All Creatures Great and Small Read online

  “He isn’t going to go down, you know, James. Don’t you think we should tie a foreleg up?”

  I adopted my usual policy of feigning deafness and a few seconds later the colt gave a final lurch and collapsed on his side. Siegfried, released from his enforced inactivity, sprang into action. “Sit on his head!” he yelled. “Get a rope on that upper hind leg and pull it forward! Bring me that bucket of water over here! Come on—move!”

  It was a violent transition. Just moments ago, peace and silence and now men scurrying in all directions, bumping into each other, urged on by Siegfried’s cries.

  Thirty years later I am still dropping horses for Siegfried and he is still saying “He isn’t going to go down, James.”

  These days I mostly use an intravenous injection of Thiopentone and it puts a horse out in about ten seconds. It doesn’t give Siegfried much time to say his piece but he usually gets it in somewhere between the seventh and tenth seconds.

  This morning’s case was an injury. But it was a pretty dramatic one, justifying general anaesthetic to repair it. The colt, bred from a fine hunter mare, had been galloping round his paddock and had felt the urge to visit the outside world. He had chosen the only sharp fence post to try to jump over and had been impaled between the forelegs; in his efforts to escape he had caused so much damage in the breast region that it looked like something from a butcher’s shop with the skin extensively lacerated and the big sternal muscles hanging out, chopped through as though by a cleaver.

  “Roll him on his back,” said Siegfried. “That’s better.” He took a probe from the tray which lay on the grass near by and carefully explored the wound. “No damage to the bone,” he grunted, still peering into the depths. Then he took a pair of forceps and fished out all the loose debris he could find before turning to me.

  “It’s just a big stitching job. You can carry on if you like.”

  As we changed places it occurred to me that he was disappointed it was not something more interesting. I couldn’t see him asking me to take over in a rig operation or something like that. Then, as I picked up the needle, my mind clicked back to that gastrotomy on the dog. Maybe I was on trial for my wasteful ways. This time I would be on my guard.

  I threaded the needle with a minute length of gut, took a bite at the severed muscle and, with an effort, stitched it back into place. But it was a laborious business tying the little short ends—it was taking me at least three times as long as it should. However, I stuck to it doggedly. I had been warned and I didn’t want another lecture.

  I had put in half a dozen sutures in this way when I began to feel the waves. My employer was kneeling close to me on the horse’s neck and the foaming breakers of disapproval were crashing into me from close range. I held out for another two sutures then Siegfried exploded in a fierce whisper.

  “What the hell are you playing at, James?”

  “Well, just stitching. What do you mean?”

  “But why are you buggering about with those little bits of gut? We’ll be here all bloody day!”

  I fumbled another knot into the muscle. “For reasons of economy.” I whispered back virtuously.

  Siegfried leaped from the neck as though the horse had bitten him. “I can’t stand any more of this! Here, let me have a go.”

  He strode over to the tray, selected a needle and caught hold of the free end of the catgut protruding from the jar. With a scything sweep of his arm he pulled forth an enormous coil of gut, setting the bobbin inside the jar whirring wildly like a salmon reel with a big fish on the line. He returned to the horse, stumbling slightly as the gut caught round his ankles and began to stitch. It wasn’t easy because even at the full stretch of his arm he was unable to pull the suture tight and had to keep getting up and down; by the time he had tacked the muscles back into their original positions he was puffing and I could see a faint dew of perspiration on his forehead.

  “Drop of blood seeping from somewhere down there,” he muttered and visited the tray again where he tore savagely at a huge roll of cotton wool. Trailing untidy white streamers over the buttercups he returned and swabbed out the wound with one corner of the mass.

  Back to the tray again. “Just a touch of powder before I stitch the skin,” he said lightly and seized a two pound carton. He poised for a moment over the wound then began to dispense the powder with extravagant jerks of the wrist. A considerable amount did go into the wound but much more floated over other parts of the horse, over me, over the buttercups, and a particularly wayward flick obscured the sweating face of the man on the foot rope. When he had finished coughing he looked very like Coco the clown.

  Siegfried completed the closure of the skin, using several yards of silk, and when he stood back and surveyed the tidy result I could see he was in excellent humour.

  “Well now, that’s fine. A young horse like that will heal in no time. Shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t even leave a mark.”

  He came over and addressed me as I washed the instruments in the bucket. “Sorry I pushed you out like that, James, but honestly I couldn’t think what had come over you—you were like an old hen. You know it looks bad trying to work with piddling little amounts of materials. One has to operate with a certain … well … panache, if I can put it that way, and you just can’t do that if you stint yourself.”

  I finished washing the instruments, dried them off and laid them on the enamel tray. Then I lifted the tray and set off for the gate at the end of the field. Siegfried, walking alongside me, laid his hand on my shoulder. “Mind you, don’t think I’m blaming you, James. It’s probably your Scottish upbringing. And don’t misunderstand me, this same upbringing has inculcated in you so many of the qualities I admire—integrity, industry, loyalty. But I’m sure you will be the first to admit,” and here he stopped and wagged a finger at me, “that you Scots sometimes overdo the thrift.” He gave a light laugh. “So remember, James, don’t be too—er—canny when you are operating.”

  I measured him up. If I dropped the tray quickly I felt sure I could fell him with a right hook.

  Siegfried went on. “But I know I don’t have to ramble on at you, James. You always pay attention to what I say, don’t you?”

  I tucked the tray under my arm and set off again. “Yes,” I replied. “I do. Every single time.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “I CAN SEE YOU like pigs,” said Mr. Worley as I edged my way into the pen.

  “You can?”

  “Oh yes, I can always tell. As soon as you went in there nice and quiet and scratched Queenie’s back and spoke to her I said ‘There’s a young man as likes pigs’.”

  “Oh good. Well, as a matter of fact you’re absolutely right. I do like pigs.” I had, in truth, been creeping very cautiously past Queenie, wondering just how she was going to react. She was a huge animal and sows with litters can be very hostile to strangers. When I had come into the building she had got up from where she was suckling her piglets and eyed me with a non-committal grunt, reminding me of the number of times I had left a pig pen a lot quicker than I had gone in. A big, barking, gaping-mouthed sow has always been able to make me move very smartly.

  Now that I was right inside the narrow pen, Queenie seemed to have accepted me. She grunted again, but peaceably, then carefully collapsed on the straw and exposed her udder to the eager little mouths. When she was in this position I was able to examine her foot.

  “Aye, that’s the one,” Mr. Worley said anxiously. “She could hardly hobble when she got up this morning.”

  There didn’t seem to be much wrong. A flap of the horn of one claw was a bit overgrown and was rubbing on the sensitive sole, but we didn’t usually get called out for little things like that. I cut away the overgrown part and dressed the sore place with our multi-purpose ointment, ung pini sedativum, while all the time Mr. Worley knelt by Queenie’s head and patted her and sort of crooned into her ear. I couldn’t make out the words he used—maybe it was pig language because the sow really seemed to b