James Herriot (47 page)

“He’ll still look out”

“Even if he can’t see?”

“Yes.” I put my hand on his arm. “You must understand, Andrew, when an animal loses his sight he doesn’t realise what’s happened to him. It’s a terrible thing, I know, but he doesn’t suffer the mental agony of a human being.”

He stood up and took a long shuddering breath. “But I’m having the agony. I’ve been dreading this happening for so long. I haven’t been able to sleep for thinking about it. It seems so cruel and unjust for this to strike a helpless animal—a little creature who’s never done anybody any harm.” He began to wring his hands again and pace about the room.

“You’re just torturing yourself!” I said sharply. “That’s part of your trouble. You’re using Digger to punish yourself instead of doing something useful.”

“Oh but what can I do that will really help? All those things you talked about—they can’t give him a happy life.”

“Oh but they can. Digger can be happy for years and years if you really work at it. It’s up to you.”

Like a man in a dream he bent and gathered his dog into his arms and shuffled along the passage to the front door. As he went down the steps into the street I called out to him.

“Keep in touch with your doctor, Andrew. Take your pills regularly—and remember.” I raised my voice to a shout “Remember you’ve got a job to do with that dog!”

After Paul I was on a knife edge of apprehension but this time there was no tragic news to shatter me. Instead I saw Andrew Vine frequently, sometimes in the town with Digger on a lead, occasionally in his car with the little white head framed always in the windscreen, and most often in the fields by the river where he seemed to be carrying out my advice by following the good open tracks again and again.

It was by the river that I stopped him one day. “How are things going, Andrew?”

He looked at me unsmilingly. “Oh, he’s finding his way around not too badly. I keep my eye on him. I always avoid that field over there—there’s a lot of boggy places in it.”

“Good, that’s the idea. And how are you yourself?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes, of course.”

He tried to smile. “Well this is one of my good days. I’m just tense and dreadfully unhappy. On my bad days I’m terror-stricken, despairing, utterly desolate.”

“I’m sorry, Andrew.”

He shrugged. “Don’t think I’m wallowing in self pity. You asked me. Anyway, I have a system. Every morning I look at myself in the mirror and I say, ‘Okay, Vine, here’s another bloody awful day coming up, but you’re going to do your job and you’re going to look after your dog.’“

“That’s good, Andrew. And it will all pass. The whole thing will go away and you’ll be all right one day.”

“That’s what the doctor says.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “But in the meantime …” He looked down at his dog. “Come on, Digger.”

He turned and strode away abruptly with the little dog trotting after him, and there was something in the set of the man’s shoulders and the forward thrust of his head which gave me hope. He was a picture of fierce determination.

My hopes were fulfilled. Both Andrew and Digger won through. I knew that within months, but the final picture in my mind is of a meeting I had with the two of them about two years later. It was on the flat table-land above Darrowby where I had first seen Digger hurtling joyously among the gorse bushes.

He wasn’t doing so badly now, running freely over the smooth green turf, sniffing among the herbage, cocking a leg now and then with deep contentment against the drystone wall which ran along the hillside.

Andrew laughed when he saw me. He had put on weight and looked a different person. “Digger knows every inch of this walk,” he said. “I think it’s just about his favourite spot—you can see how he’s enjoying himself.”

I nodded. “He certainly looks a happy little dog.”

“Yes, he’s happy all right. He has a good life and honestly I often forget that he can’t see.” He paused. “You were right, that day in your surgery. You said this would happen.”

“Well that’s great, Andrew,” I said. “And you’re happy, too, aren’t you?”

“I am, Mr. Herriot. Thank God, I am.” A shadow crossed his face. “When I think how it was then, I can’t believe my luck. It was like being in a dark valley, and bit by bit I’ve climbed out into the sunshine.”

“I can see that. You’re as good as new, now.”

He smiled. “I’m better than that—better than I was before. That terrible experience did me good. Remember you said I was torturing myself? I realised I had spent all my days doing that. I used to take every little mishap of life and beat myself over the head with it.”

“You don’t have to tell me, Andrew,” I said ruefully. “I’ve always been pretty good at that myself.”

“Well yes, I suppose a lot of us are. But I became an expert and look where it got me. It helped so much to have Digger to look after.” His face lit up and he pointed over the grass. “Just look at that!”

The little dog had been inspecting an ancient fence, a few rotting planks which were probably part of an old sheep fold, and as we watched he leaped effortlessly between the spars to the other side.

“Marvellous!” I said delightedly. “You’d think there was nothing wrong with him.”

Andrew turned to me. “Mr. Herriot, when I see a thing like that it makes me wonder. Can a blind dog do such a thing. Do you think … do you think there’s a chance he can see just a little?”

I hesitated. “Maybe he can see a bit through that pigment but it can’t be much—a flicker of light and shade, perhaps. I really don’t know. But in any case, he’s become so clever in his familiar surroundings that it doesn’t make much difference.”

“Yes … yes.” He smiled philosophically. “Anyway, we must get on our way. Come on, Digger!”

He snapped his fingers and set off along a track which pushed a vivid green finger through the heather, pointing clean and unbroken to the sunny skyline. His dog bounded ahead of him, not just at a trot but at a gallop.

I have made no secret of the fact that I never really knew the cause of Digger’s blindness, but in the light of modern developments in eye surgery I believe it was a condition called keratitis sicca. This was simply not recognised in those early days and anyway, if I had known I could have done little about it. The name means “dryness of the cornea” and it occurs when the dog is not producing enough tears. At the present time it is treated by instilling artificial tears or by an intricate operation whereby the salivary ducts are transferred to the eyes. But even now, despite these things, I have seen that dread pigmentation taking over in the end.

When I look back on the whole episode my feeling is of thankfulness. All sorts of things help people to pull out of a depression. Mostly it is their family—the knowledge that wife and children are dependent on them—sometimes it is a cause to work for, but in Andrew Vine’s case it was a dog.

I often think of the dark valley which closed around him at that time and I am convinced he came out of it on the end of Digger’s lead.

N
OW THAT
I
HAD
done my first solo I was beginning to appreciate the qualities of my instructor. There was no doubt F. O. Woodham was a very good teacher.

There was a war on and no time for niceties. He had to get green young men into the air on their own without delay and he had done it with me.

I used to fancy myself as a teacher, too, with the boys who came to see practice in Darrowby. I could see myself now, smiling indulgently at one of my pupils.

“You don’t see this sort of thing in country practice, David,” I said. He was one of the young people who occasionally came with me on my rounds. Fifteen years old, and like all the others he thought he wanted to be a veterinary surgeon. But at the moment he looked a little bewildered.

I really couldn’t blame him. It was his first visit and he had expected to spend a day with me in the rough and tumble of large animal practice in the Yorkshire Dales and now there was this lady with the poodle and Emmeline. The lady’s progress along the passage to the consulting room had been punctuated by a series of squeaking noises produced by her squeezing a small rubber doll. At each squeak Lucy advanced a few reluctant steps until a final pressure lured her on to the table. There she stood trembling and looking soulfully around her.

“She won’t go anywhere without Emmeline,” the lady explained.

“Emmeline?”

“The doll.” She held up the rubber toy. “Since this trouble started Lucy has become devoted to her.”

“I see. And what trouble is that?”

“Well, it’s been going on for about two weeks now.

She’s so listless and strange, and she hardly eats anything.”

I reached behind me to the trolley for the thermometer. “Right, we’ll have a look at her. There’s something wrong when a dog won’t eat.”

The temperature was normal. I went over her chest thoroughly with my stethoscope without finding any unusual sounds. The heart thudded steadily in my ears. Careful palpation of the abdomen revealed nothing out of the way.

The lady stroked Lucy’s curly poll and the little animal looked up at her with sorrowful liquid eyes. “I’m getting really worried about her. She doesn’t want to go for walks. In fact we can’t even entice her from the house without Emmeline.”

“Eh?”

“I say she won’t take a step outside unless we squeak Emmeline at her, and then they both go out together. Even then she just trails along like an old dog, and she’s only three after all. You know how lively she is normally.”

I nodded. I did know. This little poodle was a bundle of energy. I had seen her racing around the fields down by the river, jumping to enormous heights as she chased a ball. She must be suffering from something pretty severe, but so far I was baffled.

And I wished the lady wouldn’t keep on about Emmeline and the squeaking. I shot a side glance at David. I had been holding forth to him, telling him how ours was a scientific profession and that he would have to be really hot at physics, chemistry and biology to gain entrance to a veterinary school, and it didn’t fit in with all this.

Maybe I could guide the conversation along more clinical lines.

“Any more symptoms?” I asked. “Any cough, constipation, diarrhoea? Does she ever cry out in pain?”

The lady shook her head. “No. Nothing like that. She just looks around looking at us with such a pitiful expression and searching for Emmeline.”

Oh dear, there it was again. I cleared my throat. “She never vomits at all? Especially after a meal?”

“Never. When she does eat a little she goes straight away to find Emmeline and takes her to her basket.”

“Really? Well I can’t see that that has anything to do with it. Are you sure she isn’t lame at times?”

The lady didn’t seem to be listening. “And when she gets Emmeline into her basket she sort of circles around, scratching the blanket as though she was making a bed for the little thing.”

I gritted my teeth. Would she never stop? Then a light flashed in the darkness.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Did you say making a bed?”

“Yes, she scratches around for ages then puts Emmeline down.”

“Ah yes.” The next question would settle it. “When was she last in season?”

The lady tapped a finger against her cheek. “Let me see. It was in the middle of May—that would be about nine weeks ago.”

There wasn’t a mystery any more.

“Roll her over, please,” I said.

With Lucy stretched on her back, her eyes regarding the surgery ceiling with deep emotion, I ran my fingers over the mammary glands. They were turgid and swollen. I gently squeezed one of the teats and a bead of milk appeared.

“She’s got false pregnancy,” I said.

“What on earth is that?” The lady looked at me, round-eyed.

“Oh, it’s quite common in bitches. They get the idea they are going to have pups and around the end of the gestation period they start this business. Making a bed for the pups is typical, but some of them actually swell in the abdomen. They do all sorts of peculiar things.”

“My goodness, how extraordinary!” The lady began to laugh. “Lucy, you silly little thing, worrying us over nothing.” She looked at me across the table. “How long is she going to be like this?”

I turned on the hot tap and began to wash my hands. “Not for long. I’ll give you some tablets for her. If she’s not much better in a week come back for more. But you needn’t worry—even if it takes a bit longer she’ll be her old self in the end.”

I went through to the dispensary, put the tablets in a box and handed them over. The lady thanked me then turned to her pet who was sitting on the tiled floor looking dreamily into space.

“Come along Lucy,” she said, but the poodle took no notice. “Lucy! Do you hear me? We’re going now!” She began to walk briskly along the passage but the little animal merely put her head on one side and appeared to be hearkening to inward music. After a minute her mistress reappeared and regarded her with some exasperation. “Oh really, you are naughty. I suppose there’s only one way.” She opened her handbag and produced the rubber toy.

“Squeak-squeak,” went Emmeline and the poodle raised her eyes with misty adoration. “Squeak-squeak, squeak-squeak.” The sound retreated along the passage and Lucy followed entranced until she disappeared round the corner.

I turned to David with an apologetic grin. “Right,” I said. “We’ll get out on the road. I know you want to see farm practice and I assure you it’s vastly different from what you’ve seen here.”

Sitting in the car, I continued. “Mind you, don’t get me wrong. I’m not decrying small animal work. In fact I’d have to admit that it is the most highly skilled branch of the profession and I personally think that small animal surgery is tremendously demanding. Just don’t judge it all by Emmeline. Anyway, we have one doggy visit before we go out into the country.”

“What’s that?” the lad asked.

“Well, I’ve had a call from a Mr. Rington to say that his dalmatian bitch has completely altered her behaviour. In fact she’s acting so strangely that he doesn’t want to bring her to the surgery.”

“What do you think that might be?”