorter, canine, covered in short white fur and dressed in tight clothing that emphasized her toned features.

Aaron was in the waiting room, making idle chat-chat with the avian receptionist while the canine talked to the duty nurse. He managed to glean that the canine was a midwife, and that the bovine was her patient. His keen ears picked up the phrases "homebirth transfer" and "failure to progress". Aaron took another look at the bovine – she was so bottom-heavy that Aaron didn't even realize she was pregnant under her loose-fitting clothes, much less in labour. 

By the time the porcine nurse looked back at the desk the canine was gone, having made a hasty retreat. Aaron imagined that she didn't want to be seen as a failure for her client's inability to give birth at home under her care, or maybe she had skirted a few rules and regulations by providing care at all, and didn't want to be liable if things took a turn for the worse.

Aaron tagged along as another duty nurse was paged, and the heavy-set bovine was escorted to an exam room in a reinforced wheelchair designed for pachyderms and their larger ilk.

Inside the exam room, Aaron helped the stout woman shed her muumuu and change into a hospital gown in preparation for an examination. Sure enough, she was very round under the fabric, but someone giving a quick look might assume she was just fat. She probably outweighed Aaron almost three-to-one.  

The pair were joined shortly by Dr. Kaur, a striped feline obstetrical gynecologist with a medium build and a heavy accent. Aaron busied himself making sure all the equipment was accounted for while Dr. Kaur hooked the patient up to all sorts of monitoring equipment. The bovine offered almost nothing in return except for a few grunts of discomfort, and the occasional one-word answer when the doctor asked her all the usual questions. If she was in any pain, she bore it stoically. 

Aaron mostly stayed off to the side – as a neonatal nurse he was able to perform the same exams and take the same information as Dr. Kaur, but the pair had worked together often enough that Aaron knew to stay out of her way.

Finally, Dr. Kaur pulled Aaron aside. "The baby needs to come out," she told him in her stilted accent, "but mother is very tired. I worry about infection."

"So, a cesarean?" Aaron offered, secretly hoping he wouldn't be stuck in a crowded operating room with a dozen other doctors and nurses. Thankfully, the feline shook her head. 

"The mother has refused," she countered, "And the baby is backward. We will need to pull it out." She used one hand to illustrate the baby, and pulled on it with her other hand in mid-air to illustrate her point.

Aaron knew that English was not Dr. Kaur's first language, and he had a suspicion that it wasn't even her second or third, so the porcine never held her difficulty communicating against her. He knew she was ferociously intelligent, and she had proven herself as a competent, talented doctor many times over. Sometimes her directness could be taken as aggression, especially by other 'prey' species, but Aaron knew it was just the frustration boiling over at how difficult it was for her to communicate nuanced ideas.

"So a breech extraction?" Aaron offered, now trying to hide his excitement.

The feline nodded. "Prep for delivery."

Aaron nodded back, and headed over to an open delivery room to quickly get set up. He knew that Dr. Kaur would more than likely take the lead on the extraction itself, leaving Aaron to take care of the infant once it was delivered. Anticipating a rocky start, he set up a small camera near the warming table but kept another one on him, the pinhole lens peeking out from behind his name badge.

In a few minutes, a porter arrived with the bovine patient and Dr. Kaur close behind. Aaron watched the doctor's long tail twitch impatiently. He made sure everything was in place for a difficult delivery – forceps, hemostats, aspirator, suction pump, lots of warm towels, even epinephrine if they needed. While he did a final check of the inventory, he could hear Dr. Kaur arguing with the patient over an epidural. He could imagine how frustrating it must have been. He quietly checked in with the doctor with a tilt of his head once he was sure everything was in place. "We are doing this the hard way," she answered with a sigh as the patient shuffled into the stirrups.

Aaron stood to one side holding a tray of equipment while Dr. Kaur began the extraction process by pushing her gloved fingers roughly between the bovine's legs. The bovine grunted in pain, but Dr. Kaur wasn't hearing it, instead bracing herself by putting her other hand on the underside of the woman's heavy belly. Aaron could see that Dr. Kaur had filed her claws down so they could fit into the gloves without tearing them.

Dr. Kaur had almost her entire hand inside her patient before Aaron could see by the stiffening of her tail that she was able to grab onto something. Murky fluid splashed and dribbled as she turned her wrist to one side, and the bovine gripped the sides of the delivery bed, gritting her flat teeth. The feline pulled, steadily and insistently but not violently, until Aaron saw something in the doctor's grip. Once the baby’s hoof was out, Dr. Kaur let go, allowing her patient to breathe before another contraction hit.

Aaron watched as the doctor grabbed the baby's foot and pulled downwards. He only saw the baby's right foot, though, the other foot must have been tucked away somewhere else. The foot lengthened into a shin and then a leg, covered in wet brown fur that was already long enough look matted. There was still no sign of the baby's other leg, but the feline was no doubt already accounting for that. Aaron was thankful that the try of equipment was hiding his twitching erection under his scrubs.

Once the baby's leg had been delivered up to the hip, Dr. Kaur adjusted her grip and started pulling upwards, exposing the calf's buttocks. Thick black meconium oozed out from under its matted tail, and underneath all the messy fur Aaron swore he saw something sticking out before the other leg flopped out and blocked his view. Again, the doctor let go and allowed both mother and baby to rest for a few moments, pausing to reach under the baby's messy groin and feel for an umbilical cord. 

When the next contraction started, Aaron fidgeted as Dr. Kaur pulled the baby down by the hips and rotated it to one side again to free one of its shoulders. Aaron kept looking for anything between the baby's legs before the doctor's arm blocked his view again. Dr. Kaur quickly pulled one of the baby's arms out and let it flop down over its chest before she pulled the baby's feet towards the ceiling to free the other shoulder. At last, the porcine nurse got a full-frontal view of the baby, but its legs were so tightly pushed together from the feline's iron grip around its ankles that Aaron still couldn't tell what he was looking at. The fact that he saw nothing at all meant the baby was probably a girl, but for all he knew the baby could be hiding something between those thick, fatty thighs.

With all the baby's arms and legs delivered, Dr. Kaur again let go and allowed the baby to dangle while she again palpated the cord to assess the baby's vitals. It didn't look good from what Aaron could tell. The calf hadn’t moved or even twitched yet, it just dangled limply from its mother's birth canal, the head still stuck inside. And because the baby was facing away and to the side, he still had no idea whether he was going to be dealing with a boy or a girl. 

When the bovine woman looked like she was going to push again, Dr. Kaur pushed her arm up between the baby's legs and along its chest to feel for the baby's chin, while her other arm pulled down on the shoulders to straighten the baby’s neck, then quickly tipped the baby upside-down to wrench the head out in one motion with her fingers in the calf’s mouth. Aaron was astonished. The entire delivery took less than three minutes from start to finish thanks to the tiger’s brutal efficiency.

"Suction," Dr. Kaur ordered, holding the limp newborn in the crook of her arm. Aaron quickly put the tray down and handed her the suction bulb. It didn't look good. The baby was limp and floppy, with a dusky blue tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth. The feline squeezed the rubber bulb and jammed it into the baby's muzzle, noisily sucking out anything in the baby's throat before spraying the contents of the bulb onto the floor. She stuffed it up the baby's nose as well, jostling it from side to side before sucking out more mucus than Aaron could believe. 

"Clamp," The feline demanded once the bulb was empty. Aaron took the rubber aspirator from her and handed the doctor one of the umbilical clamps, which she clicked into place about an inch away from the baby's belly then held out her hand for another one. The second clamp was clicked into place roughly an inch away from the first one, and then both clamps were allowed to dangle before Dr. Kaur held out her hand again. This time, Aaron pushed the umbilical scissors into her hand before she could ask and started unfolding a green hospital blanket to receive his new patient.

Once the dangling cord was cut, Dr. Kaur pushed the limp infant unceremoniously into Aaron's arms. Aaron quickly pushed the blanket over her and started rubbing as he quickly walked over to the warming table, making sure the camera was still recording. He unwrapped the bundle to reveal a lifeless, brown-furred bovine calf, its legs flopped open to reveal a very puffy pair of labia sticking out past the short fur around her groin. The calf's bits could easily be mistaken for a scrotum if one didn't look too hard. Trying not to be distracted by the baby's private parts, Aaron briskly rubbed the green rag over the baby's chest and waited. Nothing. Aaron wasn't too discouraged at the sight – he knew the baby had a rough start and sometimes it took a while for them to get going. He remembered his friend Tom saying the same thing about the cows on the farm, how you needed to be rough with some of the calves otherwise they'd just linger and die. He remembered hearing all the things they did to the calves to try and get them breathing, things that would end Aaron's career at a moment's notice if anyone saw him try them. And then he got an idea.

He remembered hearing how in order to see if a breech calf was alive, Tom would stick his fingers up the calf's tailhole. If the calf clenched, it was still alive and there was hope. But if the calf didn't react, it was probably dead. Aaron looked behind him. Dr. Kaur was busy trying to extract the placenta from her patient. No one else was in the room. He wouldn't get a chance like this again. He grabbed the calf's ankles and pulled them up like he was going to change a diaper, then pushed his pinkie finger right between her buttocks, sinking in to the first knuckle. He felt the orifice squeeze his digit and then the calf let out a pitiful wet gasp. She was alive!

"Atta girl," Aaron praised, "You gave us a scare there!" He twisted his finger inside her tailhole to keep her stimulated, curling his finger gently to try and provoke more of a response. It worked, and the calf tried to kick out in protest before she drew her arms into her chest and let out a feeble cry. "That's it," Aaron praised again, then pulled his finger out and let her legs drop down so he could rub her chest again and try and get her to breathe for real. His eyes kept getting drawn back down between her legs –  her bits were so . . .obvious, so swollen, that Aaron started to wonder why. A dose of hormones from the mother, maybe? Was the big bovine getting turned on by having her baby yanked out of her? Or maybe it was the little calf's response to getting manhandled. Either way, Aaron was compelled to keep rubbing, using the rag to wipe off her chest and then back and forth between her legs before abandoning the rag entirely and using his gloved hands to rub her chest, between her legs, then lift her upside-down and slap her back to try and get her to cough up the rest of the fluid she nearly drowned in. She got more and more lively and vocal with each passing moment, until she was squirming and squealing so loud it was echoing off the walls and Aaron ran out of excuses to keep fondling her.

"I wish we had more time," he whispered to her as he finished drying her off and started doing a proper examination. To Dr. Kaur's delight the calf seemed perfectly healthy, aside from the rough start, and Aaron handed the now very loud, active bundle to the mother, who grunted contently, again expressing her feelings in her own quiet, subdued way.

What the mother and Dr. Kaur hopefully didn't know was that while Aaron was taking the newborn's measurements, writing down all those numbers and rolling her tiny hoof in ink for the birth certificate, is that the boar took a second print for himself. Quickly and quietly he stamped her hoof in the pages of a notebook he kept in his scrubs, disguised as a day planner. There the print was, along with the sex, species, and time of birth, nestled at the end of a long line of deliveries that Aaron had attended to over the years – his little black book.