All Things Bright and Beautiful Read online

  The farmer grunted. “Aye, I thowt so, just a big single ’un. They’re the ones that cause the trouble.”

  Drying my arms, I watched Herbert. He had left my patient when she moved round to lick her lamb and he was moving speculatively among the other ewes. Some of them warned him off with a shake of the head but eventually he managed to sneak up on a big, wide-bodied sheep and pushed his head underneath her. Immediately she swung round and with a fierce upward butt of her hard skull she sent the little animal flying high in the air in a whirl of flailing legs. He landed with a thud on his back and as I hurried towards him he leaped to his feet and trotted away.

  “Awd bitch!” shouted the farmer and as I turned to him in some concern he shrugged. “I know, poor little sod, it’s rough, but I’ve got a feelin’ he wants it this way rather than being in the pen with the pet lambs. Look at ’im now.”

  Herbert, quite unabashed, was approaching another ewe and as she bent over her feeding trough he nipped underneath her and his tail went into action again. There was no doubt about it—that lamb had guts.

  “Rob,” I said as he caught my second patient “Why do you call him Herbert?”

  “Well that’s my youngest lad’s name and that lamb’s just like ’im the way he puts his head down and gets stuck in, fearless like.”

  I put my hand into the second ewe. Here was a glorious mix up of three lambs; little heads, legs, a tail, all fighting their way towards the outside world and effectively stopping each other from moving an inch.

  “She’s been hanging about all morning and painin’,” Rob said. “I knew summat was wrong.”

  Moving a hand carefully around the uterus I began the fascinating business of sorting out the tangle which is just about my favourite job in practice. I had to bring a head and two legs up together in order to deliver a lamb; but they had to belong to the same lamb or I was in trouble. It was a matter of tracing each leg back to see if it was hind or fore, to find if it joined the shoulder or disappeared into the depths.

  After a few minutes I had a lamb assembled inside with his proper appendages but as I drew the legs into view the neck telescoped and the head slipped back; there was barely room for it to come through the pelvic bones along with the shoulders and I had to coax it through with a finger in the eye socket. This was groaningly painful as the bones squeezed my hand but only for a few seconds because the ewe gave a final strain and the little nose was visible. After that it was easy and I had him on the grass within seconds. The little creature gave a convulsive shake of his head and the farmer wiped him down quickly with straw before pushing him to his mother’s head.

  The ewe bent over him and began to lick his face and neck with little quick darts of her tongue; and she gave the deep chuckle of satisfaction that you hear from a sheep only at this time. The chuckling continued as I produced another pair of lambs from inside her, one of them hind end first, and, towelling my arms again, I watched her nosing round her triplets delightedly.

  Soon they began to answer her with wavering, high-pitched cries and as I drew my coat thankfully over my cold-reddened arms, lamb number one began to struggle to his knees; he couldn’t quite make it to his feet and kept toppling on to his face but he knew where he was going, all right: he was headed for that udder with a singleness of purpose which would soon be satisfied.

  Despite the wind cutting over the straw bales into my face I found myself grinning down at the scene; this was always the best part, the wonder that was always fresh, the miracle you couldn’t explain.

  I heard from Rob Benson again a few days later. It was a Sunday afternoon and his voice was strained, almost panic stricken.

  “Jim, I’ve had a dog in among me in-lamb ewes. There was some folk up here with a car about dinner time and my neighbour said they had an Alsatian and it was chasing the sheep all over the field. There’s a hell of a mess—I tell you I’m frightened to look.”

  “I’m on my way.” I dropped the receiver and hurried out to the car. I had a sinking dread of what would be waiting for me; the helpless animals lying with their throats torn, the terrifying lacerations of limbs and abdomen. I had seen it all before. The ones which didn’t have to be slaughtered would need stitching and on the way I made a mental check of the stock of suture silk in the boot.

  The in-lamb ewes were in a field by the roadside and my heart gave a quick thump as I looked over the wall; arms resting on the rough loose stones I gazed with sick dismay across the pasture. This was worse than I had feared. The long slope of turf was dotted with prostrate sheep—there must have been about fifty of them, motionless woolly mounds scattered at intervals on the green.

  Bob was standing just inside the gate. He hardly looked at me. Just gestured with his head.

  “Tell me what you think. I daren’t go in there.”

  I left him and began to walk among the stricken creatures, rolling them over, lifting their legs, parting the fleece of their necks to examine them. Some were completely unconscious, others comatose; none of them could stand up. But as I worked my way up the field I felt a growing bewilderment. Finally I called back to the farmer.

  “Rob, come over here. There’s something very strange.”

  “Look,” I said as the farmer approached hesitantly. “There’s not a drop of blood nor a wound anywhere and yet all the sheep are flat out. I can’t understand it.”

  Bob bent over and gently raised a lolling head. “Aye, you’re right. What the hell’s done it, then?”

  At that moment I couldn’t answer him, but a little bell was tinkling far away in the back of my mind. There was something familiar about that ewe the farmer had just handled. She was one of the few able to support herself on her chest and she was lying there, blank-eyed, oblivious of everything; but…that drunken nodding of the head, that watery nasal discharge…I had seen it before. I knelt down and as I put my face close to hers I heard a faint bubbling—almost a rattling—in her breathing. I knew then.

  “It’s calcium deficiency,” I cried and began to gallop down the slope towards the car.

  Rob trotted alongside me. “But what the ’ell? They get that after lambin’, don’t they?”

  “Yes, usually,” I puffed. “But sudden exertion and stress can bring it on.”

  “Well ah never knew that,” panted Rob. “How does it happen?”

  I saved my breath. I wasn’t going to start an exposition on the effects of sudden derangement of the parathyroid. I was more concerned with wondering if I had enough calcium in the boot for fifty ewes. It was reassuring to see the long row of round tin caps peeping from their cardboard box; I must have filled up recently.

  I injected the first ewe in the vein just to check my diagnosis—calcium works as quickly as that in sheep—and felt a quiet elation as the unconscious animal began to blink and tremble, then tried to struggle on to its chest.

  “We’ll inject the others under the skin,” I said. “It’ll save time.”

  I began to work my way up the field. Rob pulled forward the fore leg of each sheep so that I could insert the needle under the convenient patch of unwoolled skin just behind the elbow; and by the time I was half way up the slope the ones at the bottom were walking about and getting their heads into the food troughs and hay racks.

  It was one of the most satisfying experiences of my working life. Not clever, but a magical transfiguration; from despair to hope, from death to life within minutes.

  I was throwing the empty bottles into the boot when Rob spoke. He was looking wonderingly up at the last of the ewes getting to its feet at the far end of the field.

  “Well Jim, I’ll tell you. I’ve never seen owt like that afore. But there’s one thing bothers me.” He turned to me and his weathered features screwed up in puzzlement. “Ah can understand how gettin’ chased by a dog could affect some of them ewes, but why should the whole bloody lot go down?”

  “Rob,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  And, thirty years later, I still wonder. I still don�€