All Things Bright and Beautiful (4 page)

Bob was standing just inside the gate. He hardly looked at me. Just gestured with his head.

“Tell me what you think. I daren’t go in there.”

I left him and began to walk among the stricken creatures, rolling them over, lifting their legs, parting the fleece of their necks to examine them. Some were completely unconscious, others comatose; none of them could stand up. But as I worked my way up the field I felt a growing bewilderment. Finally I called back to the farmer.

“Rob, come over here. There’s something very strange.”

“Look,” I said as the farmer approached hesitantly. “There’s not a drop of blood nor a wound anywhere and yet all the sheep are flat out. I can’t understand it.”

Bob bent over and gently raised a lolling head. “Aye, you’re right. What the hell’s done it, then?”

At that moment I couldn’t answer him, but a little bell was tinkling far away in the back of my mind. There was something familiar about that ewe the farmer had just handled. She was one of the few able to support herself on her chest and she was lying there, blank-eyed, oblivious of everything; but…that drunken nodding of the head, that watery nasal discharge…I had seen it before. I knelt down and as I put my face close to hers I heard a faint bubbling—almost a rattling—in her breathing. I knew then.

“It’s calcium deficiency,” I cried and began to gallop down the slope towards the car.

Rob trotted alongside me. “But what the ’ell? They get that after lambin’, don’t they?”

“Yes, usually,” I puffed. “But sudden exertion and stress can bring it on.”

“Well ah never knew that,” panted Rob. “How does it happen?”

I saved my breath. I wasn’t going to start an exposition on the effects of sudden derangement of the parathyroid. I was more concerned with wondering if I had enough calcium in the boot for fifty ewes. It was reassuring to see the long row of round tin caps peeping from their cardboard box; I must have filled up recently.

I injected the first ewe in the vein just to check my diagnosis—calcium works as quickly as that in sheep—and felt a quiet elation as the unconscious animal began to blink and tremble, then tried to struggle on to its chest.

“We’ll inject the others under the skin,” I said. “It’ll save time.”

I began to work my way up the field. Rob pulled forward the fore leg of each sheep so that I could insert the needle under the convenient patch of unwoolled skin just behind the elbow; and by the time I was half way up the slope the ones at the bottom were walking about and getting their heads into the food troughs and hay racks.

It was one of the most satisfying experiences of my working life. Not clever, but a magical transfiguration; from despair to hope, from death to life within minutes.

I was throwing the empty bottles into the boot when Rob spoke. He was looking wonderingly up at the last of the ewes getting to its feet at the far end of the field.

“Well Jim, I’ll tell you. I’ve never seen owt like that afore. But there’s one thing bothers me.” He turned to me and his weathered features screwed up in puzzlement. “Ah can understand how gettin’ chased by a dog could affect some of them ewes, but why should the whole bloody lot go down?”

“Rob,” I said. “I don’t know.”

And, thirty years later, I still wonder. I still don’t know why the whole bloody lot went down.

I thought Rob had enough to worry about at the time, so I didn’t point out to him that other complications could be expected after the Alsatian episode. I wasn’t surprised when I had a call to the Benson farm within days.

I met him again on the hillside with the same wind whipping over the straw bale pens. The lambs had been arriving in a torrent and the noise was louder than ever. He led me to my patient.

“There’s one with a bellyful of dead lambs, I reckon,” he said, pointing to a ewe with her head drooping, ribs heaving. She stood quite motionless and made no attempt to move away when I went up to her; this one was really sick and as the stink of decomposition came up to me I knew the farmer’s diagnosis was right.

“Well I suppose it had to happen to one at least after that chasing round,” I said. “Let’s see what we can do, anyway.”

This kind of lambing is without charm but it has to be done to save the ewe. The lambs were putrid and distended with gas and I used a sharp scalpel to skin the legs to the shoulders so that I could remove them and deliver the little bodies with the least discomfort to the mother. When I had finished, the ewe’s head was almost touching the ground, she was panting rapidly and grating her teeth. I had nothing to offer her—no wriggling new creature for her to lick and revive her interest in life. What she needed was an injection of penicillin, but this was 1939 and the antibiotics were still a little way round the corner.

“Well I wouldn’t give much for her,” Rob grunted. “Is there owt more you can do?”

“Oh, I’ll put some pessaries in her and give her an injection, but what she needs most is a lamb to look after. You know as well as I do that ewes in this condition usually give up if they’ve nothing to occupy them. You haven’t a spare lamb to put on her, have you?”

“Not right now, I haven’t. And it’s now she needs it. Tomorrow’ll be too late.”

Just at that moment a familiar figure wandered into view. It was Herbert, the unwanted lamb, easily recognisable as he prowled from sheep to sheep in search of nourishment.

“Hey, do you think she’d take that little chap?” I asked the farmer.

He looked doubtful. “Well I don’t know—he’s a bit old. Nearly a fortnight and they like ’em newly born.”

“But it’s worth a try isn’t it? Why not try the old trick on her?”

Rob grinned. “O.K., well do that. There’s nowt to lose. Anyway the little youth isn’t much bigger than a new-born ’un. He hasn’t grown as fast as his mates.” He took out his penknife and quickly skinned one of the dead lambs, then he tied the skin over Herbert’s back and round his jutting ribs.

“Poor little bugger, there’s nowt on ’im,” he muttered. “If this doesn’t work he’s going in with the pet lambs.”

When he had finished he set Herbert on the grass and the lamb, resolute little character that he was, bored straight in under the sick ewe and began to suck. It seemed he wasn’t having much success because he gave the udder a few peremptory thumps with his hard little head; then his tail began to wiggle.

“She’s lettin’ him have a drop, any road,” Bob laughed.

Herbert was a type you couldn’t ignore and the big sheep, sick as she was, just had to turn her head for a look at him. She sniffed along the tied-on skin in a non-committal way then after a few seconds she gave a few quick licks and the merest beginning of the familiar deep chuckle.

I began to gather up my gear. “I hope he makes it,” I said. “Those two need each other.” As I left the pen Herbert, in his new jacket, was still working away.

For the next week I hardly seemed to have my coat on. The flood of sheep work was at its peak and I spent hours of every day with my arms in and out of buckets of hot water in all corners of the district—in the pens, in dark nooks in farm buildings or very often in the open fields, because the farmers of those days didn’t find anything disturbing in the sight of a vet kneeling in his shirt sleeves for an hour in the rain.

I had one more visit to Rob Benson’s place. To a ewe with a prolapsed uterus after lambing—a job whose chief delight was comparing it with the sweat of replacing a uterus in a cow.

It was so beautifully easy. Rob rolled the animal on to her side then held her more or less upside down by tying a length of rope to her hind legs and passing it round his neck. In that position she couldn’t strain and I disinfected the organ and pushed it back with the minimum of effort, gently inserting an arm at the finish to work it properly into place.

Afterwards the ewe trotted away unperturbed with her family to join the rapidly growing flock whose din was all around us.

“Look!” Rob cried. “There’s that awd ewe with Herbert. Over there on t’right—in the middle of that bunch.” They all looked the same to me but to Rob, like all shepherds, they were as different as people and he picked out these two effortlessly.

They were near the top of the field and as I wanted to have a close look at them we manoevered them into a corner. The ewe, fiercely possessive, stamped her foot at us as we approached, and Herbert, who had discarded his woolly jacket, held close to the flank of his new mother. He was, I noticed, faintly obese in appearance.

“You couldn’t call him a runt now, Rob,” I said.

The farmer laughed. “Nay, t’awd lass has a bag like a cow and Herbert’s gettin’ the lot. By gaw, he’s in clover is that little youth and I reckon he saved the ewe’s life—she’d have pegged out all right, but she never looked back once he came along.”

I looked away, over the noisy pens, over the hundreds of sheep moving across the fields. I turned to the farmer. “I’m afraid you’ve seen a lot of me lately, Rob. I hope this is the last visit.”

“Aye well it could be. We’re getting well through now…but it’s a hell of a time, lambin’, isn’t it?”

“It is that. Well I must be off—I’ll leave you to it.” I turned and made my way down the hillside, my arms raw and chafing in my sleeves, my cheeks whipped by the eternal wind gusting over the grass. At the gate I stopped and gazed back at the wide landscape, ribbed and streaked by the last of the winter’s snow, and at the dark grey banks of cloud riding across on the wind followed by lakes of brightest blue; and in seconds the fields and walls and woods burst into vivid life and I had to close my eyes against the sun’s glare. As I stood there the distant uproar came faintly down to me, the tumultuous harmony from deepest bass to highest treble; demanding, anxious, angry, loving.

The sound of the sheep, the sound of spring.

A
S THE FAINT RUMBLING
growl rolled up from the rib cage into the ear pieces of my stethoscope the realisation burst upon me with uncomfortable clarity that this was probably the biggest dog I had ever seen. In my limited past experience some Irish Wolfhounds had undoubtedly been taller and a certain number of Bull Mastiffs had possibly been broader, but for sheer gross poundage this one had it. His name was Clancy.

It was a good name for an Irishman’s dog and Joe Mulligan was very Irish despite his many years in Yorkshire. Joe had brought him in to the afternoon surgery and as the huge hairy form ambled along, almost filling the passage, I was reminded of the times I had seen him out in the fields around Darrowby enduring the frisking attentions of smaller animals with massive benignity. He looked like a nice friendly dog.

But now there was this ominous sound echoing round the great thorax like a distant drum roll in a subterranean cavern, and as the chest piece of the stethoscope bumped along the ribs the sound swelled in volume and the lips fluttered over the enormous teeth as though a gentle breeze had stirred them. It was then that I became aware not only that Clancy was very big indeed but that my position, kneeling on the floor with my right ear a few inches from his mouth, was infinitely vulnerable.

I got to my feet and as I dropped the stethoscope into my pocket the dog gave me a cold look—a sideways glance without moving his head; and there was a chilling menace in his very immobility. I didn’t mind my patients snapping at me but this one, I felt sure, wouldn’t snap. If he started something it would be on a spectacular scale.

I stepped back a pace. “Now what did you say his symptoms were Mr. Mulligan?”

“Phwaat’s that?” Joe cupped his ear with his hand. I took a deep breath. “What’s the trouble with him?” I shouted.

The old man looked at me with total incomprehension from beneath the straightly adjusted cloth cap. He fingered the muffler knotted immediately over his larynx and the pipe which grew from the dead centre of his mouth puffed blue wisps of puzzlement.

Then, remembering something of Clancy’s past history, I moved close to Mr. Mulligan and bawled with all my power into his face. “Is he vomiting?”

The response was immediate. Joe smiled in great relief and removed his pipe. “Oh aye, he’s womitin’ sorr. He’s womitin’ bad.” Clearly he was on familiar ground.

Over the years Clancy’s treatment had all been at long range. Siegfried had told me on the first day I had arrived in Darrowby two years ago that there was nothing wrong with the dog which he had described as a cross between an Airedale and a donkey, but his penchant for eating every bit of rubbish in his path had the inevitable result. A large bottle of bismuth, mag carb mixture had been dispensed at regular intervals. He had also told me that Clancy, when bored, used occasionally to throw Joe to the ground and worry him like a rat just for a bit of light relief. But his master still adored him.

Prickings of conscience told me I should carry out a full examination. Take his temperature, for instance. All I had to do was to grab hold of that tail, lift it and push a thermometer into his rectum. The dog turned his head and met my eye with a blank stare; again I heard the low booming drum roll and the upper lip lifted a fraction to show a quick gleam of white.

“Yes, yes, right, Mr. Mulligan,” I said briskly. “I’ll get you a bottle of the usual.”

In the dispensary, under the rows of bottles with their Latin names and glass stoppers I shook up the mixture in a ten ounce bottle, corked it, stuck on a label and wrote the directions. Joe seemed well satisfied as he pocketed the familiar white medicine but as he turned to go my conscience smote me again. The dog did look perfectly fit but maybe he ought to be seen again.

“Bring him back again on Thursday afternoon at two o’clock,” I yelled into the old man’s ear. “And please come on time if you can. You were a bit late today.”

I watched Mr. Mulligan going down the street, preceded by his pipe from which regular puffs rose upwards as though from a departing railway engine. Behind him ambled Clancy, a picture of massive calm. With his all-over covering of tight brown curls he did indeed look like a gigantic Airedale.

Thursday afternoon, I ruminated. That was my half day and at two o’clock I’d probably be watching the afternoon cinema show in Brawton.