All Creatures Great and Small Read online

  I knew as I stood there in the primitive, cobbled byre with its wooden partitions and rough stone walls that I was looking not just at a cow but at the foundation of the new herd, at Dick Rudd’s hopes for the future.

  It was about a month later that he phoned me. “I want you to come and look at Strawberry for me,” he said. “She’s been doing grand, tipplin’ the milk out, but there’s summat amiss with her this morning.”

  The cow didn’t really look ill and, in fact, she was eating when I examined her, but I noticed that she gulped slightly when she swallowed. Her temperature was normal and her lungs clear but when I stood up by her head I could just hear a faint snoring sound.

  “It’s her throat, Dick,” I said. “It may be just a bit of inflammation but there’s a chance that she’s starting a little abscess in there.” I spoke lightly but I wasn’t happy. Post-pharyngeal abscesses were, in my limited experience, nasty things. They were situated in an inaccessible place, right away behind the back of the throat and if they got very large could interfere seriously with the breathing. I had been lucky with the few I had seen; they had either been small and regressed or had ruptured spontaneously.

  I gave an injection of Prontosil and turned to Dick. “I want you to foment this area behind the angle of the jaw with hot water and rub this salve well in afterwards. You may manage to burst it that way. Do this at least three times a day.”

  I kept looking in at her over the next ten days and the picture was one of steady development of the abscess. The cow was still not acutely ill but she was eating a lot less, she was thinner and was going off her milk. Most of the time I felt rather helpless as I knew that only the rupture of the abscess would bring relief and the various injections I was giving her were largely irrelevant. But the infernal thing was taking a long time to burst.

  It happened that just then Siegfried went off to an equine conference which was to last a week; for a few days I was at full stretch and hardly had time to think about Dick’s cow until he biked in to see me one morning. He was cheerful as usual but he had a strained look.

  “Will you come and see Strawberry? She’s gone right down t’nick over the last three days. I don’t like look of her.”

  I dashed straight out and was in the byre at Birch Tree before Dick was half way home. The sight of Strawberry stopped me in mid-stride and I stared, dry-mouthed at what had once been a show cow. The flesh had melted from her incredibly and she was little more than a hide-covered skeleton. Her rasping breathing could be heard all over the byre and she exhaled with a curious out-puffing of the cheeks which I had never seen before. Her terrified eyes were fixed rigidly on the wall in front of her. Occasionally she gave a painful little cough which brought saliva drooling from her mouth.

  I must have stood there a long time because I became aware of Dick at my shoulder.

  “She’s the worst screw in the place now,” he said grimly.

  I winced inwardly: “Hell, Dick, I’m sorry. I’d no idea she’d got to this state. I can’t believe it.”

  “Aye well it all happened sudden like. I’ve never seen a cow alter so fast.”

  “The abscess must be right at its peak,” I said. “She hasn’t much space to breathe through now.” As I spoke the cow’s limbs began to tremble and for a moment I thought she would fall. I ran out to the car and got a tin of Kaolin poultice. “Come on, let’s get this on to her throat. It just might do the trick.”

  When we had finished I looked at Dick. “I think tonight will do it. It’s just got to burst.”

  “And if it doesn’t she’ll snuff it tomorrow,” he grunted. I must have looked very woebegone because suddenly his undefeated grin flashed out. “Never mind, lad, you’ve done everything anybody could do.”

  But as I walked away I wasn’t so sure. Mrs. Rudd met me at the car. It was her baking day and she pushed a little loaf into my hand. It made me feel worse.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  THAT NIGHT I SAT alone in the big room at Skeldale House and brooded. Siegfried was still away, I had nobody to turn to and I wished to God I knew what I was going to do with that cow of Dick’s in the morning. By the time I went up to bed I had decided that if nothing further had happened I would have to go in behind the angle of the jaw with a knife.

  I knew just where the abscess was but it was a long way in and en route there were such horrific things as the carotid artery and the jugular vein. I tried hard to keep them out of my mind but they haunted my dreams; huge, throbbing, pulsating things with their precious contents threatening to burst at any moment through their fragile walls. I was awake by six o’clock and after an hour of staring miserably at the ceiling I could stand it no longer. I got up and, without washing or shaving, drove out to the farm.

  As I crept fearfully into the byre I saw with a sick dismay that Strawberry’s stall was empty. So that was that. She was dead. After all, she had looked like it yesterday. I was turning away when Dick called to me from the doorway.

  “I’ve got her in a box on t’other side of the yard. Thought she’d be a bit more comfortable in there.”

  I almost ran across the cobbles and as we approached the door the sound of the dreadful breathing came out to us. Strawberry was off her legs now—it had cost her the last of her strength to walk to the box and she lay on her chest, her head extended straight in front of her, nostrils dilated, eyes staring, cheeks puffing in her desperate fight for breath.

  But she was alive and the surge of relief I felt seemed to prick me into action, blow away my hesitations.

  “Dick,” I said, “I’ve just got to operate on your cow. This thing is never going to burst in time, so it’s now or never. But there’s one thing I want you to know—the only way I can think of doing it is to go in from behind the jaw. I’ve never done this before, I’ve never seen it before and I’ve never heard of anybody doing it. If I nick any of those big blood vessels in there it’ll kill her within a minute.”

  “She can’t last much longer like this,” Dick grunted. “There’s nowt to lose—get on with it.”

  In most operations in large bovines we have to pull the animal down with ropes and then use general anaesthesia, but there was no need for this with Strawberry. She was too far gone. I just pushed gently at her shoulder and she rolled on to her side and lay still.

  I quickly infiltrated the area from beneath the ear to the angle of the jaw with local anaesthetic then laid out my instruments.

  “Stretch her head straight out and slightly back, Dick,” I said. Kneeling in the straw I incised the skin, cut carefully through the long thin layer of the brachiocephalic muscle and held the fibres apart with retractors. Somewhere down there was my objective and I tried to picture the anatomy of the region clearly in my mind. Just there the maxillary veins ran together to form the great jugular and, deeper and more dangerous, was the branching, ramifying carotid. If I pushed my knife straight in there, behind the mandibular salivary gland, I’d just about hit the spot. But as I held the razor-sharp blade over the small space I had cleared, my hand began to tremble. I tried to steady it but I was like a man with malaria. The fact had to be faced that I was too scared to cut any further. I put the scalpel down, lifted a pair of long artery forceps and pushed them steadily down through the hole in the muscle. It seemed that I had gone an incredibly long way when, almost unbelievingly, I saw a thin trickle of pus along the gleaming metal. I was into the abscess.

  Gingerly, I opened the forceps as wide as possible to enlarge the drainage hole and as I did the trickle became a creamy torrent which gushed over my hand, down the cow’s neck and onto the straw. I stayed quite still till it had stopped, then withdrew the forceps.

  Dick looked at me from the other side of the head. “Now what, boss?” he said softly.

  “Well, I’ve emptied the thing, Dick,” I said, “and by all the laws she should soon be a lot better. Come on, let’s roll her on to her chest again.”

  When we had got the cow settled comfortably with a bale of straw su