" "Yeah, I feel it." "Yeah, I feel it." Twenty seconds. "Okay." "I'm going to turn it." Thirty seconds. "Okay, you've got it. You're right, amniotic sac is gone. Oh, hell." She looked up at another centaur. "Shock blankets, pneumonia injections, the works. Got it?" She didn't bother to get a reply. Fifty seconds. "Brieanna, that's a rear leg you're right next to." "Okay, I'm going to keep turning." Sixty seconds. "I'm going to give a pull, I've got the flank hip." She began to withdraw the arm. The centaur I was touching hadn't said a word, was just staring. I looked at her, and she was breathing deep, and I reached out with one hand and stroked her hair. She took my hand and held it, fearing for her child and herself. Seventy seconds. There was a breach, a rush of fluid, and then the foal's hip broke air, and the rest just dropped out. Brieanna's hand came down sharply on the flank of the foal, and he (for he he was) screamed, his first, wonderful scream. He coughed up some of the amniotic fluid, but Brie was already toweling him down, and cleaning him off. She was smiling broadly, and the mother was still staring, and I reached over and hugged her. She hugged me back, and was crying. Brieanna gathered up the foal in her arms and brought it over to the mother. The mother looked up, and accepted the child, leading a mouth to her breast. The child took to it, he knew what it was there for. I'd rarely seen centaur foals, seeing as there were others far more qualified to help with that, and for the most part the birth process was prefected anyway. There rarely are breach pregnancies like that. This one was like most of them, though, the humanoid torso far more mature than in humans, say, about that of a five-year-old, but it would stay that way until the mind caught up with it. |