All Creatures Great and Small Read online

  Mrs. Calvert sat down for a moment, crossed her hands on her lap and smiled encouragingly. “Can you do anything for the calves, then?” she asked.

  Phin butted in before I could reply. “Oh aye, he can an’ all. He’s put them on to epsom salts.”

  “Epsom salts?”

  “That’s it, Missis. I said when he came that we’d get summat real smart and scientific like. You can’t beat new blood and modern ideas.” Phin sipped his beer gravely.

  Over the following days the calves gradually improved and at the end of a fortnight they were all eating normally. The worst one still showed a trace of blindness, but I was confident this too would clear up.

  It wasn’t long before I saw Phin again. It was early afternoon and I was in the office with Siegfried when the outer door banged and the passage echoed to the clumping of hobnails. I heard a voice raised in song—hi-ti-tiddly-rum-te-tum. Phineas was in our midst once more.

  “Well, well, well!” he bawled heartily at Miss Harbottle. “It’s Flossie! And what’s my little darlin’ doing this fine day?”

  There was not a flicker from Miss Harbottle’s granite features. She directed an icy stare at the intruder but Phin swung round on Siegfried with a yellow-toothed grin. “Now, gaffer, ’ow’s tricks?”

  “Everything’s fine, Mr. Calvert,” Siegfried replied. “What can we do for you?”

  Phin stabbed a finger at me. “There’s my man. I want him out to my place right sharpish.”

  “What’s the trouble?” I asked. “Is it the calves again?”

  “Damn, no! Wish it was. It’s me good bull. He’s puffin’ like a bellows—bit like pneumonia but worse than I’ve known. He’s in a ’ell of a state. Looks like he’s peggin’ out.” For an instant Phin lost his jocularity.

  I had heard of this bull; pedigree shorthorn, show winner, the foundation of his herd. “I’ll be right after you, Mr. Calvert. I’ll follow you along.”

  “Good lad. I’m off, then.” Phin paused at the door, a wild figure, tieless, tattered; baggy trousers ballooning from his ample middle. He turned again to Miss Harbottle and contorted his leathery features into a preposterous leer. “Ta-ra, Floss!” he cried and was gone.

  For a moment the room seemed very empty and quiet except for Miss Harbottle’s acid “Oh, that man! Dreadful! Dreadful!”

  I made good time to the farm and found Phin waiting with his three sons. The young men looked gloomy but Phin was still indomitable. “Here ’e is!” he shouted. “Happy Harry again. Now we’ll be all right.” He even managed a little tune as we crossed to the bull pen but when he looked over the door his head sank on his chest and his hands worked deeper behind his braces.

  The bull was standing as though rooted to the middle of the pen. His great rib cage rose and fell with the most laboured respirations I had ever seen. His mouth gaped wide, a bubbling foam hung round his lips and his flaring nostrils; his eyes, almost starting from his head in terror, stared at the wall in front of him. This wasn’t pneumonia, it was a frantic battle for breath; and it looked like a losing one.

  He didn’t move when I inserted my thermometer and though my mind was racing I suspected the half minute wasn’t going to be long enough this time. I had expected accelerated breathing, but nothing like this.

  “Poor aud beggar,” Phin muttered. “He’s bred me the finest calves I’ve ever had and he’s as quiet as a sheep, too. I’ve seen me little grandchildren walk under ’is belly and he’s took no notice. I hate to see him sufferin’ like this. If you can’t do no good, just tell me and I’ll get the gun out.”

  I took the thermometer out and read it. One hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. This was ridiculous; I shook it vigorously and pushed it back into the rectum.

  I gave it nearly a minute this time so that I could get in some extra thinking. The second reading said a hundred and ten again and I had an unpleasant conviction that if the thermometer had been a foot long the mercury would still have been jammed against the top.

  What in the name of God was this? Could be Anthrax … must be … and yet … I looked over at the row of heads above the half door; they were waiting for me to say something and their silence accentuated the agonised groaning and panting. I looked above the heads to the square of deep blue and a tufted cloud moving across the sun. As it passed, a single dazzling ray made me close my eyes and a faint bell rang in my mind.

  “Has he been out today?” I asked.

  “Aye, he’s been out on the grass on his tether all morning. It was that grand and warm.”

  The bell became a triumphant gong. “Get a hosepipe in here quick. You can rig it to that tap in the yard.”

  “A hosepipe? What the ’ell …?”

  “Yes, quick as you can—he’s got sunstroke.”

  They had the hose fixed in less than a minute. I turned it full on and began to play the jet of cold water all over the huge form—his face and neck, along the ribs, up and down the legs. I kept this up for about five minutes but it seemed a lot longer as I waited for some sign of improvement. I was beginning to think I was on the wrong track when the bull gulped just once.

  It was something—he had been unable to swallow his saliva before in his desperate efforts to get the air into his lungs; and I really began to notice a change in the big animal. Surely he was looking just a little less distressed and wasn’t the breathing slowing down a bit?

  Then the bull shook himself, turned his head and looked at us. There was an awed whisper from one of the young men: “By gaw, it’s working!”

  I enjoyed myself after that. I can’t think of anything in my working life that has given me more pleasure than standing in that pen directing the life-saving jet and watching the bull savouring it. He liked it on his face best and as I worked my way up from the tail and along the steaming back he would turn his nose full into the water, rocking his head from side to side and blinking blissfully.

  Within half an hour he looked almost normal. His chest was still heaving a little but he was in no discomfort. I tried the temperature again. Down to a hundred and five.

  “He’ll be all right now,” I said. “But I think one of the lads should keep the water on him for another twenty minutes or so. I’ll have to go now.”

  “You’ve time for a drink,” Phin grunted.

  In the farm kitchen his bellow of “Mother” lacked some of its usual timbre. He dropped into a chair and stared into his glass of Nutty Brown. “Harry,” he said, “I’ll tell you, you’ve flummoxed me this time.” He sighed and rubbed his chin in apparent disbelief. “I don’t know what the ’ell to say to you.”

  It wasn’t often that Phin lost his voice, but he found it again very soon at the next meeting of the farmers’ discussion group.

  A learned and earnest gentleman had been expounding on the advances in veterinary medicine and how the farmers could now expect their stock to be treated as the doctors treated their human patients, with the newest drugs and procedures.

  It was too much for Phin. He jumped to his feet and cried: “Ah think you’re talking a lot of rubbish. There’s a young feller in Darrowby not long out of college and it doesn’t matter what you call ’im out for he uses nowt but epsom salts and cold water.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  IT WAS DURING ONE of Siegfried’s efficiency drives that Colonel Merrick’s cow picked up a wire. The colonel was a personal friend, which made things even more uncomfortable.

  Everybody suffered when Siegfried had these spells. They usually came on after he had been reading a technical work or when he had seen a film of some new technical procedure. He would rampage around, calling on the cowering household to stir themselves and be better men. He would be obsessed, for a time, with a craving for perfection.

  “We must put on a better show at these operations on the farms. It just isn’t good enough to fish out a few old instruments from a bag and start hacking at the animal. We must have cleanliness, asepsis if possible, and an orderly technique.”

  So h