All Things Bright and Beautiful Read online

  I handed the bottle to Carmody and stepped back. The student looked up and hesitated. Tommy was a big horse and the head, pulled high, was far beyond reach; but the farm man pushed a ramshackle kitchen chair wordlessly forward and Carmody mounted it and stood swaying precariously.

  I watched with interest. Horses are awkward things to drench at any time and Tommy didn’t like Istin, even though it was good for him. On my last visit I had noticed that he was becoming very clever at holding the bitter mixture at the back of his throat instead of swallowing it. I had managed to foil him by tapping him under the chin just as he was toying with the idea of coughing it out and he had gulped it down with an offended look. But it was more and more becoming a battle of wits.

  Carmody never really had a chance. He started off well enough by grasping the horse’s tongue and thrusting the bottle past the teeth, but Tommy outwitted him effortlessly by inclining his head and allowing the liquid to flow from the far side of his mouth.

  “It’s coming out t’other side, young man!” the farmer cried with some asperity.

  The student gasped and tried to direct the flow down the throat but Tommy had summed him up immediately as an amateur and was now in complete command of the situation. By judicious rolling of the tongue and a series of little coughs and snorts he kept ridding himself of most of the medicine and I felt a pang of pity at the sight of Carmody weaving about on the creaking chair as the yellow fluid cascaded over his clothes.

  At the end, the farmer squinted into the empty bottle.

  “Well I reckon t’oss got SOME of it,” he muttered sourly.

  Carmody eyed him impassively for a moment, shook a few ounces of Istin solution from somewhere up his sleeve and strode out of the stable.

  At the next farm I was surprised to detect a vein of sadism in my makeup. The owner, a breeder of pedigree Large White pigs, was exporting a sow abroad and it had to be subjected to various tests including a blood sample for Brucellosis. Extracting a few c.c.’s of blood from the ear vein of a struggling pig is a job which makes most vets shudder and it was clearly a dirty trick to ask a student to do it, but the memory of his coldly confident request at the beginning of the afternoon seemed to have stilled my conscience. I handed him the syringe with scarcely a qualm.

  The pigman slipped a noose into the sow’s mouth and drew it tight over the snout and behind the canine teeth. This common method of restraint isn’t at all painful but the sow was one of those who didn’t like any form of mucking about. She was a huge animal and as soon as she felt the rope she opened her mouth wide in a long-drawn, resentful scream.

  The volume of sound was incredible and she kept it up effortlessly without any apparent need to draw breath. Conversation from then on was out of the question and I watched in the appalling din as Carmody put an elastic tourniquet at the base of the sow’s ear, swabbed the surface with spirit and then poked with his needle at the small blood vessel. Nothing happened. He tried again but the syringe remained obstinately empty. He had a few more attempts then, as I felt the top of my head was going to come loose, I wandered from the pen into the peace of the yard.

  I took a leisurely stroll round the outside of the piggery, pausing for a minute or two to look at the view at the far end where the noise was comparatively faint. When I returned to the pen the screaming hit me again like a pneumatic drill and Carmody, sweating and slightly pop-eyed, looked up from the ear where he was still jabbing fruitlessly. It seemed to me that everybody had had enough. Using sign language I indicated to the student that I’d like to have a go and by a happy chance my first effort brought a dark welling of blood into the syringe. I waved to the pigman to remove the rope and the moment he did so the big sow switched off the noise magically and began to nose, quite unperturbed, among the straw.

  “Nothing very exciting at the next place.” I kept the triumph out of my voice as we drove away. “Just a bullock with a tumour on his jaw. But it’s an interesting herd—all Galloways, and this group we’re going to see have been wintered outside. They’re the toughest animals in the district.”

  Carmody nodded. Nothing I said seemed to rouse much enthusiasm in him. For myself this herd of untamed black cattle always held a certain fascination; contacts with them were always coloured by a degree of uncertainty—sometimes you could catch them to examine them, sometimes you couldn’t.

  As we approached the farm I could see a bunch of about thirty bullocks streaming down the scrubby hillside on our right. The farm men were driving them down through the scattered gorse bushes and the sparse groups of trees to where the stone walls met in a rough V at the front

  One of them waved to me. “We’re going to try to get a rope on ’im down in the corner while he’s among his mates. He’s a wick bugger—you’d never get near him in t’field.”

  After a lot of shouting and waving and running about the bullocks were finally cornered and they stood in a tight, uneasy pack, their shaggy black polls bobbing among the steam rising from their bodies.

  “There he is! You can see the thing on his face.” A man pointed to a big beast about the middle of the bunch and began to push his way towards him. My admiration for the Yorkshire farm worker rose another notch as I watched him squeezing between the plunging, kicking animals. “When I get the rope on his head you’ll all have to get on t’other end—one man’ll never hold ’im.” He gasped as he fought his way forward.

  He was obviously an expert because as soon as he got within reach he dropped the halter on to the bullock’s head with practised skill. “Right!” he shouted. “Give me a hand with him. We have ’im now.”

  But as he spoke the beast gave a great bellow and began to charge from the pack. The man cried out despairingly and disappeared among the hairy bodies. The rope whipped free out of reach of everybody. Except Carmody. As the bullock shot past him he grabbed the trailing, rope with a reflex action and hung on.

  I watched, fascinated, as man and beast careered across the field. They were travelling away from me towards the far slope, the animal head down, legs pistoning, going like a racehorse, the student also at full speed but very upright, both hands on the rope in front of him, a picture of resolution.

  The men and I were helpless spectators and we stood in a silent group as the beast turned left suddenly and disappeared behind a clump of low trees.

  It was gone for only a few moments but it seemed a long time and when it reappeared it was going faster than ever, hurtling over the turf like a black thunderbolt. Carmody, incredibly, was still there on the end of the rope and still very upright but his strides had increased to an impossible length till he seemed to be touching the ground only every twenty feet or so.

  I marvelled at his tenacity but obviously the end was near. He took a last few soaring, swooping steps then he was down on his face. But he didn’t let go. The bullock, going better than ever, had turned towards us now, dragging the inert form apparently without effort, and I winced as I saw it was headed straight for a long row of cow pats.

  It was when Carmody was skidding face down through the third heap of muck that I suddenly began to like him. And when he finally did have to release his hold and lay for a moment motionless on the grass I hurried over to help him up. He thanked me briefly then looked calmly across the field at a sight which is familiar to every veterinary surgeon—his patient thundering out of sight across the far horizon.

  The student was almost unrecognisable. His clothes and face were plastered with filth except where the saffron streaks of the Istin showed up like war paint, he smelt abominably, he had been bitten in the backside, nothing had really gone right for him all day yet he was curiously undefeated. I smiled to myself. It was no good judging this bloke by ordinary standards; I could recognise the seeds of greatness when I saw them.

  Carmody stayed with us for two weeks and after that first day I got on with him not so badly. Of course it wasn’t the same relationship as with other students; there was always a barrier of reserve. He spent a lot of