Village Horse Doctor (30 page)

There’s
a few gadgets on this earth that I’ve tried to stay clear of. Two in particular that infested and disturbed the peace and tranquility of the Far Southwest were plows and propellers.

When I was a small boy playing on the floor, one of my bigger brothers dropped a geography book and I saw pictures in there where there hadn’t been any of the earth turned over and it was still in grass. I had spent the most part of my life hunting country like that and had nearly found it when pumpkin rollers came from various parts of the world to drill wells, cut down good mesquite trees, and plow up grass to raise something that the government already had too much of and the market was bad.

The gadget that I had still less use for was the airplane. It has always been my heart-felt opinion that horseback in high country is high enough off the ground for me to be. Well, airplanes were gettin’ to be too common and many ranchers in this farflung country had bladed out and graded up air-strips for them and their neighbors to use and a lot of ranchers were keeping some kind of fly-ships of their own. Whenever I walked into a crowd where the conversation was plows and propellers, I knew I didn’t belong and stayed clear of that type of unpleasant conversation.

Othro Adams had a plane and was considered to be an excellent pilot by those who may have known. He had offered me some
very enticing propositions to fly over different flocks of sheep for some reason or another and I had always turned him down.

One morning a big, fat, gray-headed, past-middle-age man walked into my office and introduced himself. We started what seemed to me would be a nice visit. However, he came to the point pretty fast. He ranched in northern Arizona and grazed mostly steers that he bought and sold every year. The more he talked about his ranch operation, the more I knew he had made or stole his money in some other industry, because his cow talk didn’t fit together too good.

The reason he had come to see me was that for several weeks now they had been finding an occasional dead steer in the mountains on his range. He said he was glad he caught me when I wasn’t busy because he had landed at the Fort Stockton airfield and caught a car to town. His pilot was at the Officers’ Club at the airfield waiting for us and he would fly me up to the ranch. After I saw his cattle, if necessary, he would have me back home tonight.

I tried not to show any pangs of shock, but I wasn’t fixin’ to fly to northern Arizona in that airship. I asked him how many steers he had and he didn’t exactly know but thought there were between twenty-seven hundred and three thousand head. This was sure proof that he wasn’t a cowman or he would’ve known within three head how many had died and how many were livin’.

I told him I’d be glad to go look into his steer troubles but that I had resented the encroachment of the automobile earlier in life and still didn’t like ’em and liked airplanes even less, and it looked to me like he had enough cattle for some of ’em to still be alive after I drove up there in my car, which would take about two days.

Well, he thought this was ridiculous and had an awful
big laugh, then said, “Doc, surely you’re joking.” He went on to tell me how many millions of dollars’ worth of business he tended to on the West Coast as well as the ranch because he was able to fly and save time. He started to recite to me all the miracles of modern medicine that were being performed because of the use of airplanes and I would have to come to the licklog and progress with the times or I would lose my practice.

I said, “You may know what you’re talkin’ about, but you’re overlookin’ my distaste for licklogs, and let me ask you how come you went to the trouble to come see me about your steers when there’re good doctors in Flagstaff and Phoenix and Page and in other parts of Arizona?”

“Oh well, you know you got sort of a reputation for working on range conditions and I just thought I’d let ’ya take a look at my range and cattle.”

“Well, I believe I’ll let you take your little airship and go back home without me.”

He kind of blowed off a batch of steam and jumped up out of his chair and said if he had known I was an old fogey, he would have saved himself a trip.

I walked up to the Stockton Pharmacy in a little while and George Baker, the newspaperman, Joe Henson, and three or four more had just heard this big ranch operator blow off a batch of his opinion about their village horse doctor. I’m sure none of them spoke up to defend me, but it had struck them funny that he thought that he had un-nerved me by his visit.

Four or five days later I got a call about dark from the big operator and flyboy from Arizona. He said that they had rounded up the steers on a part of the ranch and the cowboys told him that some more had died.

After he thought his and my visit over, he had decided that everybody had a right to their own way of travel and
if I didn’t want to ride in his $115,000 airplane, that was my business, and he would be glad to pay for the trip and my services if I would come to the ranch and look at his cattle. I told him I would be there the next afternoon in time to do some good. It was about a thousand-mile trip and he bellered over the phone, “Hell, you just as well have flown.”

I drove into Jacob’s Lake about two hours before sundown the next day and his ranch foreman met me and we headed still farther up into the mountains.

They were loose herding and allowing a herd of about five hundred head of steers to graze along a draw. Most of these cattle were in good flesh, but some of them were wobbly in their gait and the control and handling of their head and the rest of their body showed bad coordination. It was easy to tell that this was not loco, and since these cattle had not been fed any sort of commercial feed, it was un-likely that there was any fermentation condition existing that would have caused their sickness and death.

I rode the range all the next day horseback and pulled up and gathered about twenty different plants that I was suspicious of being in some stage of poison. Any desert plants and plants in other regions of the world contain acids or other toxic substances only at certain growing seasons or at certain stages of development. Many times weeds and grasses that are for the most part nutritious and even fattening can be toxic for a matter of a few days or a few weeks during a year’s growth, and I was hoping that maybe this would be a case of that sort.

It was late spring in northern Arizona and the snow had melted and gone into the ground and caused some fair grazing to be available in the high mountain region. However, the drouth was reaching that direction and there had been no spring rains.

I never did quite figure out how many different rackets this old flyboy was making money out of on the West Coast, but he did have a palacious ranch headquarters. They were brushin’ and curryin’ and carryin’ on over me and about the third day I was about to get spoiled and had begun to get a little finicky about my eatin’ because there was so much good food and so many cooks fixin’ it that I thought I just as well graze on what was best and leave the other alone. However, the fill that I was takin’ wasn’t helping those sick cattle much and I hadn’t really come across anything that I had reason to believe was too poisonous.

With my primitive way of thinking and my knowledge and love of horses and cattle, I was spending more loafin’ time around the corral talking to the Indian cowboys and playing with the little Indian kids than I was up there in that flyboy’s palace. An Indian boy about seven years old and not very big for his age took me by the finger and led me around behind the ranch help’s houses, where there was a nice flock of goats that the Indian help had and the little children herded up in the mountains during the day and brought in at night.

A fat young nanny goat was sprawled out in the corner of the corral throwing a wild kind of spasmodic fit. There were a few old squaws and small children watching her, but their expressions showed no signs of emotion. This little Indian boy was pretty sharp and spoke fair English. He told me that these goats had been dying this way about the same time as the steers had been dying, and sometimes it was one of their milk goats and some of the milk tasted wild. I didn’t tell him but I thought I had found me an Indian medicine man of about seven years old.

One of the Indian ranch hands rode up horseback and I asked him if I could cut this goat open. He said, sure, that they were going to eat it anyway. He went ahead and
butchered the goat and I examined the intestines and organs while he finished cutting up the goat, then the squaws took it to their little rock houses.

I didn’t find anything wrong with that goat and common sense told me that couldn’t be so because I had watched it have a fit and die. I went back to the palace and ate a big supper without mentioning this batch of experience.

The next morning when we rode into the cattle that were being pastured in close to the headquarters, I saw a steer that seemed a little wobbly and I rushed him horseback. When he ran about fifty feet, he stumbled and fell on the ground and went through the same kind of fit as the goat had. I cut him open, too, and examined the internal organs but found nothing wrong.

I went into town that day and bought up a batch of candy and trinkets for my little Indian friends. Late that afternoon as I saw the children bringing in the goats from the mountains, I walked down to the corral. There were three small boys and a girl with the little flock of goats. They all smiled and spoke to me and I went to passin’ out some stick candy and jawbreakers that I had in my pocket.

The jawbreakers were of all colors of the rainbow and the girl, who might have been a year or two older than my little medicine man, took a yellowish-orange one and said it was about the color of the roots that the goats that had the fits ate. The boys all had a laugh, saying that maybe a candy that color would give her fits too. Small Indian children have a keen sense of humor, and when they are not afraid of you, they are lots of fun to be around.

I knew that the little Indians knew the plant that was making the goats have fits and the next morning I was down at the corral early when they turned the goats out to herd them up into the mountains. I knew that those little
Indian kids could outwalk and outclimb me in the rocks so I saddled a good gentle horse and rode along behind the goats and talked to my little medicine man.

When we were high up in the rocks, I reached in my pocket and passed out some more candy and held one of these yellowish-orange-colored jawbreakers and asked them to show me the weed that color. They weren’t more than a minute pulling some wild potato vines out of the crevices between the rocks, and the root was a little round-shaped ball about the color of the candy.

The kids helped me gather about half a gallon of these roots, and I kept enough of the vines to stick in my pockets and poured the roots in a saddle pocket and started back to the headquarters.

My fat flyboy friend would not be in until later in the afternoon and I decided that it was time for me to get to my laboratory with these plants. I took a little more time going home and got there late the second day.

In my laboratory I started grinding and working what I had brought back with me. I had been gone six days and I had a stack of calls that I had to make. It took all of that night and most of the next day to catch up with my practice and then I came back to my Arizona plants.

Old flyboy flew in the next morning and I was able to report to him that it was the wild potato vines that were causing the trouble. The toxic substance worked on the central nervous system and the lack of coordination was coming from damage of the nervous system. The only treatment would be to move the stock away from the high rocky region where the melted snow had made the potato crop.

He was a little astonished but was convinced that I had found the trouble and began to plan how he could get his
cattle away from that part of the range. He whipped out his checkbook and paid me for my services and asked, “Are there any favors that I can do for you?”

I said, “Yeah, one. When you get back to the ranch, let the Indian children herd their goats along the draws and round the spring where the milk will be good and the goats won’t die from eating the potato vines. You see, it was your own medicine man and the goats that found the trouble for me.”

Everett Townsend of Townsend Brothers, who operated several ranches up and down the border and owned a Ford agency in Mexico City, tended to lots of their business by plane. Everett flew into Fort Stockton to get me to fly down beyond Del Rio to look at a bunch of sheep that weren’t dying but were very unthrifty.

He came in the office and we visited a little while and he told me about his sheep and said we could look at them and be back by noon. I told him I was much obliged for all that fast service, but I hadn’t got my business scattered to where I had to tend to it in an airship and his loss and lack of time were no responsibility of mine. Besides, I had my word out to my propeller friends that I would always be on the ground to gather them up. I said that if he felt that these sheep would last till morning, I would drive down in my car and take a look at them.