William's Gift

by Helen Douglas

  Everything started falling into place quickly from that point on. I found out the exam, given twice yearly, was to be held in three weeks in Eastern Canada. I just had time to get ready. I wrote the exams after studying every evening for three weeks, reviewing material on cattle and swine as well as small animals and horses. I hadn’t written an exam in sixteen years, but I managed to pass the two days of testing, so the first hurdle was over. I decided to go for it and listed the farm. I announced to my best clients I was closing the practices and was surprised at how accepting and even unsurprised they were. I let everyone else find out via the grapevine, and before long it was a fact. The farm sold in a month.

  We were moving to British Columbia! It would almost be a relief to work for someone else for a while. I started looking forward to seeing another part of the country that I knew nothing about. A neighbouring practice took over the small-animal clinic and bought my equine practice to amalgamate with theirs. Elizabeth and I got down to two horses, Kira’s daughter and Homer. They could be left in Ottawa at Anne’s farm.

  It took four months of work and organization, but I had thought it might take much longer. Although I left Nova Scotia with some sadness, it was with the satisfaction of knowing it was not because I had to, but because I chose to. I was moving on to the next step of my career. We had weathered economic hardship, gossip, and unexpected competition and managed to adapt to it all and survive through hard work and good intentions. The final lesson learned could possibly have been to know when to move on.

  From the time I was offered the job to the time we arrived in British Columbia, five months had elapsed.

  FIFTEEN

  BC, the Slippery Slope

  THE TRIP ACROSS Canada was memorable. Wild and rugged, Northern Ontario held a few surprises of its own. A stately young moose in the middle of the road, passing in the mist at sunrise, was our greeting one day. A flash thunderstorm north of Lake Superior blew our tent over in the middle of the night, sending us scurrying for cover in the car. The Prairies unfolded, eerie in their vast flatness, hot and dusty that year. Stark yet lovely, the scenery mesmerized us as the miles slipped by. A dinosaur find of huge significance in Eastern Saskatchewan lured us out of our way. We saw flash lightning on purple horizons, discovered the back roads and small towns that make up central Canada’s heartland. And who can describe the feeling of seeing the Rocky Mountains for the first time to someone who hasn’t done so. My excitement grew as we got closer to our destination. British Columbia was raw, bold, dramatic, and larger than life.

  I had called Dr. Moore from several stops on our trip, and up to that point there had been no clue of a problem in any of our previous phone calls. However, when I called from Calgary to say I was one week out, the response was a bit unsettling.

  “I’m right on schedule,” I said, “to start Monday.”

  “Well, er, great,” he said. “I’ll be going away for the month of August. You’ll be able to drive my truck, as we don’t have one for you yet.”

  “That’s fine. I’m sure I’ll know my way around before you leave,” I said.

  It wasn’t anything he had specifically said, but it was almost as if he hadn’t been expecting me. There was a hint of something else, perhaps worry, in his voice. I put it out of my mind.

  We arrived in the Fraser Valley with a couple of days to explore. Dr. Moore had located a mobile home for us as temporary accommodation. We could stay there until we got the lay of the land and found a house to rent. Household goods could come out later, hopefully within a couple of months. First we had to become familiar with our new surroundings and find out what was available.

  I had only the one contact in British Columbia, and it was a big help and a relief to have her to show us around that first weekend. It turned out the Fraser Valley was set up like a grid with numbered streets running both east-west and north-south. There was heavy traffic everywhere we went. A lot of the stables were on very small lots, one to two acres being typical, so there was very little turnout for horses. Posh, new, private estates mingled with older cottages. Everyone seemed to have security, large gates, alarm systems, and guard dogs. It was very different from Nova Scotia. There didn’t seem to be much room to spread out. But everywhere there was evidence that things were booming.

  The musty old house trailer had seen better days. The roof was moss-covered, the old shag carpet damp, and it had been empty for a while. We unpacked our few possessions and tried to set up housekeeping with a TV, a microwave, and several suitcases. End tables made of cardboard boxes and a card table and chairs were the only furniture. It was like camping, or early student days. The two dogs, Enya, a Weimaraner, and Punch, a Jack Russell terrier, explored the new digs with glee, snuffing spiders out of corners.

  In I, personally, felt no discomfort with all the changes or the accommodation. It was a dynamic and beautiful part of Canada, and in my new job I would be doing exactly what I had wanted. My comfort with our decision to leave Nova Scotia signalled to me that we were doing the right thing at the right time. As it had so many times in the past, I found that life had handed me what I needed next, exactly when I needed it. It was exciting.

  The clinic was a square, unimposing building in an industrial park. It was of concrete block construction, with a state-of-the-art surgery suite, a treatment area, and six box stalls. Dr. Moore got lameness and medical referrals from all over British Columbia. As well, his was the only clinic opening abdomens, so we got all the colic surgeries within a day’s drive. Because they offered neonatal foal intensive care as another specialty, there were a lot of staff ready to monitor and tend to colics and premature foals at all hours of the day and night. There were now five vets, including Dr. Moore, and his was considered a highly successful practice.

  The first few days at the practice, Bill Moore and I travelled together, as he introduced me to clients, showed me how to find barns, and reviewed all the equipment in the clinic and truck. I found things to be really different than in Eastern Canada in many ways. Where there I had seen mostly thoroughbreds and quarter horses as patients, here it would be largely European warmbloods. Most of our clients lived in suburban Vancouver and kept their horses at large boarding stables in the Fraser Valley, where the economy was totally different. Management of the horses was also quite different, from feeding to bedding. High expense and lack of space dictated how the animals were cared for. There was no space for turnout. Hog fuel, or cedar bark, was the common footing for all rings and paddocks. All refuse and manure had to be put in bins and removed at great expense to protect the water table and the salmon-spawning creeks that emptied into the Fraser River.

  Dr. Moore had a lot on his mind. He told me there had been two new horse vets arrive in the Fraser Valley that year. Things had been extraordinarily quiet. He suffered from terrible migraines and had had one now for several days. He was really looking forward to his month off and was glad one of the other vets was going on holiday, too. Hopefully, he added, there would be enough for me to do. I signed my job contract during my second week, including a detailed non-competition clause, and was thrown in feet first with a massive red truck, a vet box, and a map.

  There was no problem in any of this. I was completely in my element. The three of us remaining at the practice easily dealt with the daily roster of calls. Sometimes I would head downtown, seeing horses in the exclusive enclave of Southlands, a riding and golf club in the heart of Vancouver. Here, owners had small barns in their yards, and common bridle paths led to central rings and show grounds. There was a track and a shared arena as well, and all of it was run by a manager hired by Southlands’ board of directors. Other days, I would go across the Fraser River on a ferry and do calls in Maple Ridge and Mission. Those days were fun, although the ferry lineups were long. I had to find small farms hidden in the foothills and valleys of Golden Ears Park. The folks north of the river were a different group. Cowboys, back-t
o-the-landers, or people who wanted a few llama or ostrich seemed to gravitate there. East of Langley we would start to move into larger, open farmland, and once again the clients changed from uptown and upscale to dairy and crop farmers with kids in 4H and strong ties to the land.

  On one of my calls, I met Elizabeth, the lady who would lead me to a house to rent. She was a volunteer worker for the local therapeutic riding group. I overheard her telling a friend about the new house she and her husband were building and their concern about finding the right tenant for their smaller, older house. I didn’t hesitate to ask her about it. Was it in the country? On finding out it was on acreage with a small barn, I could hardly contain myself. Trying not to seem over-anxious or pushy, despite the fact I was dying of excitement, I arranged for Elizabeth and me to go for a look at it on the weekend.

  I had butterflies as we drove up. The little farmhouse was set on eighty acres with a barn and open fields in the front and woods with trails and a ravine at the back. It looked north directly at the magnificent twin peaks of the Golden Ears Mountains. It was an unbelievable find in an area where land was at such a premium. I almost felt like a kid again, waiting for them to make their decision, and the answer later that day was affirmative. They were relieved, too, at not having had to advertise or interview hordes of people. I knew we had been incredibly lucky, as no one has room to spread out in Langley. Now the furniture and horses could come out. When Dr. Moore got back from holidays, I was really pleased to tell him that not only had calls been going well but I had found a very special and suitable place to live.

  All fall felt like back-to-school time for me. Dr. Moore was quick to inform me that a whole new set of dentistry skills would have to be learned. Horse dentistry was evolving, and fast, and the old-fashioned way I had been filing horses’ teeth in Nova Scotia was now completely outdated. Dental courses were being given to equine veterinarians in an attempt to bring them to a new level of proficiency so that they could compete with equine dentists, lay people who did nothing but work on horses’ teeth. There were new terms to learn: wave mouth, sheared mouth, incisor reduction, and bite alignment, and many more. I studied eruption times, relearned dental anatomy and extraction techniques, and how to cut molars without breaking them. The biggest change of all for me was that they had moved into the era of power dental equipment. Often, I had to use a motorized dremel on a long, flexible shaft with a hand lamp and goggles. I ground off the large hooks that were preventing chewing, enamel flying everywhere. It was a whole new world to me, but the other veterinarians in the area were well versed in the modern equipment and techniques. I had catching up to do.

  Dr. Moore was often testy with us, and I thought it was either because of his migraines or the extreme amount of responsibility he had. He had, after all, trained a lot of new vets in a short time and many of these had been new grads; it was a job that took patience. Sometimes I felt the reactions I got weren’t fully justified, but I was certain I could adjust to his brusque personality type, one I wasn’t used to. After all, I was learning so much. I tried to silence my doubts and worries about returning to a nurse role or the disconcerting pattern I was seeing emerge in our relationship. It was early days.

  One day, I was putting in a catheter for a surgery in the afternoon. Dr. Moore passed the stall front and, looking at the catheter in place, made a comment that I found strange, if not unbelievable.

  “Good girl,” he said, and moved on.

  I felt a shiver of disappointment and resentment. Was Dr. Moore seeing me as an equal? Someone who had had their own clinic and knew the score? If so, why had he addressed me as a student? I was very concerned about falling back into such a subordinate role, more because I was aware of the toll it could take on me than as a matter of principle. Yet I knew I had to pay my dues again, having made the decision to jump up a level once more. I tried to put the worry out of my mind, hoping that in a short time I would be familiar with everything and up to speed. Or that perhaps in time, Dr. Moore would learn to trust me. Maybe it had been my imagination. I was being overly sensitive. I had put both Elizabeth and myself through a lot to be here.

  We had a severe colic come in one evening and had to call in the whole team of veterinarians for emergency surgery. The ten-year-old grey thoroughbred stallion was in uncontrollable pain and had to be operated on immediately. He was a breeding stallion of considerable value and was insured. We had him on iv fluids, then down under anaesthetic and on the table within an hour. When the animal was opened, loops of gas-filled bowel exploded out of the incision. Dr. Moore used a side-table technique for a lot of colics. A stainless steel tray was attached to the surgery table, and the part of the bowel that was to be worked on could be placed on it for decompression of gas, disimpaction, or resection. There, the surgeon could lavage the bowel with warm saline without contaminating the abdomen, before replacing the abdominal contents. In this case, the stallion had a loop of small intestine twisted 180º and caught through a rip in the mesentery, a fanlike sheet of tissue like a curtain supporting the whole intestine. The entire loop was purple and dying. It would have to be resected (cut out) and the healthy bowel rejoined — an arduous procedure.

  I assisted the anaesthetist and monitored the horse. There were some very frightening moments, as his blood pressure crashed numerous times, and his colour remained an unhealthy grey-blue throughout. Bill and his assistant struggled through an intense three-hour surgery. We finally hoisted the animal back to the padded recovery stall around eleven, all of us exhausted.

  I was on the phone, calling home, when we heard it. A snap like a whip cracking, or a gunshot, reverberated through the clinic. It took me a minute to understand. Two people ran by me. Bill had immediately recognized the sound of the leg breaking. The anaesthetist ran for the euthanasia solution while two vets held the poor animal’s head. It had broken its tibia getting up, slipping on the rubber mats of the recovery stall. It would now have to be euthanized. It was a sound I would never forget. No one spoke and no one cried as we spent another hour cleaning up.

  Around Thanksgiving, Paul’s son Michael from Nova Scotia drove all our household belongings out in a huge rental truck. It was a job for him, as he was moving out West, and would work out well for us, too. It was so good to see him … a touch of home and friendship … and we had a couple of fun-filled days with good food and guitar music before he moved on. He was so grown up from the days we had ridden together over the dyke lands of Grand Pré! We started into the task of unpacking boxes and hanging pictures. It was nothing less than wonderful to see our possessions after almost four months. Now we just needed to get a ride for two horses before winter, and life would become normal. We were determined to get them out of Ontario before the snow fell.

  I really understood this wasn’t a traveller’s lark. I was getting too old for that. It had been a big commitment and a serious move. I also really “got” the fact that Nova Scotia was over. It had been such a whirlwind since I flew out here months before for an interview that I hadn’t really let myself feel saddened. Now it all hit me. I had not let myself fully feel the range of emotions associated with leaving my little horse hospital behind. As we settled into a routine, we often fought homesickness. It was surprisingly hard to make friends in the Promised Land.

  We decided Elizabeth should drive east to get our horses. It was horrendously expensive to use a commercial shipper. Perhaps this notion will always be placed in the category of, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” We purchased a unique-looking, workhorse of a standard Dodge dual-wheel truck that had obviously served someone else well. It was set up for hauling, and shortly after buying it, we rented a four-horse trailer for a month. Soon the plan was in place. Elizabeth was brave and a good long-distance driver, but there was no way she could do the long trip alone. Sherry, a delightful lady I worked with at the clinic, was game to go. She had never been across Canada. After a one-night meeting, she agreed to
go along for the ride to see the country and help Elizabeth get the horses back. It was to be a three-week trip with long days and the threat of snow on the return stint. I hoped they would get along.

  Elizabeth set out before dawn on a frosty morning and drove into the sunrise. Sleeping in the trailer the first night in Banff, they endured their first bit of minor stress after being kept awake all night by trains and traffic. By the third day, Elizabeth found that Sherry wasn’t experienced enough to drive the rig, so she sat and chain-smoked in frustration the rest of the journey. By the first week, they had run out of things to say. A blizzard in the mountains on the return trip almost did them in, with slippery slopes and closed passes and two horses on. Sherry was threatening to jump ship and catch a bus. But made it they did — all in one piece.

  Having the horses in British Columbia was a big boost. Riding out through the back of the property was a perfect release. There were trails to follow, very lush with ferns and Spanish moss. There was a deep ravine as well, home to the coyotes we heard at night in the fields behind the house. I often sighted coyotes while riding. Like the ravine in Toronto, one could get lost here, surrounded by green trees and vines, immersed in earthy smells, bushwhacking on the edge of one of Canada’s largest cities. In one more way, history was repeating itself. It would turn out to be in more ways than one.

  It didn’t take long for the coyotes to notice Punch, and vice-versa. The small white dog must have looked like a tempting meal, and they ventured closer and closer to the house in the evenings, sometimes in a pack. One night, I was saddling up my young mare and I noticed Punch trotting purposefully out through the back field straight towards the ravine. The next thing I noticed was a small pack of coyotes on the edge of the woods. They were definitely going to meet Punch, and the little terrier was in danger. I hadn’t finished tacking up and jumped on my young inexperienced horse with the saddle barely done up. With the halter and shank, I headed her out to the back at a canter, yelling at the coyotes.