Elara took Finn gently into the treatment room. The bloodwork came back clean. No parasites, no infection, no virus. By the numbers, Finn was healthy. But by the behavior of the dog, he was broken.

“The fox has distemper,” she explained to Fergal. “The sheep know it. They’ve been broadcasting fear pheromones for a week. Finn, being a sensitive collie, absorbed that panic. His fever isn’t a sickness—it’s a . His body is burning up because his brain is screaming that the flock is in danger.”

The local farmers, pragmatic and weathered, often humored her. “Sure, the animal is sick, Elara,” they’d say. “The bloodwork is what matters.”

Then she saw it: a shadow moving under the old oak tree. A lone, mangy fox with a strange, jerky gait. It wasn’t attacking the sheep. It was just… circling.

But Elara knew that the bloodwork only told half the story. The other half was written in the flick of a tail, the angle of an ear, or the heavy silence of a flock.

That night, Elara wrote in her weathered journal: