Let Sleeping Vets Lie Read online

  tied-on skin in a non-committal way, then after a few seconds she gave a

  few quick licks and the merest beginning of the familiar deep chuckle.

  I began to gather up my gear. "I hope he makes it," I said. "Those two

  need each other." As I left the pen Herbert, in his new jacket, was

  still working away.

  For the next week I hardly seemed to have my coat on. The flood of sheep

  work was at its peak and I spent hours of every day with my arms in and

  out of buckets of water in all corners of the district - in the pens, in

  dark nooks in farm buildings or very often in the open fields, because

  the farmers of those days

  didn't find anything disturbing in the sight of a vet kneeling in his

  shirt sleeves for an hour in the rain.

  I had one more visit to Rob Benson's place. To a ewe with a prolapsed

  uterus after lambing - a job whose chief delight was comparing it with

  the sweat of replacing a uterus in a cow.

  It was so beautifully easy. Rob rolled the animal on to her side then

  held her more or less upside down by tying a length of rope to her hind

  legs and passing it round his neck. In that position she couldn't strain

  and I disinfected the organ and pushed it back with the minimum of

  effort, gently inserting an arm at the finish to work it properly into

  place.

  Afterwards the ewe trotted away unperturbed with her family to join the

  rapidly growing flock whose din was all around us.

  "Look!" Rob cried. "There's that awd ewe with Herbert. Over there on

  ttright!in the middle of that bunch." They all looked the same to me but

  to Rob, like all shepherds, they were as different as people and he

  picked out these two effortlessly.

  The were near the top of the field and as I wanted to have a close look

  at them we manoeuvred them into a corner. The ewe, fiercely possessive,

  stamped her foot at us as we approached, and Herbert, who had discarded

  his woolly jacket, held close to the flank of his new mother. He was, I

  noticed, faintly obese in appearance.

  "You couldn't call him a runt now, Rob," I said.

  The farmer laughed. "Nay, t'awd lass has a bag like a cow and Herbert's

  gettin" the lot. By yaw, he's in clover is that little youth and I

  reckon he saved the ewe's lifeshe'd have pegged out all right, but she

  never looked back once he came along."

  I looked away, over the noisy pens, over the hundreds of sheep moving

  across the fields. I turned to the farmer. "I'm afraid you've seen a lot

  of me lately, Rob. I hope this is the last visit."

  "Aye well it could be. We're getting well through now ... but it's a

  hell of a time, lambin" isn't it?"

  "It is that. Well I must be offi'll leave you to it." I turned and made

  my way down the hillside, my arms raw and chafing in my sleeves, my

  cheeks whipped by the eternal wind gusting over the grass. At the gate I

  stopped and gazed back at the wide landscape, ribbed and streaked by the

  last of the winter's snow, and at the dark grey banks of cloud riding

  across on the wind followed by lakes of brightest blue; and in seconds

  the fields and walls and woods burst into vivid life and I had to close

  my eyes against the sun's glare. As I stood there the distant uproar

  came faintly down to me, the tumultuous harmony from deepest bass to

  highest treble; demanding, anxious, angry, loving.

  The sound of the sheep, the sound of spring.

  Chapter Three.

  "Them masticks," said Mr. Pickersgill judicially, 'is a proper bugger."

  I nodded my head in agreement that his mastitis problem was indeed

  giving cause for concern; and reflected at the same time that while most

  farmers would have been content with the local word 'felon" it was

  typical that Mr. Pickersgill should make a determined if somewhat

  inaccurate attempt at the scientific term.

  Sometimes he got very wide of the mark as one time long after this when

  Artificial Insemination or AI was gaining a foothold in the Dales he

  made my day by telling me he had a cow in calf to the ICI.

  However he usually did better than this - most of his efforts were near

  misses or bore obvious evidence of their derivation - but I could never

  really fathom where he got the masticks. I did know that once he

  fastened on to an expression it never changed; mastitis had always been

  'them masticks" with him and it always would be. And I knew, too, that

  nothing would ever stop him doggedly trying to be right.

  Because Mr. Pickersgill had what he considered to be a scholastic

  background. He was a man of about sixty and when in his teens he had

  attended a two week course of instruction for agricultural workers at

  Leeds University. This brief glimpse of the academic life had left an

  indelible impression on his mind, and it was as if the intimation of

  something deep and true behind the facts of his everyday work had

  kindled a flame in him which had illumined his subsequent life.

  No capped and gowned don ever looked back to his years among the spires

  of Oxford with more nostalgia than did Mr. Pickersgill to his fortnight

  at Leeds and his conversation was usually laced with references to a

  godlike Professor Malleson who had apparently been in charge of the

  course.

  "Ah don't know what to make of it," he continued. "In ma college days I

  was allus told that you got a big swollen bag and dirty milk with them

  masticks but this must be another kind. Just little bits of flakes in

  the milk off and on neither nowt nor something, but I'm right fed up

  with it, I'll tell you."

  I took a sip from the cup of tea which Mrs. Pickersgill had placed in

  front of me on the kitchen table. "Yes, it's very worrying the way it

  keeps going on and on. I'm sure there's a definite factor behind it all

  - I wish I could put my finger on it."

  But in fact I had a good idea what was behind it. I had happened in at

  the little byre late one afternoon when Mr. Pickersgill and his daughter

  Olive were milking their ten cows. I had watched the two at work as they

  crouched under the row of roan and red backs ,and one thing was

  immediately obvious; while Olive drew the milk by almost imperceptible

  movements of her fingers and with a motionless wrist, her father hauled

  away at the teats as though he was trying to ring in the new year.

  This insight coupled with the fact that it was always the cows Mr.

  Pickersgill milked that gave trouble was enough to convince me that the

  chronic mastitis was of traumatic origin.

  But how to tell the farmer that he wasn't doing his job right and that

  the only solution was to learn a more gentle technique or let Olive take

  over all the milking?

  It wouldn't be easy because Mr. Pickersgill was an impressive man. I

  don't suppose he had a spare penny in the world but even as he sat there

  in the kitchen in his tattered, collarless flannel shirt and braces he

  looked, as always, like an industrial tycoon. You could imagine that

  massive head with its fleshy cheeks, noble brow and serene eyes looking

  out from the financial pages of The Times. Put him in a bowler and

  striped trousers and you