Sector C (4 page)

T
HE SUN WAS BARELY ABOVE THE HORIZON when Donna Bailey pulled her truck up to the back door of the McKenzie County Animal Clinic. Yawning, she pushed open the driver’s door, wondering vaguely when it had grown so heavy.

A black-and-white blur leaped over her lap and onto the gravel drive, nearly upsetting the half-finished cup of tea in her hand.
“Alfie!”
The
border
collie threw an apologetic look over its shoulder and waved its tail. With decidedly far less enthusiasm, Donna followed it out the door.

The six stalls at the back of the clinic were full, unusual even during calving and foaling season, but especially so during the warm summer months. A quick scan of the stalls assured her all the occupants were still alive. She moved on to the kennels, greeted by the usual cacophonous wall of barking as soon as she opened the door.

To her relief, her vet tech, Chad — a lanky, self-assured 20-something in jeans and a cowboy hat — was already at work doling out meds, checking vital signs and inspecting surgical sites. Even Amy, who volunteered at the clinic in the mornings before school, was already moving dogs and cats from kennel to kennel as she cleaned up behind them. Since neither of them accosted her as soon as she walked in, Donna was confident none of her patients were worse off than when she’d left them at 8:00 the night before. Grateful not to have to go into emergency mode this early in the morning, she continued on to the reception desk for a look at the appointment book. Mrs. Rourke had left a reminder note on the schedule penned in red:
School play Thursday morning. I’ll be in around 11:00.
Donna sighed.
Nothing like being tired
and
shorthanded.

Chad propped his elbows on the counter in front of her. “Looks like
it’s
mostly large animal work again today. What’s going on around here?”

“You’ve got me.” Donna pushed the appointment book back and stood up. “I’ve checked online, asked my colleagues, even talked to the vets at the university … they aren’t seeing the kinds of things we are. If our herds weren’t so isolated out here, I’d say there’s a new virus going around. But the last time any of the ranchers brought in a new animal, it was when Maylee Sherman bought that greenbroke Arabian colt for her grandson. And that was, what, two or three months ago?

“Nobody I’ve talked to knows of anything that would affect horses and cows and goats the same as what we’re seeing.
If it is the same.
Sheep pulling their hair out, horses that can’t remember where their barn is, cows stumbling into ponds and dying. I’ve tested for scrapie, BSE, encephalitis, brucellosis — hell, if there’s a test for it, I’ve run it. And if I even knew what to make of the couple of “inconclusives” we’ve gotten back, I might could see some sort of pattern and start putting it all together. Maybe when those last tests come back in a couple of weeks we’ll have something.”

“Mr. Larson said he has kin of some sort that’s a vet down in Texas — a cousin or nephew or something. He said he might try to see if he can get him up here if things get any worse.” Always one to know how to push her buttons, Chad watched Donna’s reaction from under the brim of his hat.

“Mr. Larson can just go stuff it for all I care.” Donna crossed her arms and set her chin. “Maybe one day he’ll join the twenty-first century where we have computers and phones and more female vets in this country than male ones. If his sister’s cousin’s son of a vet can figure this out better than I can —”

The sharp ring of the phone cut off Donna’s tirade.

Smirking, Chad untangled himself from the counter. “I’ll get it. You need to see about that pit bull of Grayson’s — he licked out a couple of his stitches last night.”

“Thanks.” Donna’s indignation drained away as she retreated to the kennels to tend to her patients.

/////

The pit bull was napping under the influence of a strong sedative on the treatment table in the kennel and Donna was tying the last suture back in place when Chad wandered into the room with a bag of dog food that he emptied into one of the plastic bins.

“That was Morris Hanes on the phone. He had a cow killed last night by what he thinks was a cougar. Found a couple of paw marks nearby.
Said they were as big as his hand.”

Donna whistled. Morris stood six-two easy. “That’s a big cat, if it’s true.” She didn’t doubt Morris’ story, but maybe the prints had been distorted by the wind or other cattle in the vicinity tromping through the area.

“Morris wants to pass the word on to the other ranchers. It’s another two months before hunting season starts. If they can’t kill the cat legally, they’ll either need to trap it or at least protect their stock.”

“OK, I’ll leave a note for Mrs. Rourke to start making some calls when she gets in. Can you get the truck loaded? I’ll be finished here in about 20 minutes and we can get on the road. I’d like to get back early today if we can.”

“Yeah.
You look beat. Get some rest, would ya?” Chad gave her a playful shove as he headed for the supply closet to refill the assortment of syringes, needles, agar plates and blood tubes with the array of red, purple and green stoppered tops they seemed to be going through at triple and more the normal rate over the past few weeks.

/////

It was after 5:00 when Donna and Chad pulled into their last appointment for the day. The Spalding Ranch boasted the largest dairy production in the western half of the state and was an anomaly at best.
Located just south of the Missouri River in a small glacial drift formed by the retreat of glaciers during the Pleistocene period, the 2,000-acre ranch sat in one of the true fertile valleys in the area.
While neighboring ranches around the buttes struggled to keep enough grass in the ground for their beef cattle, Spalding heifers enjoyed grazing in lush prairie pastures that had room left over for hay operations.

The ranch was fairly self-sufficient with experienced hands that could handle most anything cow or horse related. Vets were called out usually only for required inspections and the odd emergency. Since this wasn’t a routine appointment and the call hadn’t been flagged as an emergency, Donna wasn’t sure what to expect. The mystery only deepened when Mr. Ross Spalding and not one of the hands emerged from the long metal dairy barn to greet her before she’d even had the chance to slide out from behind the wheel.

Having taken his daddy’s mid-class beef ranch and turned it into a more-lucrative first-class dairy enterprise over the course of a decade, Mr. Spalding had proven himself as tough a businessman as a cattleman. Yet there was nothing of the businessman about him today. Dressed in well-worn work boots and jeans, with only the real silver of his belt buckle and the pricey felt of his hat distinguishing him from any of the ranch hands, Mr. Spalding had a look of concern about him immediately identifiable as trouble not with
the business
but with
his cows
. There was nothing contradictory about that — for a rancher, there was a marked difference between the two.

It was Mr. Spalding himself who opened Donna’s door and offered her a hand. In these remote lands, Donna had discovered one immutable fact: cowboys of any position always showed good manners.

Alfie, on the other hand, was no cowboy. The
border
collie, in her customary seat between Donna and Chad, bounded over Donna and through the open door, knocking Mr. Spalding’s proffered hand aside. With an apologetic smile, Donna stepped out of the cab without assistance and Chad slid out of his seat to join them.

“Dr. Bailey, I appreciate you coming out, especially this late in the day.” The polite words couldn’t hide the undercurrent of anxiety in his voice. Nor, at close distance, the deep lines of worry in the aging face. Running a ranch in modern times was no less grueling than it had been a hundred years ago. Even with automated conveniences and business software, the unpredictability of weather, disease and transportation costs clashed against the driving need for decent profit margins. And ethical cattlemen faced yet another parameter outside the normal business model: they truly cared about the welfare of the animals in their charge.

“Don’t worry about the time. I’m just surprised to be out here at all. Your foreman is usually pretty competent when it comes to taking care of your cows.” She nodded in the direction of the long-faced man standing in the shade of the barn’s open doorway.

“No one knows cows better than Dan,” Mr. Spalding agreed. “But we’ve got one breeder not acting right. Normally, we’d just isolate her in one of the corrals. Easy enough, this being summer. But she threw a late calf about a month ago and it’s acting just like her.” He nodded toward the barn and they walked that way while Alfie ducked under the barbed wire fence around the pasture and headed off to explore. Another dog Donna might have worried about, but Alfie knew enough not to bother overly protective cows with calves at their sides. “We thought it was the heat at first, or maybe that we haven’t had rain in awhile and they’re being poisoned, but they haven’t improved.”

They reached the barn door and the foreman ushered them in. The spacious barn smelled of grass mixed with the faint scent of manure. Carried in by the wind from the pasture beyond, no doubt, Donna thought, because this barn, though large, was mostly unoccupied right now. Later in the year, when the bitter winds and wet snows came, cows would be crowding together, generating heat by the closeness of their bodies and munching contentedly at hay growing now in the distant cutting fields. Donna liked the breeder barns better than the modern milk barns with their gleaming floors, sterile milking machines and stainless troughs. Breeder barns felt like barns should — like animals, not science.

In the middle of a loose stall near the door stood the stricken cow and her calf.
The cow’s head was hanging so low her nose blew swirls of dust on the ground. She swallowed deep breaths of air, each lungful punctuated by a tremor that ran the length of her body. That she was in pain was obvious; why she should be was not. Beside her, the small female calf nosed ineffectually at her mother’s udder. It wasn’t that the calf’s nose wasn’t connecting with the teats, but that when it did, the calf didn’t seem to know what to do next. It just kept compulsively nosing the full bag, trembling head to hoof all the while.

“I’ll milk the mama,” Dan, the foreman said, “just as soon as you finish up. Take the pressure off her.
Thought you might need a sample first.”

“She’s milking okay, then? Not stopped up in any of her quarters?”

“Nope.
Milked her dry last night and this morning.
I don’t think the calf’s had a drink since yesterday. I’ll bottle feed it later with milk replacer.
Should have had it on replacer before now, but these late ones just throw the schedule all to heck.”

Donna studied the black-and-white cow and her calf, knowing where her diagnosis was leading but not liking it at all. Neurologic diseases were among the hardest to pinpoint and the hardest to treat. “We’ll certainly test the feed and the grass for nitrate poisoning. Like you said, Mr. Spalding, sometimes weeds and grasses will concentrate nitrate during droughts. That painful, labored breathing and the muscle tremors are certainly classic symptoms. But three things: it’s early in the year yet to be seeing nitrate buildup, we haven’t been that long without rain, and most animals die within a day if they’re acting this bad.

“If you’ll show Chad any grains and hays the cow might have eaten, Chad can do a quick
diphenylamine
test right now. Did she only have access to this pasture?” Dan nodded. “Then Chad can test some of the grass and weeds out there, too. If we get anything even suspicious-looking, I’ll inject both cows with methylene blue. It should help if it is nitrate poisoning and it shouldn’t hurt them if it isn’t. If we get a positive result here in the field, though, we’ll need to send some samples to the lab to validate our tests. That way we’ll know for sure if the rest of the herd is at risk.

“I also want to draw some blood. Nitrate poisoning affects the hemoglobin, which is what gives blood its red color. If their blood has more of a muddy brown look, then that could clue us in, too. If not, we’ll want to run a diagnostic panel to try to figure it out.”

Donna pulled a needle and set of blood collection tubes out of her smock pocket. The cow didn’t even seem to notice her as she stepped up to it and slid the needle into its neck. She passed the tubes to Chad as they filled. He held one up to the fluorescent light and they stood under it while he slowly rocked the contents back and forth, allowing them to note its color and thickness.

“Bright red and looks a little thin, anemic.” There was disappointment in Donna’s voice. “Not what I hoped to see.”