Lord God Made Them All (41 page)

Nobody interfered. Maybe we were all a bit irritated by his antics during the afternoon, but we stood back and laughed. I laughed so much that it hurt my bruised ribs as Mr. Dunning shot down one side of the row of tumblers, then up the other, with the big animal’s nose a foot behind his neck. It might have been a Roman arena, with the mocking spectators and Andy away above rocking perilously in his cradle as he watched the chase.

It had to end sometime. After the second circuit Mr. Dunning’s cap flew off, he made a few lunging strides, then fell flat on his face in the straw. The animal did nothing more than run over the top of him, then allowed itself to be caught as though the whole thing had been a tease.

The little farmer jumped to his feet, hurt only in his dignity, and glared at us as he retrieved his cap.

With the help of the brothers I dehorned the beast, and the afternoon’s work was over.

We helped Andy down from the rack, and it took quite a while to brush the hayseeds from his smart serge. He watched impassively as I cleaned and dried my guillotine and with an effort heaved it into the boot. Then, with my own little brush, I washed the thick plastering of muck from my Wellingtons before putting on my shoes.

We got into the car and drove away into the darkening countryside. Andy lit another cigarette, and I could see him glancing at my sweaty, blood-flecked face and at my hand feeling the tenderness of my ribs under my jacket.

“Jim,” he said at length. “It’s funny how you can jump to conclusions. Maybe my own job isn’t so bad after all.”

I
N THE SEMI-DARKNESS OF
the surgery passage I thought it was a hideous growth dangling from the side of the dog’s face, but as he came closer, I saw that it was only a condensed milk can. Not that condensed milk cans are commonly found sprouting from dogs’ cheeks, but I was relieved because I knew I was dealing with Brandy again.

I hoisted him onto the table. “Brandy, you’ve been at the dustbin again.”

The big golden Labrador gave me an apologetic grin and did his best to lick my face. He couldn’t manage it since his tongue was jammed inside the can, but he made up for it by a furious wagging of tail and rear end.

“Oh, Mr. Herriot, I am sorry to trouble you again.” Mrs. Westby, his attractive young mistress, smiled ruefully. “He just won’t keep out of that dustbin. Sometimes the children and I can get the cans off ourselves, but this one is stuck fast. His tongue is trapped under the lid.”

“Yes… yes …” I eased my finger along the jagged edge of the metal. “It’s a bit tricky, isn’t it? We don’t want to cut his mouth.”

As I reached for a pair of forceps, I thought of the many other occasions when I had done something like this for Brandy. He was one of my patients, a huge, lolloping, slightly goofy animal, but this dustbin raiding was becoming an obsession.

He liked to fish out a can and lick out the tasty remnants, but his licking was carried out with such dedication that he burrowed deeper and deeper until he got stuck. Again and again he had been freed by his family or myself from fruit salad cans, corned beef cans, baked bean cans, soup cans. There didn’t seem to be any kind of can he didn’t like.

I gripped the edge of the lid with my forceps and gently bent it back along its length till I was able to lift it away from the tongue. An instant later, that tongue was slobbering all over my cheek as Brandy expressed his delight and thanks.

“Get back, you daft dog!” I said, laughing, as I held the panting face away from me.

“Yes, come down, Brandy.” Mrs. Westby hauled him from the table and spoke sharply. “It’s all very fine, making a fuss now, but you’re becoming a nuisance with this business. It will have to stop.”

The scolding had no effect on the lashing tail, and I saw that his mistress was smiling. You just couldn’t help liking Brandy because he was a great ball of affection and tolerance, without an ounce of malice in him.

I had seen the Westby children—there were three girls and a boy—carrying him around by the legs, upside down, or pushing him in a pram, sometimes dressed in baby clothes. Those youngsters played all sorts of games with him, but he suffered them all with good humour. In fact, I am sure he enjoyed them.

Brandy had other idiosyncracies, apart from his fondness for dustbins.

I was attending the Westby cat at their home one afternoon when I noticed the dog acting strangely. Mrs. Westby was sitting, knitting in an armchair, while the oldest girl squatted on the hearth rug with me and held the cat’s head.

It was when I was searching my pockets for my thermometer that I noticed Brandy slinking into the room. He wore a furtive air as he moved across the carpet and sat down with studied carelessness in front of his mistress. After a few moments he began to work his rear end gradually up the front of the chair towards her knees. Absently, she took a hand away from her knitting and pushed him down, but he immediately restarted his backward ascent. It was an extraordinary mode of progression, his hips moving in a very slow rumba rhythm as he elevated them inch by inch, and all the time the golden face was blank and innocent, as though nothing at all were happening.

Fascinated, I stopped hunting for my thermometer and watched. Mrs. Westby was absorbed in an intricate part of her knitting and didn’t seem to notice that Brandy’s bottom was now firmly parked on her shapely knees which were clad in blue jeans. The dog paused, as though acknowledging that phase one had been successfully completed, then ever so gently he began to consolidate his position, pushing his way up the front of the chair with his fore limbs, till at one time he was almost standing on his head.

It was at that moment, just when one final backward heave would have seen the great dog ensconced on her lap, that Mrs. Westby finished the tricky bit of knitting and looked up.

“Oh, really, Brandy, you are silly!” She put a hand on his rump and sent him slithering disconsolately to the carpet, where he lay and looked at her with liquid eyes.

“What was all that about?” I asked.

Mrs. Westby laughed. “Oh, it’s these old blue jeans. When Brandy first came here as a tiny puppy, I spent hours nursing him on my knee, and I used to wear the jeans a lot then. Ever since, even though he’s a grown dog, the very sight of the things makes him try to get on my knee.”

“But he doesn’t just jump up?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “He’s tried it and got ticked off. He knows perfectly well I can’t have a huge Labrador in my lap.”

“So now it’s the stealthy approach, eh?”

She giggled. “That’s right. When I’m preoccupied—knitting or reading—sometimes he manages to get nearly all the way up, and if he’s been playing in the mud he makes an awful mess, and I have to go and change. That’s when he really does receive a scolding.”

A patient like Brandy added colour to my daily round. When I was walking my own dog, I often saw him playing in the fields by the river. One particularly hot day many of the dogs were taking to the water, either to chase sticks or just to cool off, but whereas they glided in and swam off sedately, Brandy’s approach was quite unique.

I watched as he ran up to the river bank, expecting him to pause before entering. But, instead, he launched himself outwards, legs splayed in a sort of swallow dive, and hung for a moment in the air rather like a flying fox before splashing thunderously into the depths. To me it was the action of a completely happy extrovert.

On the following day in those same fields I witnessed something even more extraordinary. There is a little children’s playground in one corner—a few swings, a roundabout and a slide. Brandy was disporting himself on the slide.

For this activity he had assumed an uncharacteristic gravity of expression and stood calmly in the queue of children. When his turn came he mounted the steps, slid down the metal slope, all dignity and importance, then took a staid walk round to rejoin the queue.

The little boys and girls who were his companions seemed to take him for granted, but I found it difficult to tear myself away. I could have watched him all day.

I often smiled to myself when I thought of Brandy’s antics, but I didn’t smile when Mrs. Westby brought him into the surgery a few months later. His bounding ebullience had disappeared, and he dragged himself along the passage to the consulting room.

As I lifted him onto the table, I noticed that he had lost a lot of weight.

“Now, what is the trouble, Mrs. Westby?” I asked.

She looked at me worriedly. “He’s been off-colour for a few days now, listless and coughing and not eating very well, but this morning he seems quite ill, and you can see he’s starting to pant.”

“Yes … yes …” As I inserted the thermometer I watched the rapid rise and fall of the rib cage and noted the gaping mouth and anxious eyes. “He does look very sorry for himself.”

Temperature was 104. I took out my stethoscope and ausculated his lungs. I have heard of an old Scottish doctor describing a seriously ill patient’s chest as sounding like a “kist o’ whustles,” and that just about described Brandy’s. Rales, wheezes, squeaks and bubblings—they were all there against a background of laboured respiration.

I put the stethoscope back in my pocket. “He’s got pneumonia.”

“Oh, dear.” Mrs. Westby reached out and touched the heaving chest. “That’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“But …” She gave me an appealing glance. “I understand it isn’t so fatal since the new drugs came out.”

I hesitated. “Yes, that’s quite right. In humans and most animals the sulpha drugs, and now penicillin, have changed the picture completely, but dogs are still very difficult to cure.”

Thirty years later it is still the same. Even with all the armoury of antibiotics that followed penicillin—streptomycin, the tetracyclines, the synthetics and the new non-antibiotic drugs and steroids—I still hate to see pneumonia in a dog.

“But you don’t think it’s hopeless?” Mrs. Westby asked.

“No, no, not at all. I’m just warning you that so many dogs don’t respond to treatment when they should. But Brandy is young and strong. He must stand a fair chance. I wonder what started this off, anyway.”

“Oh, I think I know, Mr. Herriot. He had a swim in the river about a week ago. I try to keep him out of the water in this cold weather, but if he sees a stick floating, he just takes a dive into the middle. You’ve seen him—it’s one of the funny little things he does.”

“Yes, I know. And was he shivery afterwards?”

“He was. I walked him straight home, but it was such a freezing-cold day. I could feel him trembling as I dried him down.”

I nodded. “That would be the cause, all right. Anyway, let’s start his treatment. I’m going to give him this injection of penicillin, and I’ll call at your house tomorrow to repeat it. He’s not well enough to come to the surgery.”

“Very well, Mr. Herriot. And is there anything else?”

“Yes, there is. I want you to make him what we call a pneumonia jacket. Cut two holes in an old blanket for his forelegs and stitch him into it along his back. You can use an old sweater if you like, but he must have his chest warmly covered. Only let him out in the garden for necessities.”

I called and repeated the injection on the following day. There wasn’t much change. I injected him for four more days, and the realisation came to me sadly that Brandy was like so many of the others—he wasn’t responding. The temperature did drop a little, but he ate hardly anything and grew gradually thinner. I put him on sulphapyridine tablets, but they didn’t seem to make any difference.

As the days passed and he continued to cough and pant and to sink deeper into a blank-eyed lethargy, I was forced more and more to a conclusion which, a few weeks ago, would have seemed impossible—that this happy, bounding animal was going to die.

But Brandy didn’t die. He survived. You couldn’t put it any higher than that. His temperature came down and his appetite improved, and he climbed onto a plateau of twilight existence where he seemed content to stay.

“He isn’t Brandy anymore,” Mrs. Westby said one morning a few weeks later when I called in. Her eyes filled with tears as she spoke.

I shook my head. “No, I’m afraid he isn’t. Are you giving him the halibut liver oil?”

“Yes, every day. But nothing seems to do him any good. Why is he like this, Mr. Herriot?”

“Well, he has recovered from a really virulent pneumonia, but it’s left him with a chronic pleurisy, adhesions and probably other kinds of lung damage. It looks as though he’s just stuck there.” She dabbed at her eyes. “It breaks my heart to see him like this. He’s only five, but he’s like an old, old dog. He was so full of life, too.” She sniffed and blew her nose. “When I think of how I used to scold him for getting into the dustbins and muddying up my jeans. How I wish he would do some of his funny old tricks now.”

I thrust my hands deep into my pockets. “Never does anything like that now, eh?”

“No, no, just hangs about the house. Doesn’t even want to go for a walk.”

As I watched, Brandy rose from his place in the corner and pottered slowly over to the fire. He stood there for a moment, gaunt and dead-eyed, and he seemed to notice me for the first time because the end of his tail gave a brief twitch before he coughed, groaned and flopped down on the hearth rug.

Mrs. Westby was right. He was like a very old dog.

“Do you think he’ll always be like this?” she asked.

I shrugged. “We can only hope.”

But as I got into my car and drove away, I really didn’t have much hope. I had seen calves with lung damage after bad pneumonias. They recovered but were called “bad doers” because they remained thin and listless for the rest of their lives. Doctors, too, had plenty of “chesty” people on their books; they were, more or less, in the same predicament.

Weeks and then months went by, and the only time I saw the Labrador was when Mrs. Westby was walking him on his lead. I always had the impression that he was reluctant to move, and his mistress had to stroll along very slowly so that he could keep up with her. The sight of him saddened me when I thought of the lolloping Brandy of old, but I told myself that at least I had saved his life. I could do no more for him now, and I made a determined effort to push him out of my mind.