Village Horse Doctor (3 page)

He said he was driving out to his ranch for a little while and would be back about noon and asked me if I would care to go with him. Well, the demands for my services were far from pressing, and I didn’t think I would be missed for any reason before noon, so I told him that it would be my pleasure to accompany him and see his ranch. By the tone of his voice, it seemed an afterthought when he said, “I’ll call Mrs. Rochell to have a good dinner fixed for us when we get back.”

As we started to leave town he said, “By the way, if you care to, we’ll put your medicine bags in the back of my car in case you might need to have something with you when I show you some sick buck sheep.”

As we drove along to the ranch, he told me about sheep eating lechuguilla. I had never heard of the plant, so I asked some rather sensible questions and listened carefully (I intended to profit from my yellowweed experience). Guy was an intelligent man with a lifetime of ranching experience and he explained very carefully all he knew about lechuguilla.

It is a dagger-like cactus plant that grows in the high rimrock and remote regions of the hills and is seldom eaten by sheep or goats until after cold weather. Then it seems that sheep will eat lechuguilla for the juice as well as the flavor and will not come in to water. Since this is a high fibrous diet, they will develop an impaction in the stomach, and in the carcasses of sheep that have died from lechuguilla, there will be balls of tightly compressed dried fiber that they have been unable to digest. After they are dead,
many times this ball of fiber will not decompose as quickly as the body of the sheep and will lay on the ground for years.

When sheep affected by lechuguilla were brought in from the ridges and placed in corrals with feed and water, they refused to eat or drink and the symptoms were what was commonly referred to as “dry mouth.” Their lips would be sealed together with dried phlegm and their faces would swell, and their lips and noses, if they lived long enough, would peel off from the extreme temperature they had endured.

By the time Guy had finished his explanation and description, we drove up to a small chute pen where several of these bucks had been brought in and placed on feed and water. They had been there several days and had not eaten nor drank. I was very deliberate in my examination of these sheep and weighed carefully all the information that he had given me. I went to my medicine bags and prepared some hypodermic injections that I gave these several bucks.

This was about all we saw of the ranch and, I think, this was Guy’s only intention when we left town. I don’t believe it had occurred to him to do this until the moment he saw me that morning on the sidewalk. Three or four days passed and I hesitated to ask about the bucks fearful of a continuation of my recent experiences.

It was a cold morning and the average number of ranchers were holed up in the hotel lobby and drinking coffee in the dining room, and Guy motioned to me to come over to the table where he and some other ranchers were seated. I walked over—and by now I knew all of them—spoke and sat down. Guy volunteered the information to the rest of the men at the table that I had been to the ranch with him and treated some lechuguilla bucks.

It had been the experience of everybody in that country
that they always lost these sheep after they had gotten to the stage of “dry mouth.” There was a polite kind of silence for a minute when somebody asked, “Are there any of ’em still alive?”

They all laughed, and I did too. Then Guy broke the news that his old Mexican ranch foreman had told him that every buck drank water and slobbered at the mouth and had a kidney action (which would usually dry it up) before we had had time to get back to town. Within a few days, all were drinking and were eating cottonseed meal and ground grain that was left in a trough of free choice. The fever had left them, their lips had peeled off, their heads were bright, and they were ready to be turned out of the hospital pen.

The atmosphere brightened and the conversation of those around the table and those joining us warmed up considerably and Pat Cooper very hurriedly and respectfully asked, “Doctor, what did you give them?” I cut him a little short, but laughed when I said: “That’s a professional secret.”

This was the first pleasant experience that I had had in weeks. My breakfast tasted better, and I left the hotel thinking that the poisonous plants of the Trans-Pecos Region of Texas were going to need far closer attention than I had imagined.

I had been practicing in Fort Stockton about two months and had moved from the motel to the Hubbs Apartment Building, and the drugstore and other people were taking my calls for me. As yet, I didn’t have an office downtown.

The lechuguilla story spread fast, and the fact that no medication had ever been given a lechuguilla sheep or goat that seemed to have done him any good before caused the ranchers to pay me a little more mind.

Frank Hinde, who ranched about forty miles southeast of Fort Stockton, heard about the lechuguilla bucks and
came into town, found me, and told me he had sixteen Angora goats in the corral that were as bad as lechuguilla goats could be and still be alive. He grinned and said, “If you can do ’em any good, I’d begin to believe you’re a doctor, and it might be all right for you to stay in the country.”

Frank was foaled in the West, grew up in sheep and cow country, and had cowboy’d all his younger life and graduated to a ranch when he was about middle age. He was a natural-born stockman and a very close observer. He could tell what a sheep or goat was thinking and was referred to by all the Mexicans in the country as “Pancho y medio” which in their language means “man and a half.”

He was six feet eight inches tall, wore a high crown hat, high-heel and high-top boots that came to his knees and stuck his britches in his boot tops. If you could have seen him get out of a car or walk in a door, you would readily understand why they called him “man and a half.” His generosity and humor were still on a larger scale.

I told him I could treat lechuguilla but my experience was very limited, that I could make no promises as to how the goats would do but I would be glad to come out and expose them to my professional ability.

I made this statement because it was dawning on me that very little was known about the poisonous plants of the Trans-Pecos Region, and I had hunted diligently through veterinary literature and no mention could be found about the plant or of its effects on any breed of domestic livestock that had eaten it. This was why I hedged a little instead of throwin’ my chest out and actin’ as if it was very simple to have sheep or goats that had eaten the plant.

Frank laughed and said, “They’ve been exposed to enough lechuguilla to kill ’em, so they couldn’t be any worse off from your treatment.”

I got to the ranch a little before midmorning the next day, and he was out at the goat corral with some Mexican ranch hands waiting for me. This was a bunch of fine Angora goats with lots of mohair on them. They were drawn and humped up with their faces blistered, their mouths sealed to, their eyes turning yellow, and were a pitiful sight. They would make very little effort to get away from a herder when he would go up to catch them.

I had had a few days to think about lechuguilla and to think about the therapeutic action of internal medicine. It’s common knowledge that sheep and especially goats can eat and thrive on the leaves and bark of brush that cattle and horses cannot digest. The more I studied about it, the more I knew that it was not the impaction of dry fiber that was the killer; after all, there’s an old saying that a goat can digest almost anything, even a board.

It is my professional opinion that the juice of the plant had astringent effects on the hair glands of the digestive tract that secreted the acids that would normally aid in the completed destruction of woody fibers. This was the reason I resorted to hypodermic injections and treatment by mouth with drugs that contained no purgative action but worked on the stimulation of the gland functions of the sheeps’ and goats’ bodies.

As we went about treating these goats, I explained my theory to Frank, and he said, “Doc, I never knew anybody to worry as much about a goat’s belly before, so maybe you got something.”

He went on to explain to me that the Sonora Experiment Station called it photosynthesis and said that the blistering of the face and swelling of the ears was the result of the absorption of the sun’s rays. He hastened to explain that he had never believed a damn word of it, and
if it proved out that I was wrong not to be hacked because at least I’d had a new thought about it.

During this conversation we had treated the sixteen goats, and Frank and his Mexicans were talking in Spanish about the few that might get well if they weren’t treated. They pointed out three that had begun to peel off around the face and ears, which was an indication that they had passed the most dangerous stage and had a possibility of getting well.

We leaned against the fence and began to visit and talk about each one as we looked at them. I pulled out my watch and told Frank that all of them should begin to slobber at the mouth and lick their lips in about fifteen or twenty minutes. If my treatment was effective, these goats should drink water within an hour by reason of the fact that saliva had come back into their dried mouths and their lips had become moistened, which would bring feeling and taste back. Frank spoke up, “Any sheep or goat that will eat and drink will get well.”

He turned and told his herders what I had said and one of them remarked that I would be “Mucho bueno, Doc-tor.”

These goats had not drunk for the several days that they had been in this water lot, and about that time a weak little bitty yearling nanny walked up to the water trough and stuck her blistered mouth down into the cool water and licked her tongue out a few times and then drank so much that I stepped up and pushed her away from the trough. By noon every goat there had drunk and had begun to nibble at the alfalfa hay and the mixture of cottonseed meal and salt that was in the trough close to the water.

It was about dinnertime, so we went to the house, and Frank’s wife, Ruth, had a big dinner for us. We had quite a visit, and Frank bragged on me and told me how glad he was that I was in the country.

He wasn’t the timid sort, and it wasn’t long before everybody knew how he felt about having a horse doctor in the Trans-Pecos ranch country. This message coming from him didn’t hurt my future practice none.

As I drove back into town that afternoon, I was well pleased with my day’s work. It was becoming more and more apparent to me that in order to practice veterinary medicine in an alkaline soil, semi-arid region, it was going to be necessary for me to buy some laboratory equipment and do a great deal of research so as to discover methods and formulas of treating livestock in this region that were almost unknown to veterinary science.

Both the drugstores were taking my calls, and I was still carrying my medical supplies and practicing out of the back of my car and cleaning up and sterilizing my instruments in my apartment. Each time I drove into town, I went to the drugstores to see if I had any calls. The word began to get around that there was a horse doctor in town, and I began to pick up some emergencies and light practice.

About two o’clock in the morning my phone rang and it was a very fastidious old woman who after some persuasion had caused me to do some surgery on her poodle dog. I had explained to her that the dog could not have any food for about twelve hours, but never in my practice did I ever say that any animal could not have a drink of water. Now this two o’clock call was to tell me that Charm was crying for a drink of water and would it be all right for her to have some. I hadn’t been to bed very long and I wasn’t too happy about Charm and her drink of water, but I thought better than to cuss this precise old social woman out and I just as well could have a little fun out of it.

In answer to her question, I asked, “Do you have any distilled water in the house?”

She said, “No, I don’t have,” just as though she kept it all the time and this was the first time that she was out.

I said, “Put some water in a pan and boil it for about thirty minutes, let it set until it’s cool, and then it will be all right for Charm to drink all she wants of it.”

Well, she was so grateful for my consideration of Charm’s health, she said she would boil the water immediately. I figured that by the time she got the water to boil and sat up waitin’ for it to cool, maybe she could go to sleep and wouldn’t hear that dog cry and maybe I could get some sleep too.

By now my general practice had gotten to be rather steady, and all the early spring diseases and surgery were keeping me busy. It was time to begin doing the usual amount of spring surgery, mostly castrating young horses. As usual, ranchmen looked up the signs of the Zodiac before they ever came and asked me to work on their young horses. I never looked at the “signs” but I could always tell when they were supposed to be “right” because three or four different ranchers would want to make appointments to castrate their horses all about the same time.