Village Horse Doctor

by Ben K. Green

  I pulled yellowweed every day up and down the bar ditches and in various pastures where it was lush and tender and I fed these sheep an exclusive diet of fresh yellowweed.

  My practice had become real good and when I was too busy to pull yellowweed, Dow Puckett, Harrison Dyke, or somebody else would and feed these experimental sheep. Everyone was interested in what I was doing and it was the subject of conversation whenever I stopped for even a minute around the drugstore or filling station.

  None of the first several medications that I administered to these sheep, whether by injection or dry powder mixed in feed or liquid medicine given by mouth, seemed to be of any particular value, and each bunch of experimental sheep would show yellowweed sickness from the fifth to the seventh day of the test. Without exception, by the eleventh day in a number of tests the first sheep would die.

  Many times when I would be discussing yellowweed there would be talk about whether certain parts of the plant might be more poisonous than others. In one flock of experimental sheep I noticed that a big ewe lamb was especially fond of the blooms and would eat all of them off the fresh weed before she ate any of the stalk or leaves. An old Navajo sheep that I had fed several different ways preferred the dry stalk of last year’s growth. Another ewe lamb would nibble the fresh leaves off the stalk and refuse to eat the tougher parts of the plant. I fed these three sheep separate a full diet of their choice part of the weed, and they all developed sickness within a few hours of each other. During this same period of time, I had fed the fresh pulled roots to rabbits and they developed the sickness at the same time that other rabbits got sick on the whole weed, so there was no part of the weed that did not contain the toxic substance and in equal proportions to the rest of the weed.

  With one exception, by the twenty-first day, they were all dead. However, regardless of their state of sickness, they never ceased to eat fresh pulled yellowweed and would do so eagerly. In several instances they would prefer fresh yellowweed to alfalfa hay when both were put in the feeder at the same time.

  The first of the formulas that I used were products of modern medicine and in many instances were hypodermic injections known to have desirable effects in the treatment of some other toxic conditions. All of these were completely worthless and caused me to turn my attention to some of the very old drugs of botanical origin that I had either used or knew to have been used for large livestock that were sick in other desert regions of the world.

  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.”

  BANDITOS

  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.

  I was in earshot of all this and had seen the little episode, which was very amusing to me. In a few minutes Roger eased up to me and in an unconcerning tone of voice said, “Doc, who was that lady that I was just talking to?”

  I said, “Roger, any bootlegger ought to be better acquainted with his customers than that. Who you gonna charge it to?”

  Dr. Hoffman was a sincerely religious man and I knew that he had rather not be bothered on Sunday unless it was an emergency, so I waited until Monday morning to go back to Marfa. By this time I had compounded a sufficient quantity of drugs to treat a small flock of sheep. The doctor was busy and didn’t go back to the ranch and more or less turned the case and client over to me.

  This was the beginning of the successful treatment of sheep poisoned by garvencia. As a professional courtesy, I gave Dr. Hoffman the prescription for his future use. However, he said it would be a breach of professional ethics for him to compound it, and thereafter he purchased the prescription from me that he used in his practice.

  About an hour before daylight, I pulled away from my office to answer a call about some sick sheep I got during the night from Old Mexico. The first twenty-five or thirty miles west of Fort Stockton is rolling country covered with greasewood, black brush, mesquite, and now and then some flats full of burro grass and other grasses and weeds that make up the forage of that particular strip of country.

  I had been getting calls into Old Mexico, and as I started into the Davis Mountain region still on a good graded road, I couldn’t help but dread this call. Between the Davis Mountain Range and the Glass Mountains is high, open rolling prairie country. As I went through this high country and drove into Alpine and on to Marfa, I passed through the south edge of the Davis Mountains. When I turned south at Marfa to go to Presidio, I began to drop from the high country into the rimrock and canyons. The closer to the Rio Grande River I came, the less good forage and the more waste country there was, and from Shafter, an old mining town on Cibolo Creek, to Presidio would not be looked on by most livestock as a lush place to graze.

  It was a hundred-and-sixty-five-mile trip to the Rio Grande River; I crossed over the American side at Presidio into Ojinaga on the Mexican side, where I was supposed to meet a Mexican rancher who would show me the way—which turned out to be another ninety miles.

  I dreaded this trip for several reasons. The first, I suppose, was because I never got a call to Old Mexico where the time element wasn’t involved because of the long wait they made after they needed me and before they called me; then the long distance that I had to drive to get there that always put me in the state of driving under whip hoping that I would not be too late. Another reason was that Old Mexico was far out of my everyday territory and some of the diseases and poisonous-plant troubles were not know
n to me. Last but not least, when I made such a long call I dreaded the trip back and the calls that would have stacked up while I was gone.

  Anyhow, I crossed the river about nine o’clock, not having too much difficulty with the customs officers on either side of the river since they were used to me comin’ and goin’. The Mexican ranchero met me at the Bocca Bar. He was a man in his early sixties, very small and slight of build, wearing boots with three-inch heels and a high crown sombrero with an eight-inch brim that made him look nearly as tall as me. A quick glance at his tailored jacket and saddle-cut britches and store-bought shirt told me that he was a stockman and landholder.

  As we were about to leave the bar, one of the officers from the Mexican Border Patrol met us at the door with a round-faced, bright-eyed, barefooted Mexican boy about seven or eight years old following him. After a few phrases in Spanish with the old ranchero, he turned to me and in very eloquent English asked if his cousin could ride with us to his casa, which was on our way, about twenty-five miles from the border.

  This was fine and the little boy got in the back seat and we heard nothing from him until we came near a little road that turned down the canyon; then he punched the old ranchero and told him in Spanish that this was the place where he wanted off. As he got out of the car, a very ancient truck with solid rubber tires and Presto lights came struggling up the road. He smiled and said that was his papa and ran towards the truck.

  On the way to the sheep ranch, the old ranchero described the malo (sickness) condition of the borregas (sheep). It was late summer and this part of Mexico was having a severe drouth. Even though these bands of sheep were being herded on open range, good vegetation was sparse, and I had a pretty good idea that the sheep had been grazing on a combination of poisonous weeds and vines.