Village Horse Doctor

by Ben K. Green

  For several years I gathered horse-color specimens and isolated the pigments in my laboratory and made very extensive explanatory notes about each color and filed this information. There are reasons now that I am glad I did this work, even though it was time-consuming and to a degree expensive because there never again will be the assortment of colors or the opportunity to gather the hides of horses for a research project on this subject, and I have in my files the extracted knowledge from the hair, hide, mane, and tail of over one hundred head of horses.

  I had gone over close to El Dorado late one afternoon to get the hide of a rare-colored horse that a cowboy had called me about. They had roped this horse in a corral and when he reared and fell to the ground, he fell with his head under his neck and his body lunged forward and broke his neck. It was late when I drove away from the ranch so I spent the night in El Dorado.

  I woke up a little before daylight, which was my habit, so I could get back to my practice in the early hours of the morning. I thought I would eat breakfast before I left town so I drove over to Royster’s Café. Old Royster ran a good country café, and of course in the ranch country the name Royster had been revised, and he was commonly referred to as Raw Oyster.

  Raw Oyster was a good kind of a fellow past middle age whose voice was very broken and rattly and sounded older than he really was. I sat down at the counter and there was only one other customer there at this early hour. Raw Oyster and I had our morning greeting and he told me what little news there was about friends of mine and his that had happened since I was there last. Then in his cracky voice he asked, “What’s you gonna eat, Doc?”

  “Ham and eggs. I don’t guess you’ve got anything else.”

  As he wiped his hands on his apron he said, “I’ve got a few other things like that feller’s eatin’ over there.”

  I glanced at the other customer’s plate and he had it about cleaned up, so I couldn’t tell what else Raw Oyster was serving that morning for breakfast. About that time this fellow got up and left. Raw Oyster turned to his grill and put my breakfast on to cook and started tellin’ me about his first customer.

  “That feller came in here as soon as I turned on the lights. I set him out a glass of water and as I poured ’im a cup of coffee, I asked ’im, ‘What’s it for ya?’

  “He said, ‘I don’t know. What you got?’

  “Now, Doc, you know that a country café ain’t got nothin’ but bacon and eggs and ham and eggs and sausage and eggs and cereals and hot cakes for breakfast, so I set in and named all that stuff and it never looked like that I caused him to have no pangs of hunger, so then I said, ‘Hot cakes stripped with bacon.’

  “His eyes never changed so then I said, ‘Hot cakes stripped with ham,’ and that never seemed to arouse his taste buds none, and I just thought how ridiculous it would be and I said, ‘Hot cakes stripped with chili,’ and I’ll be damned if he didn’t order it and I had to heat up the chili. You heerd me when he offered to pay me and I told him that I’d been tryin’ to sell that order for thirty years and he was the first damn fool that ever had nerve enough to try to eat it and he never owed me nothin’.”

  DROUTH

  It hadn’t rained in almost a year and a few of the less hardy, who were mostly newcomers, had begun to talk about drouth. It was the custom of the natives to ignore dry weather as long as they possibly could. The old-timers hesitated to start using the word “drouth.” They seemed to have some superstitious feelings about admitting that a drouth was in progress, because they seemed to think that when they admitted it, it might make it get worse.

  My practice had fallen off a whole lot during this time for many reasons. The first one was that the ranch country still had some old dead grass and other favorable forage that stock were living on and there hadn’t been enough rain to cause the poisonous weeds to be in abundance. However, there had begun to be some cases of sheep and cattle eating desert plants that were never intended for animal consumption.

  When a flock of ewes are all bred, it is the custom among sheep ranchers to keep the bucks in a pasture to themselves most of the year. The reason for this is so that all the lambs will be the same size and age when they are weighed and shipped in the fall.

  Ranchers had begun to ask me in casual conversation about their bucks getting poor. Eventually they would begin to die without any apparent disease, even though they were being fed at least enough feed to live on. However, the condition had developed so slowly that I had not had any calls to treat bucks that were so affected.

  Dow Puckett came in one day and said he believed that all his bucks in the Red House trap were affected by something. Every few days he would find one dead, and he wished I would go out and see what could be done.

  The Red House trap was at the edge of town just beyond the stock pens. It was a small pasture of one or two sections, and it was no trouble to drive along the pasture roads until I found the bucks. Then I got out and watched them graze. There was little or no grass or weeds on the ground and the common expression was that everything was grazin’ with its “head up,” which meant that the only feed stuff left was the leaves of low-growing brush. I walked through these bucks and followed them and watched them go from bush to bush and they were gathering little gummy balls of seed from black brush. This was about the only thing they were eating except for the feed they were being given in troughs near the windmill.

  I stripped off some of these pods of gummy seed by hand, and, in fact, ate a little of the stuff to see if I could tell why a sheep liked it. By now I had eaten so many desert plants that appealed to sheep that I nearly knew a buck sheep’s taste. This stuff had a sweet astringent taste and I really didn’t see how it would be detrimental for a sheep to eat it.

  When I got through working this waxy seed in my laboratory, I had extracted a substance that was coating the inside of the intestinal tract and shrinking the mucous membranes that absorb the digested nutriments of the sheep’s diet. Actually what the sheep were gathering to eat from the black brush was starving them to death.

  This was valuable information that I spread among the ranchers without charge so that they would take their bucks off of black brush pastures. I didn’t mind passing out the advice because I had no medical treatment for the condition.

  Bill McKenzie came by the office early in the morning and said his only milk cow at his ranch near Bakersfield had been sick for several days and had fallen off in her milk production, and they had quit saving the milk until they found what was the matter with her. He wanted me to come on out that day to see the cow, and I told him I had a call at McCamey and I would drop back by his place at Bakersfield a little after noon.

  When I drove up to the ranch, Bill had a good Jersey cow in the corral that had a blistered nose from fever. Cows have no sweat glands in the skin covering their body and the only place that a cow does sweat is on the bare skin on her nose and mouth. When one is blistered, it is a symptom that she has had high fever.

  I examined this cow thoroughly and listened to a high ratio in her heartbeat. I told Bill that she had some kind of serious internal trouble that I could not positively diagnose and I would treat her for fever; however I was unable to find the real cause of trouble. We discussed the possibility of some foreign object in her stomach, which would be impossible to operate for successfully. Bill wasn’t dissatisfied with my diagnosis and understood that it was a case that we just didn’t know about and promised to let me know when the cow died. I told him I would come out and cut her open without charge in order to satisfy myself about her trouble for my future use.

  In a few days, Bill called me late one afternoon and told me the cow had died an hour or so before. I hurried out to the ranch which was thirty-five miles away, and before any decomposition or swelling set in, we did a thorough post-mortem on the cow. I found a crooked piece of baling wire jabbed through the intestinal tract and penetrating into one lobe of her lung, and from the presence of pus and blood, it could have been there for sev
eral weeks; this was the cause of death.

  As I cut into the different parts of the paunch, we began to remove various objects commonly referred to in practice as “hardware.” The term “hardware” is applied to cases where, for the lack of minerals and from pure hunger and starvation, a cow will chew on any piece of old metal that she can get in her mouth. There were nine empty rifle cartridge shells, a pocketknife with the blades broken out, half of a three-inch strap hinge, a piece of small chain nine inches long, and a metal tag off of a buggy dated 1891, Troy, Ohio.

  There were hundreds of such cases developing over the drouth area. As long as these various objects did not puncture some of the internal organs or did not build up to cause an obstruction, an animal might live out a normal lifetime unless he died from some other cause.

  A few days after this, Herman Chandler drove up in front of my office with a real good bay roping horse in his trailer. He told me he had come through Fort Stockton the day before and I was gone. He was so anxious to get something done for this horse that he had hauled him to Midland to a doctor and to Pecos and back by Monahans, and none of them had been able to diagnose the horse’s trouble.

  I said, “Herman, unload him to where I can see him on the ground.”

  While he was unloading the horse, he said he hadn’t eaten and had drunk very little for about five days, and he was givin’ me a speech about him being the best ropin’ horse he ever had and he sure hated to lose him. He was a good horse and was drawn as bad as a wolf that had been in a three-day chase in a snow storm.

  After looking at him carefully, I tried to open his mouth and he began to fight his head and run backward. I asked if anybody in examining the horse had ever looked in his mouth.

  He said, “Hell, no, and I hadn’t thought of that either.”

  We let him out in a vacant lot in front of my office and got some soft rope to use to pull his hind legs under him and and then tied all four legs together as gently as we could. We took the halter off and fitted a speculum in his mouth and buckled the straps to hold it in place up around the top of his head like the headstall of a bridle.

  A horse mouth speculum has ratchets on the side and as it is worked open, it holds the horse’s jaws apart to keep him from being able to bite when you go inside of his mouth. His mouth was dry with a thick heavy slime instead of saliva and his breath had an extremely bad odor as he struggled to get up or close his mouth.

  Chandler got down on the ground and cradled the horse’s head up in his lap and held his nose high for me to put my hand and arm down in his mouth and into his throat. I felt the stub end of something and when I touched it, the horse went into a struggle and moaned like he was in great pain. I came back out of his mouth and got a long pair of heavy-duty forceps and went back and got a hold of this strange object. It took all of Chandler’s strength to hold his head as I pulled. When I jerked it out as fast as possible, I had about a five-foot length of sotol blade with little sharp daggers that grew out on each side about a half inch apart and were turned pointed down, which caused them to be imbedded in the horse’s throat about the length of the entire blade.

  We got the riggin’ off his head and untied his feet and let him up. By this time we had a small gathering of ranch people that had noticed the commotion and had walked down to see what was going on. We led the horse back to the office, and I carried water out of the office in a two-gallon bucket until he had drunk about two tubs full. I told Chandler I was afraid to give the horse any more water now and told him to load the animal and take him home; no further treatment would be necessary.

  This horse was another case of trying to survive in a drouth by eating desert plants.

  I was sittin’ on my porch at Stud Flat (this was the name the natives had given my office when I moved out on Spring Drive on the edge of town) watchin’ the heat waves in the middle of the afternoon irradiate from the pebble-rock-covered desert when Abe Mitchell drove up, got out and came in. I said, “Abe, drag up a chair and be slow to bring up your troubles ’cause it’s awful damn hot, and I don’t much want to make a call until the cool of the evenin’.”

  We sat there awhile and wiped sweat, and I finally got up and went to the icebox and got us some cold drinks. Soon he began to unload a small amount of his troubles. He said he had a hundred and eighty white-faced cattle, that some of them were about to go blind and all of their eyes were runnin’ and looked irritated and sore.

  I said, “Abe, I imagine it’s the pinkeye.”

  “I know it is, but how are you goin’ to unpink a white-faced cow’s eyes and skin?”

  We talked on and discussed the various unsuccessful ways that had been tried since the dust had gotten so bad during the drouth. One of the drouth-type conditions that developed first in range cattle was what’s commonly referred to as pinkeye. This is a common name for keratitis. There are three types of pinkeye. One is caused by a lack of green feed that occurs in livestock that are kept in barns in northern climates. Another type is actually a bloodstream infection. But the one occurring in the Trans-Pecos Region in my practice was caused by dust, wind, and hot sunshine that irritated the eyes of all breeds of animals. However, pinkeye was not considered common to anything but sheep and cattle.

  I told Abe that being a smart doctor, I knew how to unpink the skin and eyes of a white-faced cow and, at the same time, treat the infection.

  He said, “I’ll have the cattle in the corral early in the morning and I’ve got a good chute and plenty of help, and if you would get up and tend to business as early in the morning as I’m goin’ to, we’ll get through treating the cattle before the heat of the day.”

  Later in the afternoon, I compounded five gallons of saline sulfa solution and added enough methylene blue medical dye to make a real dark-blue solution.

  I was at the corral early the next morning as Abe and his cowboys brought the cattle into the corral. The working chute was long enough to hold about twenty-five or thirty head at a time, and the chute had a head squeeze on the gate. We would let a cow stick her head up into the gate and drop a lever down that would catch her head so she couldn’t get out but would be able to turn it from one side to the other so that we could treat each eye.

  I had a six-ounce drench gun that I filled. As I squirted this solution into the cow’s eye with one hand, and as it gushed out, I would catch it with my other hand and smear it all over the white hair and the pink skin of the white-faced cow, which would dye the whole area a dark blue that would stay a week or ten days under range conditions and during that time deflect the sunrays that were causing the irritation of the eye socket itself.

  Some of these cows’ eyes were so bad that there was already a white scum growth over the eyeball and a few were blind in one eye and one or two were blind in both eyes and followed the rest of the herd around by sound and smell. There was one cow that you could tell was pretty old by the wrinkles on her horns and around her eyes and she had already lost one eye. I gave her a very thorough treatment and when we let her head loose and let her come out of the chute, she turned and refused to leave. When I slapped her on the shoulder and hollered at her, she turned her good eye back up to me for more treatment.

  This ten or fifteen days’ relief at the most for pinkeye at normal range conditions would have remedied the problem. However, in a drouth that hung on, this was only temporary relief and treatment had to be repeated regularly.

  After we turned the cattle out, we watched them stand around in the shade at the water trough, and Abe said, “To see them not rubbin’ their heads against one another and to notice the flies gone from around their faces is satisfaction enough for me for the trouble.”

  With all this evidence of drouth developing in my practice by the middle of 1947, it was hardly possible to continue to ignore dry weather. The small irrigation valley north of Fort Stockton that got its water from the historical Comanche Springs was such a small body of land that it did not begin to produce a fraction of the amount of feed necessa
ry for the great drouth-stricken ranching area. The few pump farms that were being irrigated by wells were of no particular importance in the supply of feed and the depth of water in these wells was dropping by the day.

  Dry feed that was being hauled and shipped in for hundreds of miles was a poor substitute for the lush growth of spring and summer weeds or cured mesquite and grama grass for fall and winter grazing. By now, nearly all the ranchers for about a year had been feeding hay as well as some stronger supplementary feed, and as these small ranchers used up their borrowing power, they began to go out of business. Some of the larger ranchers had begun to lease ranches in other parts of the country that were not affected by the drouth.

  It was during the following year that many West Texans transplanted themselves to the Arkansas-Missouri grass country to the east and north and the hardier and larger operators moved into Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Those that went to Colorado bettered themselves only for a short season or so because the drouth was spreading that direction.

  I still had a practice that afforded some relief from the drouth and I even began to hate cats and dogs and the people that owned them a little less. When Mrs. John Lancaster called me in the middle of a hot day in July to deliver some pigs, I almost welcomed the change.

  Mrs. Lancaster lived in the irrigated valley north of town. John was in the oil-field-supply business and was gone from home a lot of the time. They weren’t really stock people to begin with; however, they had bought this farm and were raising, among other things, some hogs. She had called to tell me that one of their big hogs was trying to have some little hogs, and she didn’t think that the old sow was going to be able to have them and could I come right out.