All Creatures Great and Small Read online

  I could never be quite sure, but it was funny how he always received me with the same words. “Ah, Mr. Herriot, how are your pools?” He used to say the word in a long-drawn, loving way—poools. This enquiry had been unvarying ever since I had won sixteen shillings one week on the Three Draws. I can never forget the awe with which he fingered the little slip from Littlewoods, looking unbelievingly from it to the postal order. That was the only time I was a winner but it made no difference—I was still the oracle, unchallenged, supreme. Harold never won anything, ever.

  The Denhams were a family of note in North Yorkshire. The immensely wealthy industrialists of the last century had become leaders in the world of agriculture. They were “gentlemen farmers” who used their money to build up pedigree herds of dairy cows or pigs; they ploughed out the high, stony moorland and fertilised it and made it grow crops, they drained sour bogs and made them yield potatoes and turnips; they were the chairmen of committees, masters of fox hounds, leaders of the county society.

  But Harold had opted out of all that at an early age. He had refuted the age old dictum that you can’t be happy doing absolutely nothing; all day and every day he pottered around his house and his few untidy acres, uninterested in the world outside, not entirely aware of what was going on in his immediate vicinity, but utterly content. I don’t think he ever gave a thought to other people’s opinions which was just as well because they were often unkind; his brother, the eminent Basil Denham, referred to him invariably as “that bloody fool” and with the country people it was often “nobbut ninepence in t’shillin’.”

  Personally I always found something appealing in him. He was kind, friendly, with a sense of fun and I enjoyed going to his house. He and his wife ate all their meals in the kitchen and in fact seemed to spend most of their time there, so I usually went round the back of the house.

  On this particular day it was to see his Great Dane bitch which had just had pups and seemed unwell; since it wasn’t Wednesday I felt that there really might be something amiss with her and hurried round. Harold gave me his usual greeting; he had the most attractive voice—round, fruity, mellow, like a bishop’s, and for the hundredth time I thought how odd it was to hear those organ-like vocal cords intoning such incongruities as Mansfield Town or Bradford City.

  “I wonder if you could advise me, Mr. Herriot,” he said as we left the kitchen and entered a long, ill-lit passage. “I’m searching for an away winner and I wondered about Sunderland at Aston Villa?”

  I stopped and fell into an attitude of deep thought while Harold regarded me anxiously. “Well, I’m not sure, Mr. Denham,” I replied. “Sunderland are a good side but I happen to know that Raich Carter’s auntie isn’t too well at present and it could easily affect his game this Saturday.”

  Harold looked crestfallen and he nodded his head gravely a few times; then he looked closely at me for a few seconds and broke into a shout of laughter. “Ah, Mr. Herriot, you’re pulling my leg again.” He seized my arm, gave it a squeeze and shuffled off along the passage, chuckling deeply.

  We traversed a labyrinth of gloomy, cobwebbed passages before he led the way into a little gun room. My patient was lying on a raised wooden dog bed and I recognised her as the enormous Dane I had seen leaping around at previous visits. I had never treated her, but my first sight of her had dealt a blow at one of my new-found theories—that you didn’t find big dogs in big houses. Times without number I had critically observed Bull Mastiffs, Alsatians and Old English Sheep Dogs catapulting out of the tiny, back street dwellings of Darrowby, pulling their helpless owners on the end of a lead, while in the spacious rooms and wide acres of the stately homes I saw nothing but Border Terriers and Jack Russells. But Harold would have to be different.

  He patted the bitch’s head. “She had the puppies yesterday and she’s got a nasty dark discharge. She’s eating well, but I’d like you to look her over.”

  Great Danes, like most of the big breeds, are usually placid animals and the bitch didn’t move as I took her temperature. She lay on her side, listening contentedly to the squeals of her family as the little blind creatures climbed over each other to get at the engorged teats.

  “Yes, she’s got a slight fever and you’re right about the discharge.” I gently palpated the long hollow of the flank. “I don’t think there’s another pup there but I’d better have a feel inside her to make sure. Could you bring me some warm water, soap and towel please?”

  As the door closed behind Harold I looked idly around the gun room. It wasn’t much bigger than a cupboard and, since another of Harold’s idiosyncrasies was that he never killed anything, was devoid of guns. The glass cases contained only musty bound volumes of Blackwood’s Magazine and Country Life. I stood there for maybe ten minutes, wondering why the old chap was taking so long, then I turned to look at an old print on the wall; it was the usual hunting scene and I was peering through the grimy glass and wondering why they always drew those horses flying over the stream with such impossible long legs when I heard a sound behind me.

  It was a faint growl, a deep rumble, soft but menacing. I turned and saw the bitch rising very slowly from her bed. She wasn’t getting to her feet in the normal way of dogs, it was as though she were being lifted up by strings somewhere in the ceiling, the legs straightening almost imperceptibly, the body rigid, every hair bristling. All the time she glared at me unblinkingly and for the first time in my life I realised the meaning of blazing eyes. I had only once seen anything like this before and it was on the cover of an old copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles. At the time I had thought the artist ridiculously fanciful but here were two eyes filled with the same yellow fire and fixed unwaveringly on mine.

  She thought I was after her pups, of course. After all, her master had gone and there was only this stranger standing motionless and silent in the corner of the room, obviously up to no good. One thing was sure—she was going to come at me any second, and I blessed the luck that had made me stand right by the door. Carefully I inched my left hand towards the handle as the bitch still rose with terrifying slowness, still rumbling deep in her chest. I had almost reached the handle when I made the mistake of making a quick grab for it. Just as I touched the metal the bitch came out of the bed like a rocket and sank her teeth into my wrist.

  I thumped her over the head with my right fist and she let go and seized me high up on the inside of the left thigh. This really made me yell out and I don’t know just what my immediate future would have been if I hadn’t bumped up against the only chair in the room; it was old and flimsy but it saved me. As the bitch, apparently tiring of gnawing my leg, made a sudden leap at my face I snatched the chair up and fended her off.

  The rest of my spell in the gun room was a sort of parody of a lion-taming act and would have been richly funny to an impartial observer. In fact, in later years I have often wished I could have a cine film of the episode; but at the time, with that great animal stalking me round those few cramped yards of space, the blood trickling down my leg and only a rickety chair to protect me I didn’t feel a bit like laughing. There was a dreadful dedication in the way she followed me and those maddened eyes never left my face for an instant.

  The pups, furious at the unceremonious removal of their delightful source of warmth and nourishment, were crawling blindly across the bed and bawling, all nine of them, at the top of their voices. The din acted as a spur to the bitch and the louder it became the more she pressed home her attack. Every few seconds she would launch herself at me and I would prance about, stabbing at her with my chair in best circus fashion. Once she bore me back against the wall, chair and all; on her hind legs she was about as tall as me and I had a disturbing close-up of the snarling gaping jaws.

  My biggest worry was that my chair was beginning to show signs of wear; the bitch had already crunched two of the spars effortlessly away and I tried not to think of what would happen if the whole thing finally disintegrated. But I was working my way back to the door and when I felt