All Creatures Great and Small (31 page)

“Ah’ve got a bowl of goose grease.”

“O.K. use that.” I reflected that there must be a bowl of goose grease on most farms; it was the all-purpose lubricant and liniment for man and beast.

Terry seemed relieved at the opportunity to do something. He fished out an old bucket, tucked the milking stool between his legs and crouched down against the cow. He looked up at me with a strangely defiant expression. “Right,” he said. “I’m startin’ now.”

As it happened, I was called out early the next morning to a milk fever and on the way home I decided to look in at the Watsons’ cottage. It was about eight o’clock and when I entered the little two-stall shed, Terry was in the same position as I had left him on the previous night. He was pulling at the infected teat, eyes closed, cheek resting against the cow’s flank. He started as though roused from sleep when I spoke.

“Hello, you’re having another go, I see.”

The cow looked round, too, at my words and I saw immediately, with a thrill of pleasure that she was immeasurably improved. She had lost her blank stare and was looking at me with the casual interest of the healthy bovine and best of all, her jaws were moving with that slow, regular, lateral grind that every vet loves to see.

“My God, Terry, she looks a lot better. She isn’t like the same cow!”

The young man seemed to have difficulty in keeping his eyes open but he smiled. “Aye, and come and have a look at this end.” He rose slowly from the stool, straightened his back a little bit at a time and leaned his elbow on the cow’s rump.

I bent down by the udder, feeling carefully for the painful swelling of last night, but my hand came up against a smooth, yielding surface and, in disbelief, I kneaded the tissue between my fingers. The animal showed no sign of discomfort. With a feeling of bewilderment I drew on the teat with thumb and forefinger; the quarter was nearly empty but I did manage to squeeze a single jet of pure white milk on to my palm.

“What’s going on here, Terry? You must have switched cows on me. You’re having me on, aren’t you?”

“Nay, guvnor,” the young man said with his slow smile. “It’s same cow all right—she’s better, that’s all.”

“But it’s impossible! What the devil have you done to her?”

“Just what you told me to do. Rub and strip.”

I scratched my head. “But she’s back to normal. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Aye, I know you haven’t.” It was a woman’s voice and I turned and saw young Mrs. Watson standing at the door holding her baby. “You’ve never seen a man that would rub and strip a cow right round the clock, have you?”

“Round the clock?” I said.

She looked at her husband with a mixture of concern and exasperation. “Yes, he’s been there on that stool since you left last night. Never been to bed, never been in for a meal. I’ve been bringing him bits and pieces and cups of tea. Great fool—it’s enough to kill anybody.”

I looked at Terry and my eyes moved from the pallid face over the thin, slightly swaying body to the nearly empty bowl of goose grease at his feet. “Good Lord, man,” I said. “You’ve done the impossible but you must be about all in. Anyway, your cow is as good as new—you don’t need to do another thing to her, so you can go in and have a bit of rest.”

“Nay, I can’t do that.” He shook his head and straightened his shoulders. “I’ve got me work to go to and I’m late as it is.”

I
COULDN’T HELP FEELING
just a little bit smug as I squeezed the bright red rubber ball out through the incision in the dog’s stomach. We got enough small animal work in Darrowby to make a pleasant break from our normal life around the farms but not enough to make us blasé. No doubt the man with an intensive town practice looks on a gastrotomy as a fairly routine and unexciting event but as I watched the little red ball roll along the table and bounce on the surgery floor a glow of achievement filled me.

The big, lolloping Red Setter pup had been brought in that morning; his mistress said that he had been trembling, miserable and occasionally vomiting for two days—ever since their little girl’s ball had mysteriously disappeared. Diagnosis had not been difficult.

I inverted the lips of the stomach wound and began to close it with a continuous suture. I was feeling pleasantly relaxed unlike Tristan who had been unable to light a Woodbine because of the ether which bubbled in the glass bottle behind him and out through the anaesthetic mask which he held over the dog’s face; he stared moodily down at the patient and the fingers of his free hand drummed on the table.

But it was soon my turn to be tense because the door of the operating room burst open and Siegfried strode in. I don’t know why it was but whenever Siegfried watched me do anything I started to go to pieces; great waves seemed to billow from him—impatience, frustration, criticism, irritation. I could feel the waves buffeting me now although my employer’s face was expressionless; he was standing quietly at the end of the table but as the minutes passed I had the growing impression of a volcano on the bubble. The eruption came when I began to stitch the deep layer of the abdominal muscle. I was pulling a length of catgut from a glass jar when I heard a sharp intake of breath.

“God help us, James!” cried Siegfried. “Stop pulling at that bloody gut! Do you know how much that stuff costs per foot? Well it’s a good job you don’t or you’d faint dead away. And that expensive dusting powder you’ve been chucking about—there must be about half a pound of it inside that dog right now.” He paused and breathed heavily for a few moments. “Another thing, if you want to swab, a little bit of cotton wool is enough—you don’t need a square foot at a time like you’ve been using. Here, give me that needle. Let me show you.”

He hastily scrubbed his hands and took over. First he took a minute pinch of the iodoform powder and sprinkled it daintily into the wound rather like an old lady feeding her goldfish, then he cut off a tiny piece of gut and inserted a continuous suture in the muscle; he had hardly left himself enough to tie the knot at the end and it was touch and go, but he just made it after a few moments of intense concentration.

This process was repeated about ten times as he closed the skin wound with interrupted silk sutures, his nose almost touching the patient as he laboriously tied off each little short end with forceps. When he had finished he was slightly pop-eyed.

“Right, turn off the ether, Tristan,” he said as he pulled off half an inch of wool and primly wiped the wound down.

He turned to me and smiled gently. With dismay I saw that his patient look was spreading over his face. “James, please don’t misunderstand me. You’ve made a grand job of this dog but you’ve got to keep one eye on the economic side of things. I know it doesn’t matter a hoot to you just now but some day, no doubt, you’ll have your own practice and then you’ll realise some of the worries I have on my shoulders.” He patted my arm and I steeled myself as he put his head on one side and a hint of roguishness crept into his smile.

“After all, James, you’ll agree it is desirable to make some sort of profit in the end.”

It was a week later and I was kneeling on the neck of a sleeping colt in the middle of a field, the sun was hot on the back of my neck as I looked down at the peacefully closed eyes, the narrow face disappearing into the canvas chloroform muzzle. I tipped a few more drops of the anaesthetic on to the sponge and screwed the cap on to the bottle. He had had about enough now.

I couldn’t count the number of times Siegfried and I have enacted this scene; the horse on his grassy bed, my employer cutting away at one end while I watched the head. Siegfried was a unique combination of born horseman and dexterous surgeon with which I couldn’t compete, so I had inevitably developed into an anaesthetist. We liked to do the operations in the open; it was cleaner and if the horse was wild he stood less chance of injuring himself. We just hoped for a fine morning and today we were lucky. In the early haze I looked over the countless buttercups; the field was filled with them and it was like sitting in a shimmering yellow ocean. Their pollen had powdered my shoes and the neck of the horse beneath me.

Everything had gone off more or less as it usually did. I had gone into the box with the colt, buckled on the muzzle underneath his head collar then walked him quietly out to a soft, level spot in the field. I left a man at the head holding a long shank on the head collar and poured the first half ounce of chloroform on to the sponge, watching the colt snuffling and shaking his head at the strange scent. As the man walked him slowly round I kept adding a little more chloroform till the colt began to stagger and sway; this stage always took a few minutes and I waited confidently for Siegfried’s little speech which always came about now. I was not disappointed.

“He isn’t going to go down, you know, James. Don’t you think we should tie a foreleg up?”

I adopted my usual policy of feigning deafness and a few seconds later the colt gave a final lurch and collapsed on his side. Siegfried, released from his enforced inactivity, sprang into action. “Sit on his head!” he yelled. “Get a rope on that upper hind leg and pull it forward! Bring me that bucket of water over here! Come on—move!”

It was a violent transition. Just moments ago, peace and silence and now men scurrying in all directions, bumping into each other, urged on by Siegfried’s cries.

Thirty years later I am still dropping horses for Siegfried and he is still saying “He isn’t going to go down, James.”

These days I mostly use an intravenous injection of Thiopentone and it puts a horse out in about ten seconds. It doesn’t give Siegfried much time to say his piece but he usually gets it in somewhere between the seventh and tenth seconds.

This morning’s case was an injury. But it was a pretty dramatic one, justifying general anaesthetic to repair it. The colt, bred from a fine hunter mare, had been galloping round his paddock and had felt the urge to visit the outside world. He had chosen the only sharp fence post to try to jump over and had been impaled between the forelegs; in his efforts to escape he had caused so much damage in the breast region that it looked like something from a butcher’s shop with the skin extensively lacerated and the big sternal muscles hanging out, chopped through as though by a cleaver.

“Roll him on his back,” said Siegfried. “That’s better.” He took a probe from the tray which lay on the grass near by and carefully explored the wound. “No damage to the bone,” he grunted, still peering into the depths. Then he took a pair of forceps and fished out all the loose debris he could find before turning to me.

“It’s just a big stitching job. You can carry on if you like.”

As we changed places it occurred to me that he was disappointed it was not something more interesting. I couldn’t see him asking me to take over in a rig operation or something like that. Then, as I picked up the needle, my mind clicked back to that gastrotomy on the dog. Maybe I was on trial for my wasteful ways. This time I would be on my guard.

I threaded the needle with a minute length of gut, took a bite at the severed muscle and, with an effort, stitched it back into place. But it was a laborious business tying the little short ends—it was taking me at least three times as long as it should. However, I stuck to it doggedly. I had been warned and I didn’t want another lecture.

I had put in half a dozen sutures in this way when I began to feel the waves. My employer was kneeling close to me on the horse’s neck and the foaming breakers of disapproval were crashing into me from close range. I held out for another two sutures then Siegfried exploded in a fierce whisper.

“What the hell are you playing at, James?”

“Well, just stitching. What do you mean?”

“But why are you buggering about with those little bits of gut? We’ll be here all bloody day!”

I fumbled another knot into the muscle. “For reasons of economy.” I whispered back virtuously.

Siegfried leaped from the neck as though the horse had bitten him. “I can’t stand any more of this! Here, let me have a go.”

He strode over to the tray, selected a needle and caught hold of the free end of the catgut protruding from the jar. With a scything sweep of his arm he pulled forth an enormous coil of gut, setting the bobbin inside the jar whirring wildly like a salmon reel with a big fish on the line. He returned to the horse, stumbling slightly as the gut caught round his ankles and began to stitch. It wasn’t easy because even at the full stretch of his arm he was unable to pull the suture tight and had to keep getting up and down; by the time he had tacked the muscles back into their original positions he was puffing and I could see a faint dew of perspiration on his forehead.

“Drop of blood seeping from somewhere down there,” he muttered and visited the tray again where he tore savagely at a huge roll of cotton wool. Trailing untidy white streamers over the buttercups he returned and swabbed out the wound with one corner of the mass.

Back to the tray again. “Just a touch of powder before I stitch the skin,” he said lightly and seized a two pound carton. He poised for a moment over the wound then began to dispense the powder with extravagant jerks of the wrist. A considerable amount did go into the wound but much more floated over other parts of the horse, over me, over the buttercups, and a particularly wayward flick obscured the sweating face of the man on the foot rope. When he had finished coughing he looked very like Coco the clown.

Siegfried completed the closure of the skin, using several yards of silk, and when he stood back and surveyed the tidy result I could see he was in excellent humour.

“Well now, that’s fine. A young horse like that will heal in no time. Shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t even leave a mark.”

He came over and addressed me as I washed the instruments in the bucket. “Sorry I pushed you out like that, James, but honestly I couldn’t think what had come over you—you were like an old hen. You know it looks bad trying to work with piddling little amounts of materials. One has to operate with a certain … well … panache, if I can put it that way, and you just can’t do that if you stint yourself.”