James Herriot's Dog Stories Read online

  The sight of that tail used to make me think there must be a lot of Irish Setter in Prince, but I was inclined to change my mind as I worked my way forward over the bulging black and white body to the shaggy head and upstanding Alsatian ears. Miss Stubbs often used to call him ‘Mr Heinz’, and though he may not have had 57 varieties in him his hybrid vigour had stood him in good stead. With his heart he should have been dead long ago.

  ‘I thought I’d best give you a ring, Mr Herriot,’ Mrs Broadwith said. She was a comfortable, elderly widow with a square, ruddy face contrasting sharply with the pinched features on the pillow. ‘He’s been coughing right bad this week and this morning he was a bit staggery. Still eats well, though.’

  ‘I bet he does.’ I ran my hands over the rolls of fat on the ribs. ‘It would take something really drastic to put old Prince off his grub.’

  Miss Stubbs laughed from the bed and the old dog, his mouth wide, eyes dancing, seemed to be joining in the joke. I put my stethoscope over his heart and listened, knowing well what I was going to hear. They say the heart is supposed to go ‘lub-dup, lub-dup’, but Prince’s went ‘swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh’. There seemed to be nearly as much blood leaking back as was being pumped into the circulatory system. And another thing, the ‘swish-swoosh’ was a good bit faster than last time; he was on oral digitalis but it wasn’t quite doing its job.

  Gloomily I moved the stethoscope over the rest of the chest. Like all old dogs with a chronic heart weakness he had an ever-present bronchitis and I listened without enthusiasm to the symphony of whistles, rales, squeaks and bubbles which signalled the workings of Prince’s lungs. The old dog stood very erect and proud, his tail still waving slowly. He always took it as a tremendous compliment when I examined him and there was no doubt he was enjoying himself now. Fortunately his was not a very painful ailment.

  Straightening up, I patted his head and he responded immediately by trying to put his paws on my chest. He didn’t quite make it and even that slight exertion started his ribs heaving and his tongue lolling. I gave him an intramuscular injection of digitalin and another of morphine hydrochloride which he accepted with apparent pleasure as part of the game.

  ‘I hope that will steady his heart and breathing, Miss Stubbs. You’ll find he’ll be a bit dopey for the rest of the day and that will help, too. Carry on with the tablets, and I’m going to leave you some more medicine for his bronchitis.’ I handed over a bottle of my old standby mixture of ipecacuanha and ammonium acetate.

  The next stage of the visit began now as Mrs Broadwith brought in a cup of tea and the rest of the animals were let out of the kitchen. There were Ben, a Sealyham, and Sally, a Cocker Spaniel, and they started a deafening barking contest with Prince. They were closely followed by the cats, Arthur and Susie, who stalked in gracefully and began to rub themselves against my trouser legs.

  It was the usual scenario for the many cups of tea I had drunk with Miss Stubbs under the little card which dangled above her bed.

  ‘How are you today?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, much better,’ she replied and immediately, as always, changed the subject.

  Mostly she liked to talk about her pets and the ones she had known right back to her girlhood. She spoke a lot, too, about the days when her family were alive. She loved to describe the escapades of her three brothers and today she showed me a photograph which Mrs Broadwith had found at the bottom of a drawer.

  I took it from her and three young men in the knee breeches and little round caps of the nineties smiled up at me from the yellowed old print; they all held long church warden pipes and the impish humour in their expressions came down undimmed over the years.

  ‘My word, they look really bright lads, Miss Stubbs,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, they were young rips!’ she exclaimed. She threw back her head and laughed, and for a moment her face was radiant, transfigured by her memories.

  The things I had heard in the village came back to me; about the prosperous father and his family who lived in the big house many years ago. Then the foreign investments which crashed and the sudden change in circumstances. ‘When t’owd feller died he was about skint,’ one old man had said. ‘There’s not much brass there now.’

  Probably just enough brass to keep Miss Stubbs and her animals alive and to pay Mrs Broadwith. Not enough to keep the garden dug or the house painted or for any of the normal little luxuries.

  And, sitting there, drinking my tea, with the dogs in a row by the bedside and the cats making themselves comfortable on the bed itself, I felt as I had often felt before – a bit afraid of the responsibility I had. The one thing which brought some light into the life of the brave old woman was the transparent devotion of this shaggy bunch whose eyes were never far from her face. And the snag was that they were all elderly.

  There had, in fact, been four dogs originally, but one of them, a truly ancient Golden Labrador, had died a few months previously. And now I had the rest of them to look after and none of them less than ten years old.

  They were perky enough but all showing some of the signs of old age; Prince with his heart, Sally beginning to drink a lot of water which made me wonder if she was starting with a pyometra, Ben growing steadily thinner with his nephritis. I couldn’t give him new kidneys and I hadn’t much faith in the hexamine tablets I had prescribed. Another peculiar thing about Ben was that I was always having to clip his claws; they grew at an extraordinary rate.

  The cats were better, though Susie was a bit scraggy and I kept up a morbid kneading of her furry abdomen for signs of lymphosarcoma. Arthur was the best of the bunch; he never seemed to ail anything beyond a tendency for his teeth to tartar up.

  This must have been in Miss Stubbs’s mind because, when I had finished my tea, she asked me to look at him. I hauled him across the bedspread and opened his mouth.

  ‘Yes, there’s a bit of the old trouble there. Might as well fix it while I’m here.’

  Arthur was a huge, grey, neutered torn, a living denial of all those theories that cats are cold-natured, selfish and the rest. His fine eyes, framed in the widest cat face I have ever seen, looked out on the world with an all-embracing benevolence and tolerance. His every movement was marked by immense dignity.

  As I started to scrape his teeth his chest echoed with a booming purr like a distant outboard motor. There was no need for anybody to hold him; he sat there placidly and moved only once – when I was using forceps to crack off a tough piece of tartar from a back tooth and accidentally nicked his gum. He casually raised a massive paw as if to say ‘Have a care, chum’, but his claws were sheathed.

  My next visit was less than a month later and was in response to an urgent summons from Mrs Broadwith at six o’clock in the evening. Ben had collapsed. I jumped straight into my car and in less than ten minutes was threading my way through the overgrown grass in the front garden with the animals watching from their window. The barking broke out as I knocked, but Ben’s was absent. As I went into the little room I saw the old dog lying on his side, very still, by the bed.

  D.O.A. is what we write in the day book. Dead on arrival. Just three words but they covered all kinds of situations – the end of milk-fever cows, bloated bullocks, calves in fits. And tonight they meant that I wouldn’t be clipping old Ben’s claws any more.

  It wasn’t often these nephritis cases went off so suddenly but his urine albumen had been building up dangerously lately.

  ‘Well, it was quick, Miss Stubbs. I’m sure the old chap didn’t suffer at all.’ My words sounded lame and ineffectual.

  The old lady was in full command of herself. No tears, only a fixity of expression as she looked down from the bed at her companion for so many years. My idea was to get him out of the place as quickly as possible and I pulled a blanket under him and lifted him up. As I was moving away, Miss Stubbs said, ‘Wait a moment.’ With an effort she turned on to her side and gazed at Ben. Still without changing expression, she reached out and touched his head lightly. Then she