Village Horse Doctor (31 page)

Well, he gave me another one of those friendly lectures like the kind I’d been gettin’ from the rest of the propeller boys around town, but it soaked in about the same way theirs had and I didn’t have a change of heart about them propellers. I told him I would be at the ranch about middle of the morning next day, and he got somebody else to rush him back out to the airfield so he could hurry to tend to something else.

I left the office long before daylight and tended to two
horse calls on the way that didn’t take up a whole lot of time and was at the ranch at Del Rio a little before noon. Everett lived in town and I called him there, but he hadn’t been in since yesterday. The foreman at the ranch said he knew about the sheep but didn’t know about Mr. Everett, so he and I went to see about the sheep.

They had been pastured on spear grass and had a good deal more than enough spear grass needles caught in their wool that were gradually working the points into the hide and flesh of these fat yearling muttons. This wasn’t hard to find out walking around on the ground, which was a lot closer than cloud range for examining sheep.

I went back into Del Rio and by middle of the afternoon found out that Everett had gone by San Angelo when he left Fort Stockton and somewhere among the hops and jumps and landin’ and risin’, he had knocked a wheel off his airplane and was grounded somewhere unhurt but scratching his head and chewing his fingernails because of all the time he was losing not being able to tell somebody else to do something.

The foreman had already moved the sheep out of the spear-grass pasture, and I was back home on the ground tending to the rest of my practice when Everett called me a few days later. We discussed what had been done and he said, “Send me a bill.”

I said, “You don’t mind if I don’t send it airmail, do you?”

One morning about daylight, I walked in on the coffee crowd and could tell by the look on their faces that something pretty serious was before the meeting. Two or three who were facing me waved to me to come over and sit down. I said, “I ain’t goin’ to drink none of that damn coffee. That’s for old men and women and nervous people. I’m goin’ to eat some breakfast.”

Someone spoke up and said, “You’d be nervous too if
you’d cleared land, drilled a well, and bought tractors and stuff to plant sorghum to kill sheep instead of fatten them.”

Othro Adams was in the crowd, and since he had a plane and flew everywhere he went, his conversation was either about flying or sheep. Since I didn’t think a man ought to be further off the ground than horseback, I thought I ought to include him in my morning’s goin’ over and said, “When people get their business mixed up with propellers and plows in a desert country, they ought not to expect anything to come out right. Anyhow, I can’t see why you’re so worried when you’ve got way the best horse doctor in the West with a damn good laboratory that would be available for a reasonable fee.”

A good many ranchers had drilled irrigation wells and put land into cultivation on the pretense that they were going to raise their own feed because of the long distances that livestock feed stuffs had to be hauled in the Southwest and the ever-presence of drouth. Very few, if any of them, knew the real cost of equipping a farm or the overhead of operating one or they wouldn’t have been so anxious to turn their attention from occasionally having to oil a windmill to the real job of pumping irrigation water with big equipment that required constant attention. However, the fad was on to bulldoze good mesquite land and turn it bottom-side upward to raise feed.

I didn’t understand all there was to know about the government farm program and cared a good deal less, but this land was not eligible to be planted to some of the other feed crops and grain sorghum crops were planted on most of these new “pump” farms. The land was fresh and fertile and the sunshine was ever-persistent, and with irrigation water bountiful, crops of grain sorghum soon dotted the otherwise range landscapes.

These crops came on in the summer after my yellowweed
research activities had become dormant. When these crops had enough growth to be putting out heads of grain, ranchers began turning their flocks of sheep in for grazing because the principal purpose of the crops was to make summer grazing or to be baled for hay.

After the sheep had been on this lush feed a few days, there would be an occasional dead one with no apparent outward cause for death; the rest of the sheep grazing in the same field would seem to be in good condition.

Throughout the years I had been in the Trans-Pecos Region I had been forced to do extensive research on most of the livestock troubles because the available sources of veterinary knowledge had never touched the semi-arid region of the Far Southwest. It had gotten to be a common statement among ranchers, “Have Doc run it through his lab and find out what it’s got in it,” and so it was natural for me to be called to start analyzing these sorghum fields.

I did post-mortems on these sheep and found no slight indications of poisoning or gastrointestinal upsets. About all I could say was that they were dead, and this wasn’t a soothing remark.

I analyzed the tender blades of the sorghum growth, the stalks, and even the sparse heads of grain and for weeks had not found out any more than I knew in the beginning. The sheep that were dying didn’t constitute a die-out and didn’t reach epidemic proportions, but a few just continued to die on these fresh fields, and limiting the grazing to a few hours a day didn’t help, nor did anything else that we tried in the way of management practices.

I saved a good many sheep that we got to after they became sick, but I didn’t explain to my rancher friends that I was using what would be termed “shotgun” medical treatment, treatment that would have cured any one of twenty things and was nonspecific for any particular condition.
After many tests, I still hadn’t learned the toxic content of these irrigated grain sorphum crops. I drove out early and late to watch the sheep and study their habits until some of my friends began to be afraid that maybe I was eatin’ that sorghum too.

Most everybody was willing to cooperate and take their sheep off the fields or turn them back on when I asked them to, and this should have helped a lot; only I still hadn’t learned much. Several ranchers were loafing in my office one afternoon when the subject of the death loss of these sheep came up.

I chimed up and said, “Believe I’ve found out all there is to know about the grazin’ of grain sorghum. If you’ll let me know when you want to turn in your sheep, I’ll run a test and see if your fields are ready.”

One of them said, “I’m sure glad that you’ve smartened up. I was beginnin’ to think that it was goin’ to take another year’s lamb crop for us to educate you.”

“Well,” I said, “I didn’t use to be so slow until I went to associatin’ with sheepherders-turned-farmers, but you haven’t ruined me entirely or I wouldn’t know what to do about the grain sorghum.”

By late summer we were following this practice without any death loss, and the ranchers were shipping fat sheep off of irrigated grain sorghum fields and braggin’ on old Doc and his lab for being able to cope with their troubles. Of course, I didn’t discourage this kind of conversation too much and by the following year nobody dared turn sheep into a grain sorghum field without first having me test it.

This went on for a number of years before I left the Trans-Pecos Region and nobody knew that the birds of the air were doing my testing for me. By close observation I had found that when wild birds would light on the heads and peck the grain, the toxic substances, whatever they were,
would be gone out of the plant and it was sufficiently matured to be grazed. The only testing I was doing was driving out to see if the sorghum was fit for the birds to eat.

I got a call about midnight from a druggist friend of mine in El Paso and from the noise in the background, I could very well picture that there was a whole lot of people having a more than common amount of fun.

During the party they had gotten to talking about horses. One of the socialite women in the party told about her saddle mare developing a very serious eye condition and said that during the last few weeks she had had several vets examine the mare’s eye. It seemed to the druggist from the conversation that this was truly a fine jet black American saddle mare and the social doll was not joking about trying to get something done for her mare.

Well, this druggist friend of mine spoke up and told her that he knew the best horse doctor in the world and if there was any way on earth to save that mare’s eye, she needed to see me quick. This champagne conversation had gotten so serious that they were calling me at midnight to talk to me about the mare’s eye. He began with a few opening remarks and then told me there was a lady who wanted to talk to me, and about that time a lot of personality began to purr and erupt over the phone. (I don’t think that the champagne had much effect on her because she was still like that several days later.)

For about thirty minutes she told me how much she loved this mare and then for another ten minutes she explained who all had looked at the horse’s eye. She said the general opinion was that there was a tumor in the socket behind the eyeball. After I was thoroughly informed as to all the treatments the mare had endured, she gushed forth
that she would have her plane pick me up in the morning so I could some see the mare’s eye.

I said, “I don’t believe you will. There never has been a plane able to pick me up.”

This was when she showed some fog from the champagne: she couldn’t quite fathom what I meant, so she gave me back to my druggist friend. I told him I could get up to see the mare in a few days, but I wasn’t going to come by plane. He thought it was kind of funny and said he would explain it to her and hung up. I thought this was just a bunch of long-distance champagne conversation and went back to sleep and forgot it.

The second morning after this conversation, a beautiful thing that didn’t want to quit being young floated in my office, and from the purr in her voice, I recognized her as being the same one who I had spoken to on the phone. She began telling me that she felt that I would surely ride in the plane with her, and I said, “Hon, there may be some things that you and I could do together, but it ain’t goin’ to be flyin’.”

This didn’t set her down too much and I think she had begun to wonder how much charm it was going to take to get me to look at that mare’s eyeball. Since she had taken a taxi to town, and I was goin’ to be driving, I thought it would be safe for me to take her back to the airport. On the way out we made arrangements for me to go up to El Paso as soon as possible to work on the mare’s eye.

The following Saturday afternoon, I called her from the Del Norte Hotel and told her I was in town, and she gave me directions to the stable where she kept her horse. The stable attendant led out this beautiful black American saddle mare that had been under blanket with all the care and attention that a fine horse could be given, and, sure enough,
she had a badly swelled eye that was running a stream of tear-gland solution.

I examined the eye carefully and used light and a magnifying glass. Even though this mare was experiencing a great deal of pain from that bad eye, her manners and training were such that she was as patient and obedient as she could possibly be while I worked around her eye.

The examination did not convince me that there was a tumor growth in the socket and I could not detect any signs of infection that should have been present when so much irritation was apparent. The druggist friend once saw me remove a tumor from an eye socket and save the horse’s eye, and this was why he had thought of me the night of the champagne party.

I explained to the Prima Donna that it would be necessary to put the mare under anesthesia for me to go in behind the eye into the eye socket. I had no encouragement to offer and no promises to make, but if she wanted the operation performed, I would do whatever I could to save the eye. She told me she would prefer not to watch but would like to know what was in that mare’s head besides her eyeball and for me to do whatever I deemed necessary.

By now the druggist and a whole carload of the socialite crowd had gotten out to get their eyes used to the sunlight and were standing around in front of the stable visiting.

The stable operator and his attendants were all very helpful. We swept off a large section of plank floor in the hall of the barn and bedded it with loose hay and then put out horse blankets on top of the hay to keep it from stirring up and being in the way.

We led this gentle mare out into the middle of the blankets without her offering any resistance or showing any bad manners, and I very carefully gave her an injection
of chloral hydrate. As she began to lay down, we maneuvered her around in order to get her down with her bad eye on the up-side. Rarely did I ever get a chance to do large-animal surgery under sanitary conditions, so I just took all precautions that I could and hoped for the best.

I had my instruments in a good antiseptic solution that would not burn the tissue of the eye socket and I rolled the upper eyelid back and was very careful in examining the socket above and behind the eye for a possible fibrous fleshy growth.

As I determined that I had found the trouble, I began to probe with some smooth round forceps that would not damage any tissue. When I got these forceps firmly fixed on the object with one hand and held the eyelid back with the other, I decided to see if this object was movable, hoping to dislodge it without too much surgery.

As I worked it forward, I used a very light touch and allowed whatever cartilage that might be caught in the forceps to slip out as gently as possible from around the object, and then very easily lifted it out. I hurriedly dropped it in my bucket of solution and began to clean the eye with medicated agents. Even though this mare was asleep, her breathing eased and I could see the muscles of her neck relax.

I had not intended for the anesthesia to last very long, so the barn attendants began to roll her over back and forth by her feet and legs and massage her, and I gave her some stimulant. The champagne crowd at the door of the barn had for the most part lost their voices, and other than an occasional gurgle of some strong liquid, they were silent.