James Herriot's Dog Stories Read online

  I flopped back and sat down in the straw while Amber leaped around me, licking and wagging. Despite her terrible state, her nature was unchanged.

  But this couldn’t go on. I knew now that she and I had come to the end of the road. As I tried to think, I stroked her head, and her cheerful eyes were pathetic in the scarecrow face. My misery was compounded of various things: I had grown too fond of her, I had failed, and she had nobody, only Sister Rose nad myself. And that was another thing – what was I going to tell that good lady after all my brave words?

  It took me until the following lunch time to summon the will to telephone her. In my effort to be matter-of-fact about the thing I fear I was almost brusque.

  ‘Sister,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid it’s all over with Amber. I’ve tried everything and she has got worse all the time. I do think it would be the kindest thing to put her to sleep.’

  Shock was evident in her voice. ‘But . . . it seems so awful. Just for a skin disease.’

  ‘I know, that’s what everybody thinks. But this is a dreadful thing. In its worst form it can ruin an animal’s life. Amber must be very uncomfortable now and soon she is going to be in pain. We can’t let her go on.’

  ‘Oh . . . well, I trust in your judgement, Mr Herriot. I know you wouldn’t do anything that wasn’t necessary.’ There was a long pause and I knew she was trying to control her voice. Then she spoke calmly. ‘I think I would like to come out and see her when I can get away from the hospital.’

  ‘Please, Sister,’ I said gently, ‘I’d much rather you didn’t.’

  Again the pause, then, ‘Very well, Mr Herriot. I leave everything to you.’

  I had an urgent visit immediately afterwards and a rush of work kept me going all afternoon. I never really stopped thinking about what I had to do later but at least the other pressures stopped it from obsessing me. It was as always pitch dark when I drove into the yard and opened the garage doors.

  And it was like all the other times. Amber was there in the beam, paws on the plywood, body swinging with her wagging, mouth open and panting with delight, welcoming me.

  I put the barbiturate and syringe into my pocket before climbing into the pen. For a long time I made a fuss of her, patting her and talking to her as she leaped up at me. Then I filled the syringe.

  ‘Sit, girl,’ I said, and she flopped obediently on to her hindquarters. I gripped her right leg above the elbow to raise the radial vein. There was no need for clipping – all the hair had gone. Amber looked at me interestedly, wondering what new game this might be as I slipped the needle into the vein. I realised that there was no need to say the things I always said. ‘She won’t know a thing.’ ‘This is just an overdose of anaesthetic.’ ‘It’s as easy way out for her.’ There was no sorrowing owner to hear me. There were just the two of us.

  And as I murmured, ‘Good girl, Amber, good lass,’ as she sank down on the straw, I had the conviction that if I had said those things they would have been true. She didn’t know a thing between her playfulness and oblivion and it was indeed an easy way out from that prison which would soon become a torture chamber.

  I stepped from the pen and switched off the car lights and in the cold darkness the yard had never seemed so empty. After the weeks of struggle the sense of loss and of failure was overpowering, but at the end I was at least able to spare Amber the ultimate miseries: the internal abscesses and septicaemia which await a dog suffering from a progressive and incurable demodectic mange.

  For a long time I carried a weight around with me, and I feel some of it now after all these years. Because the tragedy of Amber was that she was born too soon. At the present time we can cure most cases of demodectic mange by a long course of organo-phosphates and antibiotics, but neither of these things were available then when I needed them.

  It is still a dread condition; but we have fought patiently with our modern weapons and won most of the battles over the past few years. I know several fine dogs in Darrowby who have survived, and when I see them in the streets, healthy and glossy-coated, the picture of Amber comes back into my mind. It is always dark and she is always in the headlights’ beam.

  Even in these modern times my heart sinks when I see a dog with bare patches on its legs and face and a mousy smell, although the prognosis is rather better than it used to be. But demodectic mange is a dreaded condition because it is an appalling, almost unacceptable thought that an animal can lose its life because of a skin condition. I often wonder why the memory of Amber should be so vivid and painful. She was a cheerful and lovable little creature throughout her illness, but I have known many dogs like that. Perhaps she would not have stayed in my memory so clearly if I had treated her in one of the steel kennels in our present-day surgery and not under the primitive conditions which were available then. That old stable is never used now, but whenever I wander up to the yard, I look into the dark doorway and remember that long struggle which Amber and I both lost.

  47. Counting Blessings

  ‘Was there no peace in a vet’s life?’ I wondered fretfully as I hurried my car along the road to Gilthorpe village. Eight o’clock on a Sunday evening and here I was trailing off to visit a dog ten miles away which, according to Helen who had taken the message, had been ailing for more than a week.

  I had worked all morning, then spent an afternoon in the hills with the children and some of their friends, a longstanding weekly event during which we had managed to explore nearly every corner of the district over the years. Jimmy had set a brisk pace with his hardy young pals and I had had to carry Rosie on my shoulders up the steepest slopes. After tea there was the usual routine of baths, story-reading and bed for the two of them, then I was ready to settle down with the Sunday papers and listen to the radio.

  Yet here I was back on the treadmill, staring through the windscreen at the roads and the walls which I saw day in, day out. When I left Darrowby the streets of the little town were empty in the gathering dusk and the houses had that tight-shut, comfortable look which raised images of armchairs and pipes and firesides, and now as I saw the lights of the farms winking on the fell-sides I could picture the stocksmen dozing contentedly with their feet up.

  I had not passed a single car on the darkening road. There was nobody out but Herriot.

  I was really sloshing around in my trough of self-pity when I drew up outside a row of greystone cottages at the far end of Gilthorpe. Mrs Gundall, Number 4, Chestnut Row, Helen had written on the slip of paper, and as I opened the gate and stepped through the tiny strip of garden my mind was busy with half-formed ideas of what I was going to say.

  My few years’ experience in practice had taught me that it did no good at all to remonstrate with people for calling me out at unreasonable times. I knew perfectly well that my words never seemed to get through to them and that they would continue to do exactly as they had done before, but for all that I had to say something if only to make me feel better.

  No need to be rude or ill-mannered, just a firm statement of the position, that vets liked to relax on Sunday evenings just like other people; that we did not mind at all coming out for emergencies but that we did object to having to visit animals which had been ill for a week.

  I had my speech fairly well prepared when a little middle-aged woman opened the door.

  ‘Good evening, Mrs Cundall,’ I said, slightly tightlipped.

  ‘Oh, it’s Mr Herriot.’ She smiled shyly. ‘We’ve never met but I’ve seen you walkin’ round Darrowby on market days. Come inside.’

  The door opened straight into the little low-beamed living-room and my first glance took in the shabby furniture and some pictures framed in tarnished gilt, when I noticed that the end of the room was partly curtained off.

  Mrs Cundall pulled the curtain aside. In a narrow bed a man was lying, a skeleton-thin man whose eyes looked up at me from hollows in a yellowed face.

  ‘This is my husband, Ron,’ she said cheerfully, and the man smiled and raised a bony arm from the quilt in g