Lord God Made Them All (18 page)

When I arrived I still had no idea what I was going to do, and when I spoke I was half-surprised at the things I said.

“Sister, I’ve come to take Amber home with me. I’ll be able to treat her myself every day, then. You’ve got enough to do, looking after your other dogs. I know you have done everything possible, but I’m going to take on this job myself.”

“But … you are a busy man. How will you find the time?”

“I can treat her in the evenings and any other spare moments. This way I’ll be able to check on her progress all the time. I’m determined to get her right.”

And, driving back to the surgery, I was surprised at the depth of my feeling. Throughout my career I have often had this compulsive desire to cure an animal, but never stronger than with Amber. The young bitch was delighted to be in the car with me. Like everything else, she seemed to regard this as just another game, and she capered around, licking my ear, resting her paws on the dash and peering through the windscreen. I looked at her happy face, scarred by the disease and smeared with Odylen, and thumped my hand on the wheel. Demodectic mange was hell, but this was one case that was going to get better.

It was the beginning of a strangely vivid episode in my life, as fresh now as it was then, more than thirty years ago. We had no facilities for boarding dogs—very few vets had at that time—but I made up a comfortable billet for her in the old stable in the yard. I penned off one of the stalls with a sheet of plywood and put down a bed of straw. Despite its age, the stable was a substantial building and free from draughts. She would be snug in there.

I made sure of one thing. I kept Helen out of the whole business. I remembered how stricken she had been when we adopted Oscar the cat and then lost him to his rightful owner, and I knew she would soon grow too fond of this dog. But I had forgotten about myself.

Veterinary surgeons would never last in their profession if they became too involved with their patients because I knew from experience that most of my colleagues were just as sentimental over animals as the owners, but before I knew what was happening, I became involved with Amber.

I fed her myself, changed her bedding and carried out the treatment. I saw her as often as possible during the day, but when I think of her now, it is always night. It was late November, when darkness came in soon after four o’clock, and the last few visits were a dim-sighted fumbling in cow byres; when I came home, I always drove round to the yard at the back of Skeldale House and trained my headlights on the stable.

When I threw open the door, Amber was always there, waiting to welcome me, her forefeet resting on the plywood sheet, her long yellow ears gleaming in the bright beam. That is my picture of her to this day. Her temperament never altered, and her tail swished the straw unceasingly as I did all the uncomfortable things to her: rubbing the tender skin with the lotion, injecting her with the staph toxoid, taking further skin scrapings to check progress.

As the days and the weeks went by and I saw no improvement, I became a little desperate. I gave her sulphur baths, derris baths, although I had done no good with such things in the past, and I also began to go through all the proprietary things on the market. In veterinary practice every resistant disease spawns a multitude of quack “cures,” and I lost count of the shampoos and washes I swilled over the young animal in the hope that there might be some magic element in them, despite my misgivings.

Those nightly sessions under the headlights became part of my life, and I think I might have gone on blindly for an indefinite period, until one very dark evening with the rain beating on the cobbles of the yard I seemed to see the young dog for the first time.

The condition had spread over the entire body, leaving only tufts and straggling wisps of hair. The long ears were golden no longer. They were almost bald, as was the rest of her face and head. Everywhere, her skin was thickened and wrinkled and had assumed a bluish tinge. And when I squeezed it, a slow ooze of pus and serum came up around my fingers.

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 and 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 lunchtime 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 judgment, 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 onto 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 an 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,” while 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 failure was overpowering, but at the end I was at least able to spare Amber the ultimate miseries: the internal abscesses and septicaemia that 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 was 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 headlight’s beam.

“J
UST LOOK AT THAT,”
the farmer said.

“At what?” I was “cleansing” a cow (removing the afterbirth), and my arm was buried deep in the cow’s uterus. I turned my head to see him pointing at the byre floor beneath my patient. I saw four white jets of milk spurting onto the concrete from the animal’s udder.

He grinned. “That’s a funny thing, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t, really,” I said. “It’s a reflex action caused by my hand twiddling the uterus about. This acts on a gland in the brain which causes the milk to flow. I often see cows letting their milk down like that when I’m cleansing them.”

“Well, that’s a rum ’un.” The farmer laughed. “Any road, you’d better get finished quick or you’ll have a few pints of milk to knock off your bill.”

That was in 1947, the year of the great snow. I have never known snow like that before or since, and the odd thing was that it took such a long time to get started. Nothing happened in November and we had a green Christmas, but then it began to get colder and colder. All through January a north-east wind blew, apparently straight from the Arctic; usually after a few days of this sort of unbearable blast, snow would come and make things a bit warmer. But not in 1947.

Each day we thought it couldn’t get any colder, but it did, and then, borne on the wind, very fine flakes began to appear over the last few days of the month. They were so small you could hardly see them, but they were the forerunners of the real thing. At the beginning of February, big, fat flakes started a steady, relentless descent on our countryside, and we knew, after all that buildup, that we were in for it.

For weeks and weeks the snow fell, sometimes in a gentle, almost lazy curtain that remorselessly obliterated the familiar landmarks, at others in fierce blizzards. In between, the frost took over and transformed the roads into glassy tracks of flattened snow over which we drove at fifteen miles an hour.

The long garden at Skeldale House disappeared under a white blanket. There was a single deep channel by the wall-side where I fought my way daily to my car in the yard at the top.

The yard itself had to be dug out every day and the opening of the big double doors into the yard was a back-breaking job. One day I found the doors were jammed immovably in high mounds of frozen snow. There was nothing I could do about it so they were left standing open for the rest of the winter.

To get to our cases we did a lot of walking since so many of the farm tracks were blocked wall to wall. On the very high country there were some farms we couldn’t reach at all, and that was very sad because there was no doubt that many animals died for lack of veterinary help. It was around the middle of March when helicopters were dropping food on these isolated spots that Bert Kealey telephoned me.

He was one of those out of reach on a high moor that was bleak even in summertime, and I was surprised to hear his voice.

“I thought your phone wires would be down, Bert,” I said.

“Naw, they’ve survived, God knows how.” The young farmer’s voice was cheerful, as always. He ran a small suckling herd on the high tops and was one of the many who scratched a living from the unfriendly soil.

“But ah’m in trouble,” he went on. “Polly’s just had a litter, and she hasn’t a drop of milk.”

“Oh dear, that’s unfortunate,” I said. Polly was the only pig on the Kealey farm.

“Aye, it’s a beggar. Bad enough losin’ the litter—there’s twelve smashin’ little pigs—but it’s Tess I’m bothered about.”

“Yes … yes …” I was thinking of Tess, too. She was Bert’s eight-year-old daughter, and she had a thing about little pigs. She had persuaded her father to buy her an in-pig sow for her birthday so that she could have a litter of her own. I could remember Tess’s excitement when she showed me her birthday gift a few days after its arrival.

“That’s Polly Pig,” she said, pointing to the sow nuzzling the straw in its pen. “She’s mine. My dad gave her to me.”

I leaned over the pen. “Yes, I know. You’re a lucky girl. She looks a fine pig to me.”

“Oh, she is, she is.” The little girl’s eyes shone with pleasure. “I feed her every day, and she lets me stroke her. She’s nice.”

“I bet she is. She looks nice.”

“Yes, and do you know something else?” Tess’s face grew serious, and her voice took on a conspiratorial tone. “She’s going to have babies in March.”

“Well, I never!” I said. “Is that so? You’ll have a whole lot of little pink pigs to look after.” I held my hands a few inches apart. “Just about this size.”

She was so thrilled at the thought that she was lost for words. She just smiled happily, got hold of the wall of the pen and began to jump up and down.

All this came back to me as I listened to Bert Kealey’s voice on the phone.

“Do you think she’s got mastitis, Bert? Is the udder red and swollen? Is she off her food?”

“No, nowt like that. She’s eatin’ her head off, and her udder’s not a bit inflamed.”

“Well, then, it’s a straight case of agalactia. She needs a shot of pituitrin, but how the heck is she going to get it? Your district’s been cut off for weeks now.”

It takes a lot to make a Yorkshire farmer admit that his farm is inaccessible because of the weather, but these were exceptional circumstances and Bert had to agree.

“I know,” he said. “Ah’ve tried diggin’ me road out, but it fills up as fast as I clear it. Anyway, top road’s blocked for two miles, so I’m wastin’ me time.”

I thought for a moment. “Have you tried getting some cow’s milk into the piglets? An egg mixed with a quart of milk and a teaspoonful of glucose isn’t a bad milk substitute. I know you got some glucose for those scouring calves.”

“I’ve tried ’em with that,” Bert replied. “Put it in a Yorkshire puddin’ tin and dipped their noses in it, but they wouldn’t look at it. If only they could have a good suck at their mother and get summat into their bellies it would start them off, and then they’d maybe have a go at t’substitute.”