All Things Bright and Beautiful Read online

  “Yes…yes…I see…” My eyes were hunting desperately among the little animals trying to find some sort of clue. I had seen unthriftiness from parasitism but nothing like this.

  “Have you kept a lot of cattle in these fields over the last year or two?” I asked.

  She paused in thought for a moment. “No…no…I don’t think so. Billy used to let the milk cows graze up here now and then but that’s all.”

  The grass wouldn’t be likely to be “sick” with worms, then. In any case it didn’t look like that. What it did look like was Johne’s disease, but how in God’s name could thirty five young things like this get Johne’s at the same time? Salmonella…? Coccidiosis…? Some form of poisoning, perhaps…this was the time of year when cattle ate strange plants. I walked slowly round the field, but there was nothing unusual to be seen; it took even the grass all its time to grow on these wind-blown hillsides and there was no great range of other herbage. I could see bracken higher up the fell but none down here; Billy would have cleared it years ago.

  “Mrs. Dalby,” I said. “I think you’d better give these stirks another dose of the worm medicine just to be sure and in the meantime I’m going to take some samples of the manure for examination at the laboratory.”

  I brought up some sterile jars from the car and went painstakingly round the pasture scooping up as wide a range as possible from the pools of faeces.

  I took them to the lab myself and asked them to phone the results through. The call came within twenty four hours; negative for everything. I resisted the impulse to dash out to the farm immediately; there was nothing I could think of doing and it wouldn’t look so good for me to stand there gawping at the beasts and scratching my head. Better to wait till tomorrow to see if the second dose of worm medicine did any good. There was no reason why it should, because none of the samples showed a pathogenic worm burden.

  In these cases I always hope that inspiration will come to me as I am driving around or even when I am examining other animals but this time as I climbed from the car outside Prospect House I was barren of ideas.

  The young beasts were slightly worse. I had decided that if I still couldn’t think of anything I would give the worst ones vitamin injections more or less for the sake of doing something; so with Charlie holding the heads I inserted the hypodermic under the taunt skins of ten of the little creatures, trying at the same time to put away the feeling of utter futility. We didn’t have to drive them inside; they were easily caught in the open field and that was a bad sign in itself.

  “Well you’ll let me know, Mrs. Dalby,” I said hoarsely as I got back into the car. “If that injection improves them I’ll do the lot.” I gave what I hoped was a confident wave and drove off.

  I felt so bad that it had a numbing effect on me and over the next few days my mind seemed to shy away from the subject of the Dalby stirks as though by not thinking about them they would just go away. I was reminded that they were still very much there by a phone call from Mrs. Dalby.

  “I’m afraid my cattle aren’t doing any good, Mr. Herriot.” Her voice was strained.

  I grimaced into the receiver. “And the ones I injected…?”

  “Just the same as the others.”

  I had to face up to reality now and drove out to Prospect House immediately; but the feeling of cold emptiness, of having nothing to offer, made the journey a misery. I hadn’t the courage to go to the farm house and face Mrs. Dalby but hurried straight up through the fields to where the young beasts were gathered.

  And when I walked among them and studied them at close range the apprehension I had felt oh the journey was nothing to the sick horror which rushed through me now. Another catastrophe was imminent here. The big follow-up blow which was all that was needed to knock the Dalby family out once and for all was on its way. These animals were going to die. Not just half of them like last year but all of them, because there was hardly any variation in their symptoms; there didn’t seem to be a single one of them which was fighting off the disease.

  But what disease? God almighty, I was a veterinary surgeon! Maybe not steeped in experience but I wasn’t a new beginner any more. I should surely have some small inkling why a whole great batch of young beasts was sinking towards the knacker yard in front of my eyes.

  I could see Mrs. Dalby coming up the field with little William striding in his tough, arm-swinging way by her side and Charlie following behind.

  What the hell was I going to say to them? Shrug my shoulders with a light laugh and say I hadn’t a single clue in my head and that it would probably be best to phone Mallock now and ask them to shoot the lot of them straight away for dog meat? They wouldn’t have any cattle to bring on for next year but that wouldn’t matter because they would no longer be farming.

  Stumbling among the stricken creatures I gazed at them in turn, almost choking as I looked at the drooping, sunken-eyed heads, the gaunt little bodies, the eternal trickle of that deadly scour. There was a curious immobility about the group, probably because they were too weak to walk about; in fact as I watched, one of them took a few steps, swayed and almost fell.

  Charlie was pushing open the gate into the field just a hundred yards away. I turned and stared at the nearest animal, almost beseeching it to tell me what was wrong with it, where it felt the pain, how this thing had all started. But I got no response. The stirk, one of the smallest, only calf-size, with a very dark roan-coloured head showed not the slightest interest but gazed back at me incuriously through its spectacles. What was that…what was I thinking about…spectacles? Was my reason toppling…? But yes, by God, he did have spectacles…a ring of lighter hair surrounding each eye. And that other beast over there…he was the same. Oh glory be, now I knew! At last I knew!

  Mrs. Dalby, panting slightly, had reached me.

  “Good morning, Mr. Herriot,” she said, trying to smile. “What do you think, then?” She looked around the cattle with anxious eyes.

  “Ah, good morning to you, Mrs. Dalby,” I replied expansively, fighting down the impulse to leap in the air and laugh and shout and perhaps do a few cartwheels. “Yes, I’ve had a look at them and it is pretty clear now what the trouble is.”

  “Really? Then what…?”

  “It’s copper deficiency.” I said it casually as though I had been turning such a thing over in my mind right from the beginning. “You can tell by the loss of the pigment in the coat, especially around the eyes. In fact when you look at them you can see that a lot of them are a bit paler than normal.” I waved an airy hand in the general direction of the stirks.

  Charlie nodded. “Aye, by gaw, you’re right. Ah thowt they’d gone a funny colour.”

  “Can we cure it?” Mrs. Dalby asked the inevitable question.

  “Oh yes, I’m going straight back to the surgery now to make up a copper mixture and we’ll dose the lot. And you’ll have to repeat that every fortnight while they are out at grass. It’s a bit of a nuisance, I’m afraid, but there’s no other way. Can you do it?”

  “Oh aye, we’ll do it,” Charlie said.

  And “Oh aye, we’ll do it,” little William echoed, sticking out his chest and strutting around aggressively as though he wanted to start catching the beasts right away.

  The treatment had a spectacular effect. I didn’t have the modern long-lasting copper injections at my disposal but the solution of copper sulphate which I concocted under the surgery tap at Skeldale House worked like magic. Within a few weeks that batch of stirks was capering, lively and fully fleshed, over those hillside fields. Not a single death, no lingering unthriftiness. It was as though the whole thing had never happened, as though the hand of doom had never hovered over, not only over the cattle, but the little family of humans.

  It had been a close thing and, I realised, only a respite. That little woman had a long hard fight ahead of her still.

  I have always abhorred change of any kind but it pleases me to come forward twenty years and spectate at another morning in the kitch