All Things Bright and Beautiful (22 page)

“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 râle, 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. 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 it much longer.”

I looked from his worried face to the little animal trembling in the pen. “You’re right. Well 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 days 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 cc’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 everything; 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 unsure of 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 bump 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.”

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.”