Village Horse Doctor

by Ben K. Green

  Bert was a big, stout young man with exceptionally good hands and arms, and he could inject as many sheep or cattle in a day as anyone I ever had help me. We also got along well with one another and our away-from-home business was getting us both enough money to enable us to do as our ranching friends were: hanging on until it rained and the country would be restocked.

  I met Tobe Foster, who was a rancher, oil operator, and speculator in Lubbock, in the lobby of the St. Angelus Hotel in San Angelo. He was interested in having five thousand young ewes treated on his Block Ranch at Capitán, New Mexico, that fall to ensure a good lamb crop the following spring. Bert and I made definite plans to go up to Capitán, and Mr. Foster was to furnish all the labor to help us and have the sheep gathered and at the working pens on Monday of Thanksgiving week. This would be a big deal for Bert and me in the dead of winter when we had very little other business.

  It was a hard day’s drive from Fort Stockton to Capitán. Bert and I left about daylight Sunday morning, planning to get to Capitán on Sunday night, when we were to meet Tobe Foster. Monday passed and Tobe Foster didn’t show up, and we were unable to get him by phone in Lubbock.

  We finally drove out to the ranch and talked to the foreman. He hadn’t heard anything about the hormoning of the sheep, but he said that this sort of slipshod arrangement wasn’t too uncommon with Foster, and he didn’t doubt our story and would take his ranch hands and gather sheep all day Tuesday, and we could come back Wednesday morning and go to work.

  The weather was unsettled but not bad. Bert and I found time to pass pretty slow around Capitán, where there were only two or three general stores and Pearl’s Café. We drove over to Carrizozo without running into any excitement and came back to Capitán, where we were staying in a rooming-house type of hotel.

  The weather took a turn for the worse during the night and about eighteen inches of snow fell by morning, and the temperature dropped to 5 degrees above. When we started to the ranch, we followed a snow plow out of town to the turn-off, which was about ten miles from the ranch headquarters. We managed to make it through the snow over a ranch road to the headquarters, where we changed our instruments and vials of hormones over into a jeep. We went about another fifteen miles across the ranch to where the first fifteen hundred ewes were bunched.

  Several Indian sheepherders had built up a good fire behind the cedar breaks about a hundred yards from the corrals. Bert and I didn’t tarry around the fire too long because we didn’t want to get used to it if we were goin’ to have to work in the snow and cold all day.

  The Indians weren’t too anxious to leave the fire to work the sheep, and when they got out and into the snow, we had trouble getting the Indians or the sheep to move and work into the chute. I noticed several old sheep hides on the fence, so I gathered them up and rolled them up in a bundle with the wool side showing and tied a wire to the bundle and drug it around through the sheep and tried to get them to follow it into the chute. They didn’t shy or booger from the skins of their dead kinfolk, but they weren’t interested in letting a bundle of dead hides act as a lead ram.

  After this hide trick failed, Bert took a sheep by the head and drug it slowly through the snow and bleated like a sheep and got some of the others to start following. The dragging of the lead sheep and the tromping of the others that followed beat down the snow which had piled inside the chute fences so that the sheep couldn’t step over the fence as they would have been able to do on snow.

  This chute was a little too wide and we crowded in as many sheep as possible so they couldn’t turn around in the chute. When we had them all headed the same way, they were about four sheep wide across the chute. Bert and I started working at the back of the chute hormoning two sheep apiece, using one hand to part the wool on the thick part of the hindquarter and using a three-quarter-inch 18-gauge needle to make the 1-cc. hormone injection. As we finished those four sheep, we stepped in front of them and pushed them back and took the next four. The chute would hold about fifty head and we were tellin’ each other that we might get through before we froze to death.

  The first slowdown that we weren’t prepared for happened when the sesame oil got so thick from the cold that it couldn’t be forced through the needles. We had to build up a fire close to the chute and lay the bottles of Ewetone close enough to the fire to keep warm; we changed bottles often to keep the oil thin enough to work. Another advantage we discovered about changing bottles from around the fire was that a warm bottle would help warm our cold hands for a few minutes before the oil got too thick to flow. Before long, Bert was doing the injecting and I was standing between him and the fire, passing the bottles both directions.

  We went back to the fire where the Indian ranch hands were and tried to talk them into helping us, and their spokesman said, “Me can’t see no hurry. Sheep be here all winter.”

  This tapped off my high temper, and I gave him a fair cussin’ and asked him why he didn’t go back to the headquarters. He said, “Indian no walk in snow. Wait till jeep go back.”

  I could tell by the way he said it that he didn’t think it would be very long before we froze out on the job. That Indian didn’t know how much money Bert and I had tied up in hormones and in the trip.

  Bert and I went back to work and after a while Bert began to tell me that his feet were frozen. I asked him how he could tell, and he said that they felt like it. I said, “Hell, they aren’t frozen or you couldn’t feel ’em. I know ’cause I can’t feel mine.”

  This type of encouragin’ conversation went on between us all day and there were a few times when we picked up a cold metal syringe and it would be so cold that it would stick to our hands.

  We got through in the late afternoon and the Indians had gotten tired of waiting and had drifted away from the fire. We fired up the company jeep that had snow tires on it and started back to the headquarters. As we started off of a high ridge below a mountain road down into a deep gorge, I looked to one side and said, “Bert, where’s that steam comin’ from?”

  We were traveling real slow and he stopped the jeep and said, “What steam?” About two hundred feet up a narrow canyon there was some white steam.

  We got out of the jeep and walked over to the edge of this narrow gorge and there was what appeared to be about four hundred sheep that had found protection in the canyon, which was also dotted with scrub cedar. They were humped up and covered with snow and their breath and the heat of their bodies was making the steam that attracted my attention.

  I said, “Bert, we are already frozen to death and at the most we have only used eighteen hundred doses of that five thousand contract. This bunch of sheep are humped up in a protected spot. Why don’t we just ease among ’em and shoot ’em with some hormone.”

  “It’s all right with me, but I don’t think we can build a fire with the snow as deep as it is. How are we going to keep the hormone warm?”

  “Leave the jeep runnin’ and set the bottles around on the motor and radiator.”

  We pulled the jeep about as close as we thought was safe and started working these sheep. They weren’t too bad off, as far as weather was concerned, and they were too smart to be scared out of their protection, so we walked among them and crowded them up against the canyon wall and by the cedar trees and started injecting them with hormone and doing our best to walk through them and keep the treated ones behind us. We may have given a few an extra shot or two to be sure we got ’em all.

  About fifty feet from the end of the canyon, an Indian sheepherder dressed in plenty of warm clothes with a blanket over his head rolled out from under some cedar trees. He spoke plenty of English and was half-mad because we had loosened the sheep, so to speak, and pushed them back from the cedars where he had curled up. The cedar was knocking the snow off of him and the herd of sheep were thick enough around him that he had a warm spot to wait out the norther.

  He told us he had started to the corral with these sheep the day before and in the late afternoon had herd
ed them into that canyon for the night and the snow during the night made him stay in the canyon. I asked him if he had anything to eat and he explained that he had some tortillas and beans in a marrell. He had a cactus-fiber marrell slung over his shoulder under about half of his clothes that he showed me, and it looked like it was still about half full of grub, which would have been enough to have lasted an Indian sheepherder bedded up under a cedar thicket a week.

  By now it was almost dark and we got in the jeep—we let the herder come with us—and drove into the headquarters for the night. There were other hands working on the ranch and there was a big, old, fat, filthy, nearsighted Dutchman who was the ranch cook. As nasty as he looked and as greasy as his grub was, it was still pretty tasty after a day in the snow. Bert and I went to bed upstairs in a little room without any fire and not quite enough cover, but it was warmer than what we had had all day and we were so tired that we had to get warmer before we knew that we were cold and we made it pretty good till daylight.

  It snowed some more durin’ the night and the ranch foreman wasn’t too interested in our project and all the ranch hands had quit work because of the weather, so Bert and me were holed up on Thanksgiving Day with seven or eight Indian-Mexican half-breeds and a fat, nasty cook. We had the fattest turkey and the greasiest dressing and the sweetest raisin pie that anybody ever tried to eat—and the most uninteresting conversation.

  When we got through as much of this batch of stuff as we could stand, I told Bert that I believed that we could break through that bank of snow to civilization. He said, “I bet you can’t get off without me.”

  We started down the mountain about two in the afternoon. We slid and pushed and took our chances and got out to the public road, where there had been a snow plow about five o’clock, and made it to Capitán just at dark. We had already had a batch of Capitán, so we decided to drive on to Roswell and spend the night. It was about seventy miles to Roswell and the town was crowded, and it was late in the night when we found a good old stone-wall hotel with a single room and a double bed and plenty of cover.

  It had been a cold trip and when Bert started to pull his socks off that night, he found that they had frozen to his feet from pushing and working in the snow and then driving into town in a cold car. We missed Thanksgiving at home and had a pretty rough nonprofitable trip. We were glad that it was over and decided that we wouldn’t answer any farflung calls in the mountains until spring.

  I tried for several weeks to get Tobe Foster on the phone. I sent a bill to his office, and when the ewes were supposed to start lambing five months later, his accountant sent me a check for the trip.

  PLOWS AND PROPELLERS

  There’s a few gadgets on this earth that I’ve tried to stay clear of. Two in particular that infested and disturbed the peace and tranquility of the Far Southwest were plows and propellers.

  When I was a small boy playing on the floor, one of my bigger brothers dropped a geography book and I saw pictures in there where there hadn’t been any of the earth turned over and it was still in grass. I had spent the most part of my life hunting country like that and had nearly found it when pumpkin rollers came from various parts of the world to drill wells, cut down good mesquite trees, and plow up grass to raise something that the government already had too much of and the market was bad.

  The gadget that I had still less use for was the airplane. It has always been my heart-felt opinion that horseback in high country is high enough off the ground for me to be. Well, airplanes were gettin’ to be too common and many ranchers in this farflung country had bladed out and graded up air-strips for them and their neighbors to use and a lot of ranchers were keeping some kind of fly-ships of their own. Whenever I walked into a crowd where the conversation was plows and propellers, I knew I didn’t belong and stayed clear of that type of unpleasant conversation.

  Othro Adams had a plane and was considered to be an excellent pilot by those who may have known. He had offered me some very enticing propositions to fly over different flocks of sheep for some reason or another and I had always turned him down.

  One morning a big, fat, gray-headed, past-middle-age man walked into my office and introduced himself. We started what seemed to me would be a nice visit. However, he came to the point pretty fast. He ranched in northern Arizona and grazed mostly steers that he bought and sold every year. The more he talked about his ranch operation, the more I knew he had made or stole his money in some other industry, because his cow talk didn’t fit together too good.

  The reason he had come to see me was that for several weeks now they had been finding an occasional dead steer in the mountains on his range. He said he was glad he caught me when I wasn’t busy because he had landed at the Fort Stockton airfield and caught a car to town. His pilot was at the Officers’ Club at the airfield waiting for us and he would fly me up to the ranch. After I saw his cattle, if necessary, he would have me back home tonight.

  I tried not to show any pangs of shock, but I wasn’t fixin’ to fly to northern Arizona in that airship. I asked him how many steers he had and he didn’t exactly know but thought there were between twenty-seven hundred and three thousand head. This was sure proof that he wasn’t a cowman or he would’ve known within three head how many had died and how many were livin’.

  I told him I’d be glad to go look into his steer troubles but that I had resented the encroachment of the automobile earlier in life and still didn’t like ’em and liked airplanes even less, and it looked to me like he had enough cattle for some of ’em to still be alive after I drove up there in my car, which would take about two days.

  Well, he thought this was ridiculous and had an awful big laugh, then said, “Doc, surely you’re joking.” He went on to tell me how many millions of dollars’ worth of business he tended to on the West Coast as well as the ranch because he was able to fly and save time. He started to recite to me all the miracles of modern medicine that were being performed because of the use of airplanes and I would have to come to the licklog and progress with the times or I would lose my practice.

  I said, “You may know what you’re talkin’ about, but you’re overlookin’ my distaste for licklogs, and let me ask you how come you went to the trouble to come see me about your steers when there’re good doctors in Flagstaff and Phoenix and Page and in other parts of Arizona?”

  “Oh well, you know you got sort of a reputation for working on range conditions and I just thought I’d let ’ya take a look at my range and cattle.”

  “Well, I believe I’ll let you take your little airship and go back home without me.”

  He kind of blowed off a batch of steam and jumped up out of his chair and said if he had known I was an old fogey, he would have saved himself a trip.

  I walked up to the Stockton Pharmacy in a little while and George Baker, the newspaperman, Joe Henson, and three or four more had just heard this big ranch operator blow off a batch of his opinion about their village horse doctor. I’m sure none of them spoke up to defend me, but it had struck them funny that he thought that he had un-nerved me by his visit.

  Four or five days later I got a call about dark from the big operator and flyboy from Arizona. He said that they had rounded up the steers on a part of the ranch and the cowboys told him that some more had died.

  After he thought his and my visit over, he had decided that everybody had a right to their own way of travel and if I didn’t want to ride in his $115,000 airplane, that was my business, and he would be glad to pay for the trip and my services if I would come to the ranch and look at his cattle. I told him I would be there the next afternoon in time to do some good. It was about a thousand-mile trip and he bellered over the phone, “Hell, you just as well have flown.”

  I drove into Jacob’s Lake about two hours before sundown the next day and his ranch foreman met me and we headed still farther up into the mountains.

  They were loose herding and allowing a herd of about five hundred head of steers to graze along a draw.
Most of these cattle were in good flesh, but some of them were wobbly in their gait and the control and handling of their head and the rest of their body showed bad coordination. It was easy to tell that this was not loco, and since these cattle had not been fed any sort of commercial feed, it was un-likely that there was any fermentation condition existing that would have caused their sickness and death.

  I rode the range all the next day horseback and pulled up and gathered about twenty different plants that I was suspicious of being in some stage of poison. Any desert plants and plants in other regions of the world contain acids or other toxic substances only at certain growing seasons or at certain stages of development. Many times weeds and grasses that are for the most part nutritious and even fattening can be toxic for a matter of a few days or a few weeks during a year’s growth, and I was hoping that maybe this would be a case of that sort.

  It was late spring in northern Arizona and the snow had melted and gone into the ground and caused some fair grazing to be available in the high mountain region. However, the drouth was reaching that direction and there had been no spring rains.

  I never did quite figure out how many different rackets this old flyboy was making money out of on the West Coast, but he did have a palacious ranch headquarters. They were brushin’ and curryin’ and carryin’ on over me and about the third day I was about to get spoiled and had begun to get a little finicky about my eatin’ because there was so much good food and so many cooks fixin’ it that I thought I just as well graze on what was best and leave the other alone. However, the fill that I was takin’ wasn’t helping those sick cattle much and I hadn’t really come across anything that I had reason to believe was too poisonous.