Village Horse Doctor (9 page)

I didn’t have a lot of faith in this old witch medicine, but I had begun to think that maybe yellowweed was a witch too. Some of my treatments were in a sense farfetched. I ordered old botanical drugs that were in many instances obsolete, and sometimes the supplies I received showed signs of having been stored for a long time.

I gave some sheep a brown powder that was a combination of things that I had seen camel drivers use for what they called wet sickness in camels. I had also seen them give this same powder to their milking sheep—some Arabs have a breed of sheep that they keep instead of goats.

I also used medical preparations that I had found in the writings of early-day sheepmen in Australia, but these proved to be of no help. One time I even fed the sheep some skunk cabbage and seaweed from an old “Dr. LeGears’s” prescription. They improved remarkably for several
days and showed an increasing appetite and a thriftier, more alert appearance but that soon vanished and they went the way of all yellowweed sheep. I determined later that they showed improvement for a few days because they were iodine-deficient and the seaweed had been of benefit to them.

After I tried twenty formulas that didn’t work, I began to take a much more serious look at the yellowweed problem. I moved into an office and installed a good practical laboratory and began doing extensive laboratory analyses of the internal organs of each sheep that died.

I was grinding yellowweed every day in a specially built grinding mill. The containers were made of porcelain, and porcelain balls of various sizes were placed in the porcelain barrel and set on a mill that turned the barrel over, and the falling of the balls ground the yellowweed to a pulp so that the juice could be extracted and the fiber analyzed microscopically. Porcelain equipment was used so as to prevent any chemical reaction from occurring in the grinding of the weed since the porcelain was neutral and no metal surfaces were involved.

Ranchers and town people alike were constantly encouraging me to work on this yellowweed project because it was of such major economic importance to this sheep-ranching country. Summer caused the weed to mature and become tough and other vegetation grew and so my yellowweed research had to be postponed until the following winter, but I was never allowed to forget the fact that I had started the project.

One day in the drugstore, I said something sharp and unpleasant to Gallemore, and Concho Cunningham had turned up his hearing aid and quickly turned to Gallemore and said, “Don’t pay any attention to him. You remember he was on yellowweed all winter.”

Soon
after I settled in Fort Stockton, Pete Williams from McCamey, forty-five miles away, visited me and told me of all the opportunities there were at McCamey for a veterinary doctor. He had some good horses that needed various routine things done for them, and there was some racehorse interest in and around the town, with a lot of other general practice. He and I agreed that I would come to McCamey every Monday morning until such a time as they didn’t need me this often.

Pete Williams, a retired oilfield contractor, lived on the east side of McCamey. He was a very accommodating fellow and was known and liked by everybody and made a real good contact for me at McCamey for many years. He and Doc Halimacek at the drugstore in McCamey would write down all the calls that people had left for me that were not of an emergency nature. Then Pete would go along to show me where people lived and open gates and help with the livestock and visit with his neighbors. At the end of the day’s work, anybody that had left word for me to vaccinate a dog or work a horse’s teeth or anything else that hadn’t been at home when we got there, Pete would give me his personal check for all that hadn’t paid me and then do his own collecting. This was a good arrangement in that I didn’t charge full mileage on one call because I would get a big enough day’s work that I could divide a small amount of mileage between
the calls of the day and nobody was hurt by the charges.

A year or two later a racetrack was built at McCamey by a group of public-minded citizens. I took a little stock in the track and racing was held every Saturday and Sunday. Dr. Cooper, an M.D. in McCamey, had a little bay mare named Golden Slippers. She was a sure ’nuff racehorse and outran ’most every horse that was brought in from other places for matched races.

Golden Slippers developed a serious kidney block one night. I was out on other calls, and it was about three o’clock in the morning when I got the word to come to McCamey.

In the meantime some of the stable hands drenched the mare by using a long-necked bottle and pouring the drench down through her nose. This could be done by a skilled person, but a much safer way would be to use a tube and pass it through the passage in the nose to the throat. I always gave liquid medicine as drench by mouth.

The stable hands made the fatal mistake of pouring sweet spirits of nider into Golden Slippers’s lungs. I worked with her the rest of the night, knowing that there was no real hope of saving her. However, I gave her sedatives, trying to make her dying as painless as possible, and she died about daylight.

By this time there were several other horsemen at the stables, and we all went up to Doc Halimacek’s drugstore for coffee. There was a good-lookin’ black-headed girl named Betty working at the fountain. She had been betting some money on Golden Slippers every time the mare ran and was a pretty big winner by now and, needless to say, was overly fond of the little mare.

She heard us talkin’ about Golden Slippers dying as we sat around the table. As she was serving us, I rubbed my
tired eyes and said, “I don’t know why I made a horse doctor.”

Betty’s eyes flashed and her voice carried a great deal of expression when she looked straight at me and said, “Did ya?”

It was mid-July and there had been some early rain, but the country in general had turned off to be extremely dry by midsummer. Dr. Hoffman, who lived at Marfa, was a very fine old veterinarian who had more or less retired from general practice, had taken on the wholesale distribution of veterinary drugs as his principal business. He was no longer interested in trying to solve the grazing problems of the country and had on several occasions called me to work on cases. This time he was calling about some sheep that were dying about twenty miles south of Marfa. According to his information, there were quite a number of sheep dying or at least sick that were apparently affected the same way in other parts of the Big Bend country south of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

I left Fort Stockton early and was in Marfa by midmorning. We went down to the ranch south of there where the sick sheep were. The rancher had the sheep in a water lot that was probably about five acres in size. I could walk among the sheep and they wouldn’t try to run or get away from me, and it would take one of them a long time to cross the lot. They were extremely stiff and were walking in what was generally termed a stilted position, being up on the points of their toes both in front and behind. This flock of sheep were still willing to drink water, but in spite of that fact, they were extremely drawn, though apparently not fevered.

We drove and walked over the pastures where these sheep had been grazing. For the most part the vegetation appeared to be of fair quality, not too dry and still palatable
to a sheep. Knowing that a sheep is a green-feeder by choice, and from my experience in poisonous plants, I reasoned that whatever was poisoning the sheep would probably be the vegetation that was greenest and the most protected from the summer sun.

I began to look around the rock ledges and bluffs where there would be a little more shade and perhaps a little more moisture that formed on the rock and ran into the crevices and shallow soil around the rock where something could grow. I found a plant resembling a pea vine that was rather plentiful and was forming some small seed pods—when broken open, I found three or four green peas in them that were in the dough, so to speak. The term “in the dough” means any grain or seed that is in a stage of development and is full of a doughy-like substance that will finally harden when the seed is matured. Such vegetable substances ofttimes contain an unbelievable quantity of acid that in the desert region will more than likely be digestible without any serious upset; the ill effects occur when these substances are carried into the blood stream.

All the time I was pulling these pods and the whole vine too, Dr. Hoffman and I were visitin’ and I was explaining to him my theory that this would be the vegetation that was causing the trouble. I put about twenty pounds of vine and seed in a refrigerated box that I had in the back of my car and we drove back to Marfa. I told Dr. Hoffman that I would take the vine to my laboratory and report back to him as soon as possible.

That night I isolated preacyntic acid from the seed, especially from the premature seed. However, it took me another several days before I arrived at the proper prescription to counteract the ill effects of the
garvencia
that had already entered the blood streams of the sheep.

It was after dark and I thought I would take a break
from my laboratory so I walked up the alley and went in the back door of Gallemore’s Drugstore. It was Saturday night and the usual Saturday-night business was going on, and I saw Roger Gallemore standing between the ends of two counters up at the front of the store.

A middle-aged widow woman had moved into the country and had leased a ten-section ranch about ten miles west of town where she raised some sheep and goats. Ernie Hamilton, field representative for the National Finance Corporation, whose home office was in Fort Worth, had been this woman’s forerunner in arranging for the lease and so forth because she was a customer of the loan company and they were trying to get her in better condition so she could pay out.

She was a pretty tough old ranchwoman, wore men’s levi britches and boots nearly all the time, lived hard, was hard-spoken, and was always in hard shape financially, but tonight she had on a nice dress and a lot of make-up. She walked into the drugstore and up to Roger and explained to him that she was having some visitors over this weekend and she thought that they might want a drink of spirits, and since she never went into a whisky store and didn’t know anything about that kind of place, she wondered if he would go across the street to Tom’s Liquor Store and get her some kind of nice whisky. Of course, old Roger was an easy mark for that kind of a story and said, “Oh sure, what kind do you want, Ma’m?”

“Oh, Mr. Gallemore, anything that you would pick out I’m sure would be all right.”

In a few minutes he came back with the quart of whisky in one of those little tight sacks and was carrying it in his left hand under his coat. As he walked in the door, she stepped back and opened a great big purse that you could have put a sack of feed in and Roger caught the hint and
sidled up to the purse and dropped the bottle of whisky in it.

The old woman snapped the big purse to and smiled and said, “Just put that on my bill, Mr. Gallemore,” as she hurriedly stepped out of the door.