Village Horse Doctor (6 page)

I studied his expression a few seconds and realized how much faith he had in that strong Indian-Gypsy medicine and said, “Seeino, you did exactly the right thing. It’s just not a big enough dog to carry out all the bad spirits.”

I told him the dog’s head was causing the horse to be sad, and I unwired it and took it off as I explained that it would keep my medicine from working on the white man part of the horse.

When the horse got well Seeino offered to go partners with me. He explained that there was lots of Indian blood in Western horses and he’d get the Indian part of the horse well, and then if my medicine was strong enough to get the paleface part of the horse well, we’d never lose a horse.

Charlie
Baker, the sheriff of Pecos County, rushed into my office about nine o’clock one hot August morning and said, “Doc, there’re four or five horses over at the Sheriff’s posse barn fallin’ around, and I know they’ve got the blind staggers. I’ve seen some of it when I farmed back East and they’re got it if I ever saw it, and I’m afraid that the rest of the horses over there are goin’ to start staggerin’ soon. Ben K. is already weavin’ a little when he walks. (Ben K. was a horse I had given him.) You know everybody that’s got a horse over there thinks as much of them as they do of their families and you got to do somethin’ fast.”

“Charlie, it ain’t likely that there is any blind staggers in this old desert country because it’s generally caused by horses bein’ fed moldy corn or some other feed that’s in the process of sourin’ after it’s been wet.”

“Well, I’ll swear it looks just like blind staggers.”

As I stepped into my car, I said, “I’ll follow you to the posse barn.”

News had spread fast and there were several of the fellows who had horses in the posse barn already there when I drove up. They were leading and holding four horses out in the corral in front of the barn that were having a hard time being still or walking straight. At a glance I knew that we had a fresh outbreak of sleeping sickness, and I explained to everybody that it might be easier to cure and stop the spread of it than blind staggers because there were serum injections for the treatment of sleeping sickness and vaccines to stop it from spreading.

Encephalomyelitis is a disease of horses that is spread by blood-sucking insects that transmit the disease from one horse to another; this explains why it is a late-summer and fall disease, for it is then that the transporting hosts are most prevalent. It is commonly referred to among horsemen as “sleeping sickness.”

When a horse has been bitten by an insect carrying the virus, he will slowly develop the virus in his blood stream; it takes about five or six days. When the disease becomes apparent, the first symptoms are nervousness and a difficulty with vision, and a gentle horse will have trouble recognizing the person who has been handling him.

After this first stage, the horse becomes unsteady on his feet and wobbles and staggers and stands with his head lowered toward the ground, and as he becomes worse, he will find a fence or tree or some other solid object to push against with his breast or shoulder to steady himself. This is getting into the last stages.

The next step in the disease is that the horse falls to the ground and is unable to regain his equilibrium. After this happens, no matter how much treatment and care a horse may get, should he recover he will never be the same because the damage to his central nervous system will leave him more or less stupid and without good coordination, even though he may appear to be normal.

There had been a few cases of sleeping sickness in the area in the late summer every year. This had been a rainy summer, so to speak, for a desert region and flies and mosquitoes were plentiful. A good many of my regular clients had me vaccinate their horses for sleeping sickness early enough to prevent the disease. However, these horses would amount to a very small percentage of the horse population in the Trans-Pecos, Edwards Plateau, and Davis Mountains Region. These areas had gotten to be my over-all territory.

In late August I was called for a few cases of sleeping sickness that were widely scattered over my practicing territory. By the first week in September there was a full-scale epidemic of sleeping sickness raging among the horse population. I was ordering vaccine for the inoculations and anti-serum for the treatment in such high amounts that
the laboratories were beginning to short my orders but were sending all they could, which in many instances wasn’t enough. I began phoning drugstores and other practitioners in regions where there had not been an outbreak and buying up all the available stock I could find while the laboratories hurried in their efforts to produce fresh supplies.

The harder and the faster I worked, it seemed the more the epidemic got out of hand. There were thousands of stock horses, brood mares, yearlings, two’s, and so forth that weren’t being vaccinated and were a constant source of new infestation to the gentle horses that were in the working remuda on the various ranches. It seemed that horses being kept on feed around ranch headquarters or in town so that they would be available for immediate and everyday use were getting sick in greater numbers than range horses. This was true because of the additional population of flies and mosquitoes around barns, corrals, watering places, and the like.

The vaccination was a 1-cc. live-virus injection administered between the layers of the skin (interdermal). Because of the slow absorption of this skin shot it took at least nine days to begin to furnish some immunity, and it was necessary to vaccinate the horse with a second shot seven days after the first one. Within three weeks I had vaccinated about three thousand horses and had about two hundred and fifty active cases of sleeping sickness under treatment.

The usual treatment for a horse already stricken with the disease was to inject into the juglar vein 250-cc.’s of anti-serum. In addition to this I always gave some heart stimulant, the purpose of which was to keep the horse on his feet. Often when an owner would describe a horse’s condition to me over the phone and I knew that it would be a few hours before I could possibly get to him, I would
instruct that a quart of strong black coffee to be given by mouth every two hours until I got there. This was another way to keep a horse awake and on his feet. Many of those good telephone operators who served the ranch country of the Far Southwest mercifully would sometimes be guilty of listening in and asking somebody that couldn’t get in touch with me how sick their horse was and several learned to tell them to drench their horses with a quart of strong black coffee until they could reach me.

This was a big ranch country and I was driving unbelievable distances, making very few stops other than to get gas and supplies. These were the war years and the local ration officer caught up with me about noon one day and told me there was a man from Washington, D.C., in his office who came to check my gas mileage and would ride along with me for a few days in my practice. I had had very little sleep, ate when I could get to it, and was drawn down pretty hard and mean, so I said, “Brush the brain-washed civil service idiot out on the curb and I’ll suck him up directly.”

I whipped by the courthouse and this very nice precise gentleman of about thirty-five was standing on the curb in front of the courthouse when I stopped. As I got out of the car, he asked, “Are you Dr. Green?”

I told him, “Yeah,” and he introduced himself by saying that he was the civil service idiot who I was supposed to suck up. He had been on an extension line when Mr. Johnson, the chairman of our local board, was talking to me.

I had started to Marathon sixty miles south on a graded road. As we pulled out of town he took out a pencil and pad and went to figurin’ and explainin’ to me at the suggested word rate that at the speed of 45 mph in a ten-hour day with time out for meals and stops, it was hardly possible for one driver to drive one car more than three hundred
miles. The record showed that I was consistently getting over five hundred miles of gas-ration stamps a day, figured at the rate of fifteen miles per gallon.

At the time he was makin’ me this speech, I was driving at 85 mph. I hadn’t driven less than eighteen to twenty-four hours a day in over two weeks and wasn’t payin’ a hell of a lot of attention to what he was sayin’. However, I had looked him over pretty good as was my habit with livestock, women, and civil service employees.

He had the ruddy complexion of a freshly peeled banana and his eyes were sort of marble-like of an indeterminate color, and when you glanced at him through those thick horn-rim glasses, you could almost see a column of figures crossing the stare he wore. His nose and chin and the rest of his face were narrow and sharp and you could have jabbed both his eyes out with a hairpin without spreadin’ it. His hairline hovered down close to his eyebrows, and the back of his head ran down his neck. After lookin’ at him carefully, I would say that he had a very typical kind of a government head, and he had adorned it with a small crown, narrow-brimmed brown hat that you could barely get thumb-hold on.

We drove up to the Hess Ranch and the foreman by the name of Hill waved me to come on down to the barn. I got out and started talking with him and walked into the corral where the sick horses were and also those that he had to vaccinate. He glanced over the fence and saw my passenger sittin’ in the car with the door open and asked, “What’s that?”

I told him who this passenger was and why he was along and that he was a native of Maryland. Hill walked back to the car with me, and on the way he said he wanted to take a closer look at this gov’ment man.

I introduced Mr. Hill to Mr. Stratsford. Hill stuck his
long, strong callused hand out, and as he shook hands, you could tell he was tryin’ to break every bone in that pencil-muscled hand as he said, “Hello, ‘Fed.’ I’m glad the gov’ment has begun to pay old Doc some mind.”

We circled by Alpine from Marathon and out to some ranches and back down the public highway between Alpine and Fort Stockton to the Hoovey Draw country. By now it was dark and I was still going from ranch to ranch treating horses that were already stricken with sleeping sickness. Along about five o’clock in the afternoon I noticed that he had put his little scratch pad and pen in his pocket.

We came out on the Balmorhea-Fort Stockton highway and turned toward town, a distance of about thirty miles. When I let him out about eleven o’clock that night at the Springhurst Hotel, I had crisscrossed and driven about three hundred miles since I picked him up. He had insisted that I not make any calls without him so I told him to eat something, get some rest, and I would pick him up just as soon as I had to make a call.

I had my living quarters in the back of my office, so I went in and started to go to bed when the phone rang. It was another case at Imperial, which was forty miles north of town, and I told them I would be right out. The telephone operators voluntarily kept tickets on my incoming calls and promised people who were phoning me that they would give me the message when they found me or when I called in.