The Lord God Made Them All Read online

  “Yes … yes …” As I inserted the thermometer I watched the rapid rise and fall of the rib cage and noted the gaping mouth and anxious eyes. “He does look very sorry for himself.”

  Temperature was 104. I took out my stethoscope and ausculated his lungs. I have heard of an old Scottish doctor describing a seriously ill patient’s chest as sounding like a “kist o’ whustles,” and that just about described Brandy’s. Rales, wheezes, squeaks and bubblings—they were all there against a background of laboured respiration.

  I put the stethoscope back in my pocket. “He’s got pneumonia.”

  “Oh, dear.” Mrs. Westby reached out and touched the heaving chest. “That’s bad, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “But …” She gave me an appealing glance. “I understand it isn’t so fatal since the new drugs came out.”

  I hesitated. “Yes, that’s quite right. In humans and most animals the sulpha drugs, and now penicillin, have changed the picture completely, but dogs are still very difficult to cure.”

  Thirty years later it is still the same. Even with all the armoury of antibiotics that followed penicillin—streptomycin, the tetracyclines, the synthetics and the new non-antibiotic drugs and steroids—I still hate to see pneumonia in a dog.

  “But you don’t think it’s hopeless?” Mrs. Westby asked.

  “No, no, not at all. I’m just warning you that so many dogs don’t respond to treatment when they should. But Brandy is young and strong. He must stand a fair chance. I wonder what started this off, anyway.”

  “Oh, I think I know, Mr. Herriot. He had a swim in the river about a week ago. I try to keep him out of the water in this cold weather, but if he sees a stick floating, he just takes a dive into the middle. You’ve seen him—it’s one of the funny little things he does.”

  “Yes, I know. And was he shivery afterwards?”

  “He was. I walked him straight home, but it was such a freezing-cold day. I could feel him trembling as I dried him down.”

  I nodded. “That would be the cause, all right. Anyway, let’s start his treatment. I’m going to give him this injection of penicillin, and I’ll call at your house tomorrow to repeat it. He’s not well enough to come to the surgery.”

  “Very well, Mr. Herriot. And is there anything else?”

  “Yes, there is. I want you to make him what we call a pneumonia jacket. Cut two holes in an old blanket for his forelegs and stitch him into it along his back. You can use an old sweater if you like, but he must have his chest warmly covered. Only let him out in the garden for necessities.”

  I called and repeated the injection on the following day. There wasn’t much change. I injected him for four more days, and the realisation came to me sadly that Brandy was like so many of the others—he wasn’t responding. The temperature did drop a little, but he ate hardly anything and grew gradually thinner. I put him on sulphapyridine tablets, but they didn’t seem to make any difference.

  As the days passed and he continued to cough and pant and to sink deeper into a blank-eyed lethargy, I was forced more and more to a conclusion which, a few weeks ago, would have seemed impossible—that this happy, bounding animal was going to die.

  But Brandy didn’t die. He survived. You couldn’t put it any higher than that. His temperature came down and his appetite improved, and he climbed onto a plateau of twilight existence where he seemed content to stay.

  “He isn’t Brandy anymore,” Mrs. Westby said one morning a few weeks later when I called in. Her eyes filled with tears as she spoke.

  I shook my head. “No, I’m afraid he isn’t. Are you giving him the halibut liver oil?”

  “Yes, every day. But nothing seems to do him any good. Why is he like this, Mr. Herriot?”

  “Well, he has recovered from a really virulent pneumonia, but it’s left him with a chronic pleurisy, adhesions and probably other kinds of lung damage. It looks as though he’s just stuck there.” She dabbed at her eyes. “It breaks my heart to see him like this. He’s only five, but he’s like an old, old dog. He was so full of life, too.” She sniffed and blew her nose. “When I think of how I used to scold him for getting into the dustbins and muddying up my jeans. How I wish he would do some of his funny old tricks now.”

  I thrust my hands deep into my pockets. “Never does anything like that now, eh?”

  “No, no, just hangs about the house. Doesn’t even want to go for a walk.”

  As I watched, Brandy rose from his place in the corner and pottered slowly over to the fire. He stood there for a moment, gaunt and dead-eyed, and he seemed to notice me for the first time because the end of his tail gave a brief twitch before he coughed, groaned and flopped down on the hearth rug.

  Mrs. Westby was right. He was like a very old dog.

  “Do you think he’ll always be like this?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “We can only hope.”

  But as I got into my car and drove away, I really didn’t have much hope. I had seen calves with lung damage after bad pneumonias. They recovered but were called “bad doers” because they remained thin and listless for the rest of their lives. Doctors, too, had plenty of “chesty” people on their books; they were, more or less, in the same predicament.

  Weeks and then months went by, and the only time I saw the Labrador was when Mrs. Westby was walking him on his lead. I always had the impression that he was reluctant to move, and his mistress had to stroll along very slowly so that he could keep up with her. The sight of him saddened me when I thought of the lolloping Brandy of old, but I told myself that at least I had saved his life. I could do no more for him now, and I made a determined effort to push him out of my mind.

  In fact, I tried to forget Brandy and managed to do so fairly well until one afternoon in February. On the previous night I felt I had been through the fire. I had treated a colicky horse until 4 A.M. and was crawling into bed, comforted by the knowledge that the animal was settled down and free from pain, when I was called to a calving. I had managed to produce a large live calf from a small heifer, but the effort had drained the last of my strength, and when I got home, it was too late to return to bed.

  Ploughing through the morning round, I was so tired that I felt disembodied, and at lunch Helen watched me anxiously as my head nodded over my food.

  There were a few dogs in the waiting room at two o’clock, and I dealt with them mechanically, peering through half-closed eyelids.

  By the time I reached my last patient, I was almost asleep on my feet. In fact, I had the feeling that I wasn’t there at all.

  “Next, please,” I mumbled as I pushed open the waiting-room door and stood back, expecting the usual sight of a dog being led out to the passage.

  But this time there was a big difference. There was a man in the doorway all right, and he had a little poodle with him, but the thing that made my eyes snap wide open was that the dog was walking upright on his hind limbs.

  I knew I was half-asleep, but surely I wasn’t seeing things. I stared down at the dog, but the picture hadn’t changed. The little creature strutted through the doorway, chest out, head up, as erect as a soldier.

  “Follow me, please,” I said hoarsely and set off over the tiles to the consulting room. Halfway along, I just had to turn round to check the evidence of my eyes, and it was just the same—the poodle, still on his hind legs, marching along unconcernedly at his master’s side.

  The man must have seen the bewilderment in my face because he burst suddenly into a roar of laughter.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Herriot,” he said. “This little dog was cir-cus-trained before I got him as a pet. I like to show off his little tricks. This one really startles people.”

  “You can say that again,” I said breathlessly. “It nearly gave me heart failure.”

  The poodle wasn’t ill; he just wanted his nails clipped. I smiled as I hoisted him onto the table and began to ply the clippers.

  “I suppose he won’t want his hind claws