Village Horse Doctor (33 page)

When I drove into the headquarters, he was at the barn with his helpers and waved at me to come on down there. As usual, he was well dressed in a business suit with a white shirt and a bow tie, was clean shaven and even smelled good. He had a coming two-year-old heifer in labor with her first calf and it was easy to see that the farm and ranch hands had done everything in their power to deliver this calf. I could tell at a glance that the calf had been dead several days and that calling me was the last resort to try to save the heifer.

I explained to Mr. Information that it would be a useless effort on my part because gangrene had set in and there was no way of saving the heifer. He was very respectful of my opinion and granted me that this was probably a total loss except for the fact that much information could be gained by a Caesarean operation that would be useful in
the future management and calving of young cattle and he was very insistent that I do a Caesarean section.

After administering sufficient anesthesia by intravenous injection, I shaved the heifer’s side and belly and very professionally and expertly started the operation.

Mr. Information securely stood a good distance away on the offwind side and held a spotless white handkerchief over his nose and mouth to protect his sensitive system from the unpleasant odors. He would step up to my back and pull on the sleeve that I had rolled up past my elbows to get my attention as he asked me questions. I was very deliberate and technical in my explanations and answered every question that he asked me very explicitly.

When this useless operation was completed and I had sutured the incision just as though the cow were going to live a normal lifetime, I went over to the water pump to clean off the rough part of the aftermath of the surgical performance. He came over and complimented me very eloquently for my professional knowledge and ability and said to send him a bill. With this he bid me adieu and went back to the more comfortable and pleasant atmosphere of his office.

I went into town and that night wrote out and mailed him a bill—fifty dollars for the Caesarean operation, one hundred dollars for the lecture. I got my check in the return mail and was forever free of Mr. Information and his practice.

Just after sundown I was sittin’ out in front of the office enjoyin’ the breeze that always comes up from the desert at this time of day when Chiquita, a sweet little Mexican girl about five years old, came up to my chair waggin’ her kitty cat, and in her English-Spanish mixed baby jabber put
her fingers around on some sores on her cat’s head that she wanted doctored.

I could tell at a glance that these were ringworms, and unbeknownst to most people, cats have been supplying babies with ringworms since time began, so I was laughin’ and teasin’ Chiquita and ran my hand under her hairline above her forehead and there was a little sore on her too. I had some ringworm medicine; it was almost a clear light liquid but would make a little bit of an amber stain on the skin.

I painted the ringworms on the cat. Then painted Chiquita’s ringworms and told her that the sores on the cat would get well faster if we treated hers too. She thought that was funny and rolled her big brown eyes and smiled and showed me another one behind her ear. She thought this was great fun and the medicine didn’t burn but very little and she turned and ran back up the street carrying her cat about half a block to where her momma and daddy ran a little Mexican eating place and bar.

The next morning at sunup as I came out of the office door, Chiquita was coming up waggin’ her little bitty baby brother and said that he had kitty sores too. He was a little baby with one ringworm right on his fat cheek. I thought this was going to be fun so I dropped a little green dye into the ringworm medicine and told Chiquita that I would doctor Little Chappo with pretty medicine. She thought this was funny and said that it was pretty and she wanted some “pretty” on her, too; so I treated her ringworms with the green medicine. The cat had followed her and I gave it another treatment also.

In a few days Chiquita’s mother was passing the office door, stopped and stuck her head in and said, “Dok-tor, I want to thank you ‘too much’ and next time I have baby I think we call you.”

I was answering from one to three calls a day to Burdine’s Dairy, and even though they were short calls, it was too many to one dairy to treat cows that were having a variety of internal upsets, including lots of bloat. Old man Burdine kept tellin’ me that he had not changed the feed; he was feeding them alfalfa hay between milking times and he was feeding ground ear corn, which was ground corn cob, shuck and all, with cottonseed meal and other additives. He had been feeding this same feed for a year, and in his argumentative way, he knew it couldn’t be the feed.

The cattle were not on pasture and were standing in a dry lot eating baled alfalfa hay between milkings, so the trouble had to be caused by the feed. I started through his feed barn and mixing operation and everything was just as he had said it was, and for the want of something smarter to do, I took samples of the separate feed materials and took them to my laboratory after this condition had been prevalent for over a week.

This corn, cob, shuck, and all, that was coarsely ground began to worry me, so I decided to run a few chemical tests. I didn’t find any prussic, picric, or any of the other common acids that would usually cause trouble. An old cowboy alcoholic with a sensitive nose came in the front door of my office, and as he came through the middle door to the laboratory, he said, “Doc, I smell some kind of a cheap grade of drinkin’ whisky. Have you got on that stuff?”

I said, “Hell no, it’s just your breath blowin’ back in your face.”

He said, “It ain’t either. You’re about to turn to a private drinker hidin’ back here in this dive where you won’t have to divide with nobody.”

I said, “Well, I ain’t gonna divide with you. You’ve already made fun of the quality of my whisky and you haven’t even seen it.”

He picked up a handful of that ground corn off the end of the lab table and stuck it up to his nose and said, “You’re worse’n a bootlegger. You’re puttin’ it in cow feed.”

This was the very lead I needed, but I wasn’t about to let him know it, so I said, “If it would steady your nerves any, we’ll go up to the Stockton Pharmacy and I’ll buy you some fresh brewed coffee that hasn’t been made in a tin bucket and it’ll have a different taste than what you’ve been used to.”

We walked from the Medical Arts up to the drugstore and I socialized with him just long enough to be pleasant, then broke back to run some different tests on that ground corn. I had to go back out to the dairy to get a fresh supply of corn and after about three hours of laboratory work and half a bushel of ground corn, I came up with a vial of stuff that I identified as acetone, which is a few molecule chemical structures from being alcohol.

Late that afternoon about milking time, I went out and told old man Burdine that his trouble was in his ground corn. He sputtered and slobbered and said that it couldn’t be that because this was a fresh batch of corn he got about ten days ago from the feed mill. I asked him right quick what day it was he called me for a first case of bloat. He studied a minute and said, “I’ll be damn. It was about ten days ago.”

I asked him if there was any way he could manage to feed that night without using any more corn. He said, “Yeah, I’ll just give ’em the same amount of other feed and more alfalfa hay and they won’t miss the corn much.”

He added, however, that the bulkiness of the ground
corn, cob, shuck, and all made it a lot easier to mix the other feed.

I was out early the next morning and there were no cases of bloat. As we talked, he said he still had to have some more corn and if what he had was causing the poison, he would try to get it from some other source. He had lost quite a bit of milk production in ten days and two cows had died.

I told him I wasn’t practicin’ law, but I thought he had reason for the feed mill to pay him some damages. Besides that, the feed mill might be selling this same corn to other feeders and we had better take it up with them. He said, “Yeah, you go on in and tell ’em what you found, so they won’t think I’m crazy like they will when I go to tryin’ to tell ’em, and I’ll come in after I get through milking.”

I went to the feed mill and was careful to present the case to the feed-mill manager, who listened with interest and showed no signs of trying to deny that the corn might be the trouble. However, he told me that he was buying this corn by the carload in hundred-pound sacks already ground and it was being shipped to him by a feed brokerage company in Lubbock. He wasn’t sure who the brokerage company was selling it for, but, as best he could remember, the last car had an Iowa billing on it.

I happened to know the feed brokerage company since I had done business with them and told him that with his permission I would talk to them on the phone. He said, “Yeah, go ahead. We need to trace this corn down and put the blame and cost of damages on the proper parties.”

I thought it would be best to tend to this over my own phone, so I went back to the office. In talking with the brokerage firm manager, he said that they had not loaded, unloaded, ground, or in any manner handled these corn
consignments and it was being shipped by a mill in Iowa to them.

I went back to the feed mill and old man Burdine had come in from milking and we all discussed his trouble. I told them that it would not be wise to make a phone call to the Iowa mill because if they had any more of that particular corn they could dispose of it and hedge against any liability concerning the loss of milk and the two cows.

Old man Burdine said, “Doc, it’d be good to have you out of town a few days, and maybe you haven’t seen Iowa, so why don’t you go up there, and if you stay out of the country long enough maybe my cows will straighten out and be all right.”

I said right quick that his talk didn’t fool me none. He wasn’t as interested in my seein’ Iowa as he was in seein’ his cows straighten’n’ out and start back to giving milk.

I drove into Iowa after midday the next afternoon. I found the feed mill and went in the office and introduced myself and met the man who owned the mill. He was a nice fellow and an old-time mill operator and I explained my mission to him.

He said, “Well, if I’d known there was such a man, I’d have already sent for you. We’ve got a lot of steers in feed lots around close that are havin’ all kinds of trouble and there have been several steers die and nobody’s put their hand on the cause.”

He called his mill foreman in and talked about the corn that they were grinding. It developed that this corn had been stored in an old warehouse and lots of water had dripped in and been blown in from snow through the winter and spring, but since they had corn stored in outside wire granaries and even in small silos made out of red panel fence, they hadn’t felt that the water damages could have been of any consequence to this corn. If it was true, this
would be the first time that they had ever experienced any trouble from grinding corn that had been damp from weather.

I was fast to explain the difference in their storaging process and pointed out that the water seeping through the ear corn under a shed and surrounded by solid walls would be more likely to go through a fermentation process than corn stored in the open, where the wind and sun could hit it. This all made sense, and without much argument, the mill owner was glad for me to have samples of freshly ground corn that was going through the mill at this particular moment. It was easy to see that he had quite a bit more at stake than the losses at one dairy in Texas.

I took the corn samples and drove into Omaho, where I knew a lab technician from years past, and we extracted the same faint-smellin’ stuff that Old Alcoholic had sniffed in my office. The mill owner was quick to call the feeders that had this corn in their feed lots and instruct his mill foreman to start grinding corn that he had stored in other buildings and told me that an immediate settlement would be made with my client in Texas. This old gentleman was a businessman and fair in his dealings.

I thought I was far enough from home, and as old Burdine wanted me to be gone an extra day or so, I went by Kansas City and then worked my way back to Fort Stockton about the third day. It was right after noon and I went to the feed mill to give a report and the old Iowa corn miller was sittin’ in the office with old Burdine.

They were discussing what the damages would amount to and old Burdine was trying to be as fair as Mr. Iowa. They asked me what my fees were in the case and I told them and Mr. Iowa said, “I’ll include it in Mr. Burdine’s check.”

In a few days I got a nice letter of appreciation with a
one hundred dollar check in it from the Iowa corn miller. This was the most pleasant mishap in my entire veterinary practice that I ever experienced with people where cattle, feed, milk, and money were concerned.

The seasons of the year had ceased to have much meaning because they were all dry. We talked about the possibility of rain at equinox. The seasons of the year were passed as designated by the calendar, but in truth the drouth and the desert had given the year only two seasons, winter and summer, both dry. What few livestock that were in the country after winter set in could be generally assumed that the ranchers and their bankers had decided to stay with another year and my winter practice was a matter of survival on accidental cases of injury to livestock and other emergency-type calls.

The economic influence of ten years of drouth had more than separated the men from the boys, and the common run of jokes about dry weather only produced a grin instead of a laugh in a crowd. Occasionally somebody would buy a new pickup or a new car, and when it came up in conversation, people would ask in not quite a half-joking manner, “Where did ya get the money?”

The best answer was, “I’ve been savin’ my feed sacks since the drouth started and I just sold them all,” and there had been enough feed sacks bought on some ranches to have paid for a new car or truck.

Most of the concentrated feed being put out for range livestock was ground maize, cottonseed meal, and salt. The salt content would run about 25 per cent and in some cases was stepped up to 33⅓ per cent. The reason for this huge amount of salt was because feed was being put out in self-feeders. Since the pastures were so big and the
livestock population was so small, a rancher couldn’t very well drive to them and hunt up what needed to be fed and these self-feeders were usually placed in reasonable distance from the water troughs.