Village Horse Doctor (29 page)

Some of the mountain regions of New Mexico hadn’t gotten quite as dry as the Trans-Pecos and I had begun to spread out, advertise, and travel some of that country and
sell my hormone products for sheep and cattle. Cattle are much easier to get to breed and calve than sheep and there was the need in the range industry for a hormone product that could be used to cause cows to calve at a particular time of year, which would enable a rancher to make the best possible use of his range and have calves of uniform size at shipping time.

With the experience I had had in developing a hormone product for sheep, I took several short cuts in testing various blends of hormones in treating heifers of breeding age. After a few trial-and-error experiences, by the end of my first year of research, I had Cowtone ready for commercial use.

Breeding cattle does not present too much of a problem and the big advantage to be had by the use of Cowtone on heifers was in setting their calving time with the first calf and causing them all to calve within a short period—thus making calves uniform at the time of shipment the following fall. By starting heifers to breed at a particular time of year, with good range management as to when to put the bulls out on range and take them off, they could very well be controlled to calve at the same time of year for the rest of their productive life.

Bert Kincaid was back from service in the Second World War and was drenching sheep for intestinal parasites on a commercial custom basis. He and I had overlapping interests in the livestock medicine business that caused us to work together a good deal. In need of business and work, we began to solicit large herds of heifers in New Mexico of breeding age to treat with Cowtone. We made trips into Clovis, Fort Sumner, and on up into the mountain regions of New Mexico.

Bert was a big, stout young man with exceptionally good hands and arms, and he could inject as many sheep or
cattle in a day as anyone I ever had help me. We also got along well with one another and our away-from-home business was getting us both enough money to enable us to do as our ranching friends were: hanging on until it rained and the country would be restocked.

I met Tobe Foster, who was a rancher, oil operator, and speculator in Lubbock, in the lobby of the St. Angelus Hotel in San Angelo. He was interested in having five thousand young ewes treated on his Block Ranch at Capitán, New Mexico, that fall to ensure a good lamb crop the following spring. Bert and I made definite plans to go up to Capitán, and Mr. Foster was to furnish all the labor to help us and have the sheep gathered and at the working pens on Monday of Thanksgiving week. This would be a big deal for Bert and me in the dead of winter when we had very little other business.

It was a hard day’s drive from Fort Stockton to Capitán. Bert and I left about daylight Sunday morning, planning to get to Capitán on Sunday night, when we were to meet Tobe Foster. Monday passed and Tobe Foster didn’t show up, and we were unable to get him by phone in Lubbock.

We finally drove out to the ranch and talked to the foreman. He hadn’t heard anything about the hormoning of the sheep, but he said that this sort of slipshod arrangement wasn’t too uncommon with Foster, and he didn’t doubt our story and would take his ranch hands and gather sheep all day Tuesday, and we could come back Wednesday morning and go to work.

The weather was unsettled but not bad. Bert and I found time to pass pretty slow around Capitán, where there were only two or three general stores and Pearl’s Café. We drove over to Carrizozo without running into any excitement and came back to Capitán, where we were staying in a rooming-house type of hotel.

The weather took a turn for the worse during the night and about eighteen inches of snow fell by morning, and the temperature dropped to 5 degrees above. When we started to the ranch, we followed a snow plow out of town to the turn-off, which was about ten miles from the ranch headquarters. We managed to make it through the snow over a ranch road to the headquarters, where we changed our instruments and vials of hormones over into a jeep. We went about another fifteen miles across the ranch to where the first fifteen hundred ewes were bunched.

Several Indian sheepherders had built up a good fire behind the cedar breaks about a hundred yards from the corrals. Bert and I didn’t tarry around the fire too long because we didn’t want to get used to it if we were goin’ to have to work in the snow and cold all day.

The Indians weren’t too anxious to leave the fire to work the sheep, and when they got out and into the snow, we had trouble getting the Indians or the sheep to move and work into the chute. I noticed several old sheep hides on the fence, so I gathered them up and rolled them up in a bundle with the wool side showing and tied a wire to the bundle and drug it around through the sheep and tried to get them to follow it into the chute. They didn’t shy or booger from the skins of their dead kinfolk, but they weren’t interested in letting a bundle of dead hides act as a lead ram.

After this hide trick failed, Bert took a sheep by the head and drug it slowly through the snow and bleated like a sheep and got some of the others to start following. The dragging of the lead sheep and the tromping of the others that followed beat down the snow which had piled inside the chute fences so that the sheep couldn’t step over the fence as they would have been able to do on snow.

This chute was a little too wide and we crowded in as many sheep as possible so they couldn’t turn around in the
chute. When we had them all headed the same way, they were about four sheep wide across the chute. Bert and I started working at the back of the chute hormoning two sheep apiece, using one hand to part the wool on the thick part of the hindquarter and using a three-quarter-inch 18-gauge needle to make the 1-cc. hormone injection. As we finished those four sheep, we stepped in front of them and pushed them back and took the next four. The chute would hold about fifty head and we were tellin’ each other that we might get through before we froze to death.

The first slowdown that we weren’t prepared for happened when the sesame oil got so thick from the cold that it couldn’t be forced through the needles. We had to build up a fire close to the chute and lay the bottles of Ewetone close enough to the fire to keep warm; we changed bottles often to keep the oil thin enough to work. Another advantage we discovered about changing bottles from around the fire was that a warm bottle would help warm our cold hands for a few minutes before the oil got too thick to flow. Before long, Bert was doing the injecting and I was standing between him and the fire, passing the bottles both directions.

We went back to the fire where the Indian ranch hands were and tried to talk them into helping us, and their spokesman said, “Me can’t see no hurry. Sheep be here all winter.”

This tapped off my high temper, and I gave him a fair cussin’ and asked him why he didn’t go back to the headquarters. He said, “Indian no walk in snow. Wait till jeep go back.”

I could tell by the way he said it that he didn’t think it would be very long before we froze out on the job. That Indian didn’t know how much money Bert and I had tied up in hormones and in the trip.

Bert and I went back to work and after a while Bert began to tell me that his feet were frozen. I asked him how he could tell, and he said that they felt like it. I said, “Hell, they aren’t frozen or you couldn’t feel ’em. I know ’cause I can’t feel mine.”

This type of encouragin’ conversation went on between us all day and there were a few times when we picked up a cold metal syringe and it would be so cold that it would stick to our hands.

We got through in the late afternoon and the Indians had gotten tired of waiting and had drifted away from the fire. We fired up the company jeep that had snow tires on it and started back to the headquarters. As we started off of a high ridge below a mountain road down into a deep gorge, I looked to one side and said, “Bert, where’s that steam comin’ from?”

We were traveling real slow and he stopped the jeep and said, “What steam?” About two hundred feet up a narrow canyon there was some white steam.

We got out of the jeep and walked over to the edge of this narrow gorge and there was what appeared to be about four hundred sheep that had found protection in the canyon, which was also dotted with scrub cedar. They were humped up and covered with snow and their breath and the heat of their bodies was making the steam that attracted my attention.

I said, “Bert, we are already frozen to death and at the most we have only used eighteen hundred doses of that five thousand contract. This bunch of sheep are humped up in a protected spot. Why don’t we just ease among ’em and shoot ’em with some hormone.”

“It’s all right with me, but I don’t think we can build a fire with the snow as deep as it is. How are we going to keep the hormone warm?”

“Leave the jeep runnin’ and set the bottles around on the motor and radiator.”

We pulled the jeep about as close as we thought was safe and started working these sheep. They weren’t too bad off, as far as weather was concerned, and they were too smart to be scared out of their protection, so we walked among them and crowded them up against the canyon wall and by the cedar trees and started injecting them with hormone and doing our best to walk through them and keep the treated ones behind us. We may have given a few an extra shot or two to be sure we got ’em all.

About fifty feet from the end of the canyon, an Indian sheepherder dressed in plenty of warm clothes with a blanket over his head rolled out from under some cedar trees. He spoke plenty of English and was half-mad because we had loosened the sheep, so to speak, and pushed them back from the cedars where he had curled up. The cedar was knocking the snow off of him and the herd of sheep were thick enough around him that he had a warm spot to wait out the norther.

He told us he had started to the corral with these sheep the day before and in the late afternoon had herded them into that canyon for the night and the snow during the night made him stay in the canyon. I asked him if he had anything to eat and he explained that he had some tortillas and beans in a marrell. He had a cactus-fiber marrell slung over his shoulder under about half of his clothes that he showed me, and it looked like it was still about half full of grub, which would have been enough to have lasted an Indian sheepherder bedded up under a cedar thicket a week.

By now it was almost dark and we got in the jeep—we let the herder come with us—and drove into the headquarters for the night. There were other hands working on the ranch and there was a big, old, fat, filthy, nearsighted
Dutchman who was the ranch cook. As nasty as he looked and as greasy as his grub was, it was still pretty tasty after a day in the snow. Bert and I went to bed upstairs in a little room without any fire and not quite enough cover, but it was warmer than what we had had all day and we were so tired that we had to get warmer before we knew that we were cold and we made it pretty good till daylight.

It snowed some more durin’ the night and the ranch foreman wasn’t too interested in our project and all the ranch hands had quit work because of the weather, so Bert and me were holed up on Thanksgiving Day with seven or eight Indian-Mexican half-breeds and a fat, nasty cook. We had the fattest turkey and the greasiest dressing and the sweetest raisin pie that anybody ever tried to eat—and the most uninteresting conversation.

When we got through as much of this batch of stuff as we could stand, I told Bert that I believed that we could break through that bank of snow to civilization. He said, “I bet you can’t get off without me.”

We started down the mountain about two in the afternoon. We slid and pushed and took our chances and got out to the public road, where there had been a snow plow about five o’clock, and made it to Capitán just at dark. We had already had a batch of Capitán, so we decided to drive on to Roswell and spend the night. It was about seventy miles to Roswell and the town was crowded, and it was late in the night when we found a good old stone-wall hotel with a single room and a double bed and plenty of cover.

It had been a cold trip and when Bert started to pull his socks off that night, he found that they had frozen to his feet from pushing and working in the snow and then driving into town in a cold car. We missed Thanksgiving at home and had a pretty rough nonprofitable trip. We were
glad that it was over and decided that we wouldn’t answer any farflung calls in the mountains until spring.

I tried for several weeks to get Tobe Foster on the phone. I sent a bill to his office, and when the ewes were supposed to start lambing five months later, his accountant sent me a check for the trip.