I had been deceived by his almost delicate appearance into thinking that
he wouldn't be up to the job," the pallid face, the large, sensitive
eyes and slender frame didn't seem fitted far the seven days a week
milking, feeding, mucking-out slog that was dairy farming. But I had
been wrong.
The fearless way he plunged in and grabbed at the hind feet of kicking
cows for me to examine and his clenched-teeth determination as he hung
on to the. noses of the big loose beasts at testing time made me change
my mind in a hurry He worked endlessly and tirelessly and it was natural
that his drive should have taken him to the south of Scotland to find a
bull.
Harry's was an Ayrshire herd - unusual among the almost universal short
thorns in the Dales - and there was no doubt an injection of the famous
Newton blood would be a sure way of improving his stock.
"He's got prize winners on both his sire and dam's side," the young
farmer said. "And a grand pedigree name, too. Newton Montmorency the
Sixth -~ Monty for short."
As though recognising his name, the calf raised his head from the bucket
and looked at us. It was a comic little face - wet-muzzled, milk
slobbered half way up his cheeks and dribbling freely from his mouth. I
bent over into the pen and scratched the top of the hard little head,
feeling the tiny horn buds no bigger than peas under my fingers.
Limpid-eyed and unafraid, Monty submitted calmly to the caress for a few
moments then sank his head again in the bucket.
I saw quite a bit of Harry Sumner over the next few weeks and usually
had a look at his expensive purchase. And as the calf grew you could see
why he had cost 100. He was in a pen with three of Harry's own calves
and his superiority was evident at a glance; the broad forehead and
wide-set eyes; the deep chest and short straight legs; the beautifully
even line of the back from shoulder to tail head. Monty had class; and
small as he was he was all bull.
He was about three months old when Harry rang to say he thought the calf
had pneumonia. I was surprised because the weather was fine and warm and
I knew Monty was in a draught-free building. But when I saw him I
thought immediately that his owner's diagnosis was right. The heaving of
the rib cage, the temperature of 105 degrees - it looked fairly
straightforward. But when I got my stethoscope on his chest and listened
for the pneumonic sounds I heard nothing. His lungs were perfectly
clear. I went over him several times but there was not a squeak, not a
rare, not the slightest sign of consolidation.
This was a facer. I turned to the farmer. "It's a funny one, Harry. He's
sick, all right, but his symptoms don't add up to anything
recognisable."
I was going against my early training because the first vet I ever saw
practice with in my student days told me once: "If you don't know what's
wrong with an animal for God's sake don't admit it. Give it a name call
it McLuskie's Disease or Galloping Dandruff - anything you like, but
give it a name." But no inspiration came to me as I looked at the
panting, anxious-eyed little creature.~
Treat the symptoms. That was the thing to do. He had a temperature so
I'd: try to get that down for a start. I brought out my pathetic armoury
of febrifuges; the injection of non-specific antiserum, the 'fever
drink" of sweet spirit of nitre; but over the next two days it was
obvious that the time-honoured remedies were, having no effect. ~
On the fourth morning, Harry Sumner met me as I got out of my car. "He's
walking funny, this morning, Mr. Herriot - and he seems to be blind."
Blind! An unusual form of lead-poisoning - could that be it? I hurried
into the calf pen and began to look round the walls, but there wasn't a
scrap of paint anywhere and Monty had spent his entire life in there.
And anyway, as I looked at him I realised that he wasn't really blind;
his eyes were staring and slightly upturned and he blundered unseeingly
around the pen, but he blinked as I passed my hand in front of his face.
To complete my bewilderment he walked with a wooden, stiff-legged gait
almost like a mechanical toy and my mind began to snatch at diagnostic
straws - tetanus, no - meningitis - no, no; I always tried to maintain
the calm, professional exterior but I had to fight an impulse to scratch
my head and stand gaping.
I got off the place as quickly as possible and settled down to serious
thought as I drove away. My lack of experience didn't help, but I did
have a knowledge of pathology and physiology and when stumped for a
diagnosis I could usually work something out on rational grounds. But
this thing didn't make sense.
That night I got out my books, notes from college, back numbers of the
Veterinary Record and anything else I could find on the subject of calf
diseases. Somewhere here there would surely be a clue. But the volumes
on medicine and surgery were barren of inspiration and I had about given
up hope when I came upon the passage in a little pamphlet on calf
diseases. "Peculiar, stilted gait, staring eyes with a tendency to gaze
upwards, occasionally respiratory symptoms with high temperature." The
words seemed to leap out at me from the printed page and it was as
though the unknown author was patting me on the shoulder and murmuring
reassuringly: "This is it, you see. It's all perfectly clear."
I grabbed the phone and rang Harry Sumner. "Harry, have you ever noticed
Monty and those other calves in the pen licking each other?"
"Aye, they're allus at it, the little beggars. It's like a hobby with
them. Why?"
"Well I know what's wrong with your bull. He's got a hair ball."
"A hair ball? Where?"
"In the abomasum - the fourth stomach. That's what's ,setting up all
those strange symptoms." , "Well I'll go to hell. What do we do about
it, then?"
"It'll probably mean an operation, but I'd like to try dosing him with
liquid paraffin first. I'll put a pint bottle on the step for you if
you'll come and collect it. Give him half a pint now and the same first
thing in the morning. It might just grease the thing through. I'll see
you tomorrow."
I hadn't a lot of faith in the liquid paraffin. I suppose I suggested it
for the sake of doing something while I played nervously with the idea
of operating. And next morning the picture was as I expected; Monty was
still rigid-limbed, still staring sightlessly ahead of him, and an
oiliness round his rectum and down his tail showed that the paraffin had
by-passed the obstruction.
"He hasn't had a bite now for three days," Harry said. "I doubt he won't
stick ~t much longer."
I looked from his worried face to the little animal trembling in the
pen. "You're right. We'll have to open him up straight away to have any
hope of saving him. Are you willing to let me have a go?"
"Oh, aye, let's be at t'job - sooner the better." He smiled at me. It
was a confident smile and my stomach gave a lurch. His confidence could
be badly misplaced because in those d
ays abdominal surgery in the bovine
was in a primitive state. There were a few jobs we had begun to tackle
fairly regularly but removal of a hair-ball wasn't one of them and my
knowledge of the procedure was confined to some rather small-print
reading in the text books.
But this young farmer had faith in me. He thought I could do the job so
it .~_ ~
was no good letting him see my doubts. It was at times like this that I
envied our colleagues in human medicine. When a surgical case came up
they packed: their patient off to a hospital but the vet just had to get
his jacket off on the spot and make an operating theatre out of the farm
buildings.
Harry and I busied ourselves in boiling up the instruments, setting out
buckets of hot water and laying a clean bed of straw in an empty pen.
Despite his weakness the calf took nearly sixty c.c."s of Nembutal into
his vein before he was fully anaesthetised but finally he was asleep,
propped on his back between two straw bales, his little hooves dangling
above him. I was ready to start.
It's never the same as it is in the books. The pictures and diagrams
look so simple and straightforward but it is a different thing when you
are cutting into a living, breathing creature with the abdomen rising
and falling gently and the blood oozing beneath your knife. The
abomasum, I knew, was just down there, slightly to the right of the
sternum but as I cut through the peritoneum there was this slippery mass
of fat-streaked omentum obscuring everthing; and as I pushed it aside
one of the bales moved and Monty tilted to his left causing a sudden
gush of intestines into the wound. I put the flat of my hand against the
shining pink loops - it would be just great if my patient's insides
started spilling out on to the straw before I had started.
"Pull him upright, Harry, and shove that bale back into place," I
gasped. The farmer quickly complied but the intestines weren't at all
anxious to return to their place and kept intruding coyly as I groped
for the abomasum. Frankly I was beginning to feel just a bit lost and my
heart was thudding when I came upon something hard. It was sliding about
beyond the wall of one of the stomachs - at the moment I wasn't sure
which. I gripped it and lifted it into the wound. I had hold of the
abomasum and that hard thing inside must be the hair-ball.
Repelling the intestines which had made another determined attempt to
push their way into the act, I incised the stomach and had my first look
at the cause of the trouble. It wasn't a ball at all, rather a flat
plaque of densely matted hair mixed freely with strands of hay, sour
curd and a shining covering of my liquid paraffin. The whole thing was
jammed against the pyloric opening.
Gingerly I drew it out through the incision and dropped it in the straw.
It wasn't till I had closed the stomach wound with the gut, stitched up
the muscle layer and had started on the skin that I realised that the
sweat was running down my face. As I blew away a droplet from my nose
end Harry broke the silence. -, "It's a hell of a tricky job, isn't it?"
he said. Then he laughed and thumped, my shoulder. "I bet you felt a bit
queer the first time you did one of these!"
I pulled another strand of suture silk through and knotted it. "You're
right, Harry," I said. "How right you are."
When I had finished we covered Monty with a horse rug and piled straw on
top of that, leaving only his head sticking out. I bent over and touched
a corner of the eye. Not a vestige of a corneal reflex. God, he was deep
- had I given him too much anaesthetic? And of course there'd be
surgical shock, too. As I left I glanced back at the motionless little
animal. He looked smaller than ever and very vulnerable under the bare
walls of the pen.
I was busy for the rest of the day but that evening my thoughts kept
coming back to Monty. Had he come out of it yet? Maybe he was dead. I
hadn't the experience of previous cases to guide me and I simply had no
idea of how a calf reacted to an operation like that. And I couldn't rid
myself of the nagging consciousness of how much it all meant to Harry
Sumner. The bull is half the; herd, they say, and half of Harry's future
herd was Lying there under the straw: - he wouldn't be able to find that
much money again.
I jumped suddenly from my chair. It was no good, I had to find out what
was happening Part of me rebelled at the idea of looking amateurish and
u'su. c ~ myself by going fussing back, but, I thought, I could always
say I had returned to look for an instrument The farm was in darkness as
I crept into the pen. I shone my torch on the mound of straw and saw
with a quick thump of the heart that the calf had not moved. I dropped
to my knees and pushed a hand under the rug; he was breathing anyway.
But there was still no eye reflex - either he was dying or he was taking
a hell of a time to come out.
In the shadows of the yard I looked across at the soft glow from the
farmhouse kitchen Nobody had heard me. I slunk over to the car and drove
off with the sick knowledge that I was no further forward. I still
didn't know how the job was going to turn out.
Next morning I had to go through the same thing again and as I walked
stiffly across to the calf pen I knew for sure I'd see something this
time. Either he'd be dead or better. I opened the outer door and almost
ran down the passage. It was the third pen along and I stared hungrily
into it.
Monty was sitting up on his chest. He was still under the rug and straw
and he looked sorry for himself but when a bovine animal is on its chest
I always feel hopeful. The tensions flowed from me in a great wave. He
had survived the operation - the first stage was over; and as I knelt
rubbing the top of his head I had the feeling that we were going to win.
And, in fact, he did get better, though I have always found it difficult
to explain to myself scientifically why the removal of that pad of
tangled fibres could cause such a dramatic improvement in so many
directions. But there it was. His temperature did drop and his breathing
returned to normal, his eyes did stop staring and the weird stiffness
disappeared from his limbs.
But though I couldn't understand it, I was none the less delighted. Like
a teacher with his favourite pupil, I developed a warm proprietary
affection for the calf and when I happened to be on the farm I found my
feet straying unbidden to his pen. He always walked up to me and
regarded me with friendly interest; it was as if he had a fellow feeling
for me, too.
He was rather more than a year old when I noticed the change. The
friendly interest gradually disappeared from his eyes and was replaced
by a thoughtful, speculative look; and he developed a habit of shaking
his head at me at the same time.
"I'd stop going in there, Mr. Herriot, if I were you," Harry said one
day. "He's getting big and I reckon he's going to be a cheeky bugger
before he's finished."
&nb
sp; But cheeky was the wrong word. Harry had a long, trouble-free spell and
Monty was nearly two years old when I saw him again. It wasn't a case of
illness this time. One or two of Harry's cows had been calving before
their time and it was typical of him that he should ask me to blood test
his entire herd for Brucellosis.
We worked our way easily through the cows and I had a long row of glass
tubes filled with blood in just over an hour.
"Well, that's the lot in here," the farmer said. "We only have bull to
do and we're finished." He led the way across the yard through the door
into the calf pens and along a passage to the bull box at the end. He
opened the half door and as I looked inside I felt a sudden sense of
shock.
Monty was enormous. The neck with its jutting humps of muscle supported
a head so huge that the eyes looked tiny. And there was nothing friendly
in those eyes now; no expression at all, in fact, only a cold black
glitter. He was standing sideways to me, facing the wall, but I knew he
was watching me as he pushed his head against the stones, his great
horns scoring the whitewash with slow, menacing deliberation.
Occasionally he snorted from deep in his chest but apart from that he
remained ominously still. Monty wasn't just a bull - he was a vast,
brooding presence.
Harry grinned as he saw me staring over the door. "Well, do you fancy
popping inside to scratch his head? That's what you allus used to do."
"No thanks." I dragged my eyes away from the animal. "But I wonder what
my expectation of life would be if I did go in."
"I reckon you'd last about a minute," Harry said thoughtfully. "He's a
grand bull - all I ever expected - but by God he's a mean 'un. I never
Let Sleeping Vets Lie Page 12