Village Horse Doctor (32 page)

In a few minutes the mare came up on her feet, and though she was groggy, she was standing very relaxed. I wiped the small amount of blood off her face that had been
caused by the probing, and after she had her complete balance, we walked her up and down the hall of the barn a few times and then put her back in a dark stall.

I picked up my bucket of antiseptic solution and thought I would turn the stomach of some of that socialite crowd by walking out in the sunlight and pull out whatever it was that I got out of that mare’s eye in front of Prima Donna and her friends. I felt around in this milky-like solution and to my surprise came up with a pretty blue and white glass marble—the kind that kids play in the sand with.

I turned to this astonished bunch of champagners and said in a very unconcerned voice, “It happens all the time where horses are allowed to play marbles.”

Nobody knew then and nobody has found out since how the marble got behind that mare’s eyeball.

Thousands of sheep had been shipped from the desert up into the irrigated plains of the Panhandle of Texas and in ’most any hotel lobby around Lubbock or Plainview or any of the rest of the High Plains all the way to Kansas, you could go in and find someone you knew from the desert Southwest.

A bunch of these transplanted visitors were in the Plainview irrigated area grazing lambs and other sheep on irrigated winter wheatfields. They called me one night after suppertime. There were three or four of them up there talkin’ to me on the phone about their troubles—not askin’ me too much about what to do about them—but just tellin’ me that I had to do somethin’.

John Gahr was having the worst fit among ’em because he had lots of sick sheep, and I believe sick sheep gave John Gahr the bellyache, the heartburn, and runnin’ fits worse than anybody I ever knew. Each one of them made these
sheep sound a little worse, and by the time John Gahr got to the phone, I didn’t think they would have any left if I started up right then.

One of the other boys came back on the phone and said they’d have a plane down for me early in the morning. Plainview wasn’t more than three hundred miles from Fort Stockton and I told him I guessed he could send a plane to take the drench back that I would use after I got there. I said that I didn’t suppose that a high elevation would curdle it too much but it sure would curdle my stomach to come in an airship, so I would be there when I could get there in a car.

He said, “I don’t believe you know how sick these sheep are.”

Then John Gahr came back on to tell me about how sick the sheep were, and I said, “I can tell from here that they aren’t as sick as you bunch of desert rats that’s got your money tied up in them.”

This caused a little laughin’ and carryin’ on and they admitted that might be part of the trouble, and I promised them I would get there as soon as I could make the trip in my car.

Next afternoon we all met at the hotel and had a round of refreshments and a main course of conversation about the sheep. They told me the sheep were standing on their toes with their bellies drawed in and their backs humped up, and some of them showed the effects of a little fever on their noses and mouths.

These lambs and yearlings had been born in the Trans-Pecos Region in a drouth and some of their mothers had been born in the same drouth before them. During their days as suckling lambs, they had gotten little milk and hardly any tender weeds or grass. They were undersized
when they were shipped to the Plains Region to go on irrigated lush winter wheatfields.

We drove around to the fields to see several different flocks and the situation was pretty nearly the same in about twenty thousand sheep. There were as many as 20 per cent in any and all the flocks that were in this stiff, sore condition.

Back at the hotel I explained to the boys that these sheep had taken in so little of the proper mineral content in their early diet to build bone, cartilage, and tissue that they didn’t have enough room in their intestinal tract for all the green wheat that they were standing on, and they didn’t have enough frame to put on flesh as fast as this lush wheat would furnish it to them. They had spent all their lives gettin’ this way and I just wanted to point out to them how little good it would have done for me to have saved six hours by flying up there.

They all slobbered and said, “All right, all right. You’ve made your point and we didn’t send after you to listen to you lecture us about our man-made mistakes. We’ve done put the word out that you’re a genius, so you got no way out but to make these sheep start doing good.”

I got on the phone and called a laboratory in Kansas City to send me a one hundred thousand cc. of ovine natural serum. Then I called the Tennessee Valley Authority at Knoxville, Tennessee, and asked them to send us a shipment of the very purest dicalcium phosphate that they had mined. I got in touch with other sources of supply for vitamins and other digestive aids and asked that they be shipped the fastest possible way and told my air-minded friends that it was too bad it would be too heavy to come by plane.

I had about a fourth of the needed normal serum the
next morning and I’m afraid it came by airmail, so I didn’t bring up the subject around the breakfast table at the hotel. My purpose in shooting these sheep with normal serum was to furnish them enough animal fluid to incorporate with the available protein already saturated in the tissues, which was causing the stiffness. This would put the sheep back to grazing as fast as they were treated.

Within five days we had a mineral amino-acid vitamin-supplement mixture put out in containers in the fields near the watering places and the ready intake of this preparation put the sheep back to gaining weight on the wheatfields to which the sheepmen had bought the grazing rights at premium prices.

Since I had proved again that I was the genius they had claimed I was and had also settled their nerves and improved their digestion, I told them I would include it on the bill at a later date and drove back to the tranquil existence of the desert and drouth.

In
the early spring a few plants were attempting to grow and there was some sparse green stuff in the draws and around the edges of the irrigation ditches in the fields. The Leon Farms a few miles west of Fort Stockton were watered by the Leoncita Springs. A large earthen dam that had been constructed many years before impounded the spring water that was used for irrigation on the Leon Farms long before irrigation wells were drilled for supplementary water. It had been a dry, warm winter and spring vegetation was coming up a month or so earlier than usual.

The Leon Farms were nonresident-owned and managed exclusively by Mr. Beeman. He was a very efficient business administrator and farmer and didn’t make any pretense of being a cowman or stockman, and he was very willing to discuss details and receive advice and help with his livestock problems. Mr. Beeman drove up to my office in the late morning hours and told me that he had over a hundred cattle in the pasture surrounding Leon Lake and several of them were showing signs of sickness. He asked me if I would come and look at the cattle and see what could be done for them.

As we walked along the ditches that were used for irrigation beneath the lake dam, there was but little green vegetation and I saw no evidence that the cattle were eating on any brush that would be considered poisonous. However, there was a good supply of desirable browse plants in this part of the pasture. We had already “posted” a dead cow and found extreme swelling in the liver and a highly in-flamed intestinal tract with thickened walls.

The cattle were reasonably gentle and we walked around through them without any difficulty. Many of them were breathing extremely hard and I could tell by observation that they had a high heart ratio and were nervous.

Any lake dam will seep a little water to the lower side,
and as we got into this part of the pasture, there was a lush crop of tender young yellowish-green cocklebur plants growing in profusion on several acres below and up on the dam. I told Mr. Beeman that this was his trouble and that the cattle ought to be treated after they had been moved out of this pasture and given a few days’ rest on good feed.

He immediately instructed his helpers to slowly drive these cattle along the irrigation ditch and across the road to another pasture. While they were doing this, he told me that there was nothing in that pasture for them to eat but he did have plenty of alfalfa in the barns which he would put them on. He asked me whether medication would be necessary if they began to straighten up on dry feed.

I explained to him that taking them off the poison weed and putting them on alfalfa would stop any further accumulation of toxic effects but that the animal body would not eliminate the poison already consumed without medical attention. Mr. Beeman readily understood this and told me he would have men ready to help doctor these cattle when I deemed it best.

One cow died after they were moved and before we treated them, which was three days later. Mr. Beeman explained to me that this condition had never occurred before because there had always been an abundance of other vegetation, and it wouldn’t happen again because he would fence off the land that was infested with the cockleburs and it would never be grazed again.

Since I had begun practicing at Fort Stockton, I had served very few unpleasant people. However, there were some that I could never do quite enough for, and when I kept their livestock from dying, they usually were quick to tell me that they thought they would have gotten well anyway but maybe
I helped them some. The veterinary profession is a hard one in that many times owners do not appreciate what is done and livestock can neither tell what is the matter with them, what mankind has fed them, nor thank you for the relief they experience.

I had one client in particular—general manager for a large farming and ranching operation—who considered himself just a little more intelligent than anybody that he was discussing his troubles with, but he was very charitable in that he allowed you to converse with him. However, from my point of view he lacked a damn sight being as smart as he thought.

When I answered a call to his place, he would call in his stock foreman and another helper or two and he was always in attendance himself. As I treated whatever type of domestic animal that was sick, he very carefully cross-examined me with direct questions as to the disease, cause, diagnosis, and treatment. He was very careful to get the exact dosage and the proper name of all medical agents I used.

There was a huge ledger on a desk in the farm office where immediately after my departure he went and wrote up the entire case; “Information” was the title of that ledger. In his estimation, this made it unnecessary to ever call on a professional individual to treat that type of case again, since he and his foreman would refer back to “Information” and get the diagnosis and what drugs to administer.

One day he called me on the phone and told me that he had a cow with milk fever (his diagnosis) and I should come out and bring an intravenous apparatus with a 16-gauge two-inch hypodermic needle and 350-cc. of calcium gluconate. I had once treated a cow for him that had milk fever and knew the reason he called me was because he
was caught short by not having already purchased an intravenous outfit.

The mail hack was leaving in a few minutes from the Post Office and would go by the farm, so I just wrapped up everything that he asked for, put it on the mail hack, and sent it to him and he had it as soon as I could have answered the call. He came in in a few days and in a very guarded conversation did admit that there might have been a slight possibility that they had misdiagnosed the cow’s case since it was a fact that she died.

I was trying to get loose from this particular operator and had already made arrangements to do without his practice and thought that this little episode might break him of the habit of calling me. However, in about three weeks I got another call from him and he had evidently overcome whatever ill feelings he had toward me from that last incident.