A Good Day's Work (9 page)

“She hasn't been eating well,” he says of the cow, which has ribs that show. “She's pretty lethargic.” They manoeuvre the animal to the side of the stall, where a gate keeps her still as Jessica does her physical. She listens to the heart, lungs and abdomen through a stethoscope. Then she plunges her hand into the cow's rear end and gropes around to check some other organs. The news is bad, the diagnosis unequivocal: a heart murmur. The farmer asks if anything can be done. When Jessica says no, the cow's fate is sealed: one way or the other the cow will be put down, probably to become hamburger.

By the time Jessica is back in the milk house, stripping off her gear, she has probed by hand the guts of a dozen cows. Only six of them are pregnant. There's a cloud over Martin-Dan's face. On Jessica's advice he's been using an artificial insemination program called Ovsynch to get the herd reproducing and keep the cycle of milk production going. “He's discouraged,” she tells me. “But those are normal results. Maybe the cows have been working hard at milking and not working at breeding. There could be fertility issues. It's hard to know. Martin-Dan is just very enthusiastic; he wants to do a really good job. He wants them to get pregnant.” They work through his options. It takes a few minutes, but she talks him down; he'll give the program another shot, he says. Jessica, who has taken off her messed-up coveralls, is using a
heavy-duty spray to clean her gear. Through the steam, I see her smile when Martin-Dan announces his decision.

BACK in the truck she tells me that she's probably at this farm once a month, about average for her “clients.” Sometimes farmers think they can handle whatever has happened by themselves or with a little advice over the phone. Other times it's “better get over here fast because all hell is breaking loose.” Breached deliveries. Colic. Gashed-up legs. Pneumonia. A host of maladies can befall a farm animal. “Take your prolapsed uterus,” Jessica says, a term with which I am not familiar. It means that while calving, a cow has somehow pushed her uterus outside of her body. In January, when there are lots of beef cattle calving in the area, Jessica runs into a fair number of prolapsed uteruses. “Some are easy—some are hard. It's got to go back in. So I give the cow an epidural and I start pushing. It's this big bag that has carried a calf. It can take forty minutes of pushing; my arms ache for days after. The whole thing is a bloody wet mess. I put a calving suit over top of the coveralls. But I still get wet. There's a lot of blood from the afterbirth. I'm covered in blood and water, and it's all happening at the back end, so I'm covered in that too.”

C-sections, another regular procedure, sound like no walk in the park either. Jessica describes the circumstances of her most recent one: a farm that had lost its power during a big windstorm and a cow trying to calve, with a twisted uterus preventing the birth from taking place. Jessica used a local anaesthetic to numb the “surgery site.” She sedated the cow and
then cut a fifteen-inch-long hole in the animal's side. “I reached into the abdomen, pulled the uterus out and made an incision. Then the farmer and I pulled the calf out.” That understates the process a little. The calf weighed about a hundred pounds, which explained why Jessica couldn't untwist things. By the time she stitched up the uterus and incision ninety minutes had elapsed. A “difficult” C-section can take two and a half hours.

We pull into an Irving Big Stop, where she has arranged to hand off some medication to a farmer. Jessica punches the office number into her cell phone. “Hi, I'm all done at Dykstra's,” she says. When Jessica hangs up, she explains that a while ago her colleague André stitched up a high-spirited filly with considerable difficulty. Now those stitches need to come out. Carl, who is already out at the stable, thinks that this is more than a one-person job. Jessica, lucky her, is closest.

A car finally pulls up. A window rolls down. The farmer's two-month-old calf isn't drinking much water and just lies there. Jessica asks a few questions. They settle on a treatment that is about sixty dollars less than the medicine he was originally scheduled to pick up. “If things get worse, call me ASAP,” she says. Then she slaps the truck into drive and is back on the road again, bound for the Maritime Saddle and Tack Shop a few kilometres east.

Inside the barn, the horse's owner, Michelle Bourque, leans up against the stall. Styletto—shiny chestnut coat with a white-patched forehead and dabs of snow on two legs—has quite the lineage: sired by a dressage world champ whose daughter sold for a cool 2.5 million euros at an auction, she's on the market for twelve thousand dollars. But even to my untutored eye Styletto—chest heaving, nostrils pulsing—looks
skittish. She's a hoity-toity show horse that spends her time cantering around exhibition rings. Nonetheless, when Carl tries to pick up the stitched right front leg, she rears up, smashing her head on the barn roof and making a sound like someone chopping wood. “Whoa,” says Carl. “Whoa,” says Michelle. “Whoa,” says Jessica.

Injuries are unavoidable for big-animal vets. Horses kick. So do cows. Mostly it's just bruises and bangs. But André has never quite recovered from being bitten in the face by an ornery mare on what should have been a routine call. Horses will try to stomp you with their hooves, as Styletto aspires to do to Carl at this very moment. If your arm gets wedged in between a wild horse and the sides of the stall—as seems to be on the verge of happening to Jessica, now also inside the stall with Styletto—it could get fractured. Styletto, it is decided, needs a little sedation. Jessica heads for the truck. She returns minutes later carrying a black case with silver latches and hinges that snap open.

Inside her emergency kit are needles, syringes and IV catheters. Rompun, an injectable sedative, is in a 50 ml bottle, about half the size of the ampoules of Flunazine, a painkiller. The Dormosedan is in a clear bottle with labels on either side. Because Styletto is so jumpy, Jessica puts a little of it together with a little Torbugesic, another sedative. She flicks the syringe a couple of times with her index finger to get the medicine flowing. Then she steps inside the stall.

The horse isn't big. Even so, Carl clenches Styletto's halter for control. Amid beams of light from a flashlight, Jessica, making calming noises, searches for the horse's jugular vein with her left hand while the syringe stands ready in her right.
Inside an eight-foot-square stall a wrestling match ensues. A chorus of “whoas” fills the barn. The vets muscle the horse. Styletto, moving counter-clockwise, muscles back. Somehow Jessica gets the needle in, plunges the sedation into the horse's circulatory system, then backs off to let it work.

The drug combo, under normal circumstances, should take the fight out of a horse. Styletto just stands there. “It's the animal's temperament that's the issue,” says Jessica. “Taking out the stitches isn't that painful. It's just that nothing we were doing was to her liking. It's just her personality. She's very stubborn.” The vets look at Michelle. Michelle looks at them. Carl tries to grab the filly's right leg and then just gives up. In her mind, Jessica is already mixing Dormosedan and Rompun, a more potent sedative combination, and reaching for another syringe.

BACK in the office half an hour later Jessica plucks a doughnut from a Tim Hortons box. If she doesn't eat something now, she might have to go the entire workday with nothing more than a few handfuls of trail mix from the plastic bag in the cab of her truck. She's had half an hour of downtime. Now a horse is about to foal. Dairy cattle tend to calve all year. Horses tend to foal in the spring. This, for example, will be the first equine birth Jessica has seen this season. Normally when horses foal, a farmer doesn't reach for the phone to call the vet. But this couple raises show horses.

Maryanne Gauthier, who also works for the local John Deere dealer, focuses on paints, so called because of their
distinctive markings. Her husband, Marc, raises Clydesdales, just like in the Budweiser ads. Marc is a farrier, which means he shoes horses for a living. He's also a bit of a worrier. He's spent a lot of time and money on a mare named Amelia Earhart. So when the mare's water broke, Marc hit Jessica's cell phone number and told her that, if possible, her presence would be appreciated.

“There's a good chance it will all be done by the time we get there,” says Jessica, back behind the wheel. A cow can take two hours. Horses are a lot faster. That her water has broken implies that she will foal in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. “But there's no happy medium with foals,” Jessica says. “They're either really easy going, or it's really, really hard.”

We're heading southwest from Moncton, down an unremarkable stretch of Trans-Canada Highway before turning off onto a country road. The Arctic temperature seems to give everything outside a hard, metallic look. Jessica's cell rings: “Have you seen any signs of heat … I can book something for next week in the morning … Oh, I know Lola. What's her due date again … I'll call you later when I have my book and we'll make an appointment.”

The community we're bound for, Havelock, sits at the junction of Route 880 and the Hicks Settlement Road. When I look on my iPhone, I note that the settlement—along with towns in Nebraska and New Zealand and streets in Singapore and Kanpur—is named after a British general famous for putting down an uprising in Raj-era India. The Internet also tells me that Havelock's most famous citizen is an evangelist named George McCready Price, known for his creationist thinking.

I personally believe in evolution. However life comes to be, there is no mistaking the wondrous yet messy path of the natural world inside the barn where Maryanne, dressed in ladylike pink, leads us. Paints in stalls line either side of the barn. Amelia's space is the last one on the left. She's not alone: kneeling in the hay, a fifteen-minute-old Clydesdale foal blinks from the shock of entering this here world.

I may have gasped. I may have thrown my hands up in the air like a three-year-old coming down the stairs on Christmas morning. I can't really recall. All I can relay for certain is my abiding sense that city folks don't often get the opportunity to see such things, and recall the way that foal looked—eyes barely open, white forehead, muzzle twitching, I imagine, in confusion—and how his mother, covered in blankets to keep her warm after the exertion of birth, just stood there obliviously munching hay.

A horse like Amelia is probably worth fifteen to twenty thousand dollars. So I understand why Marc, kneeling by the foal's side, is so excited. He reaches up to shake my hand, then goes back to cleaning the foal's coat and whispering encouraging words. Jessica, at this point, just stands by the entrance to the stall watching things unfold. Marc and Maryanne try to get the foal to rise, fail, then try again. Finally, on the shakiest of legs, it gets to its feet. “Holy sweet mother, look at the size,” says Maryanne. The horse, now about forty minutes old, reaches almost to her shoulders. Marc looks like he may weep with joy. Jessica makes an appreciative noise and notes the time: 3:06 p.m.

Foalings are supposed to follow what she calls the “one-two-three principle.” If all goes well, the foal is supposed to be upright within an hour. Within two hours of being born it is
supposed to be feeding. An hour later the mare is supposed to clear the placenta, which at this moment hangs a foot or so out of Amelia's rear end. If the placenta doesn't clear by this time, the danger of infection increases. Jessica watches Maryanne and Marc try to get the foal to latch onto its mother to feed. Then, after a while, she opens the metallic case.

She lifts out a vial of oxytocin, the hormone responsible for producing the uterine contractions that birth the foal and push out the afterbirth. She pops the needle of a hypodermic syringe into the centre of the ampoule and draws out the medicine. As Marc calms the horse, she hits the jugular with the needle, plunging the medicine into the Clydesdale's bloodstream. Then there's nothing for her to do but watch and wait.