All Things Bright and Beautiful (16 page)

The little woman, dignified as ever, inclined her head, smiled and walked past him while Siegfried hastened to her side; and as they negotiated the passage he kept up a running fire of enquiries. “And how is William…and Dennis…and little Michael? Good, good, splendid.”

At the sitting room door there was the same ceremonious opening and courteous gestures and once inside a tremendous scraping of armchairs as he hauled them around to make sure she was comfortable and in the right position.

Next he galloped through to the kitchen to organise some refreshment and when Mrs. Hall appeared with the tray he raked it with an anxious glance as though he feared it may fall below the standard of Mrs. Dalby’s. Apparently reassured, he poured the tea, hovered around solicitously for a moment or two then sat down opposite, the very picture of rapt attention.

The little woman thanked him and sipped at her cup.

“Mr. Farnon, I have called to see you about some young beasts. I turned a batch of thirty five out this spring and they looked in good condition but now they’re losing ground fast—all of them.”

My heart gave a great thump and something must have shown in my face because she smiled across at me.

“Oh don’t worry, Mr. Herriot it’s riot husk again. There’s not a cough among the lot of them. But they are going thin and they’re badly scoured.”

“I think I know what that will be,” Siegfried said, leaning across to push a plate of Mrs. Hall’s flapjack towards her. “They’ll have picked up a few worms. Not lungworms but the stomach and intestinal kind. They probably just need a good dose of medicine to clear them out.”

She nodded and took a piece of the flapjack. “Yes, that’s what Charlie thought and we’ve dosed the lot of them. But it doesn’t seem to have made any difference.”

“That’s funny.” Siegfried rubbed his chin. “Mind you they sometimes need a repeat but you should have seen some improvement. Perhaps we’d better have a look at them.”

“That’s what I would like,” she said. “It would set my mind at rest.”

Siegfried opened the appointment book. “Right and the sooner the better. Tomorrow morning all right? Splendid.” He made a quick note then looked up at her. “By the way I’m going off for a week’s holiday starting this evening, so Mr. Herriot will be coming.”

“That will be fine,” she replied, turning to me and smiling without a trace of doubt or misgiving. If she was thinking “This is the fellow who supervised the deaths of nearly half of my young stock last year” she certainly didn’t show it. In fact when she finally finished her tea and left she waved and smiled again as though she could hardly wait to see me again.

And when I walked across the fields with Mrs. Dalby next day it was like turning the clock back to last year, except that we were going in the other direction; not down towards the marshy ground below the house but up to the stony pastures which climbed in an uneven checkerboard between their stone walls over the lower slopes of the hill.

The similarity persisted as we approached, too. These young beasts—roans, reds, red and whites—were an almost exact counterpart of last year’s batch; shaggy little creatures, little more than calves, they stood spindly legged and knock-kneed regarding us apathetically as we came up the rise. And though their symptoms were entirely different from the previous lot there was one thing I could say for sure; they were very ill.

As I watched I could see the dark watery diarrhoea flowing from them without any lifting of the tails as though there was nothing they could do to control it. And every one of them was painfully thin, the skin stretched over the jutting pelvic bones and the protruding rows of ribs.

“I haven’t neglected them this tune,” Mrs. Dalby said. “I know they look dreadful but this seems to have happened within a few days.”

“Yes…yes…I see…” My eyes were hunting desperately among the little animals trying to find some sort of clue. I had seen unthriftiness from parasitism but nothing like this.

“Have you kept a lot of cattle in these fields over the last year or two?” I asked.

She paused in thought for a moment. “No…no…I don’t think so. Billy used to let the milk cows graze up here now and then but that’s all.”

The grass wouldn’t be likely to be “sick” with worms, then. In any case it didn’t look like that. What it did look like was Johne’s disease, but how in God’s name could thirty five young things like this get Johne’s at the same time? Salmonella…? Coccidiosis…? Some form of poisoning, perhaps…this was the time of year when cattle ate strange plants. I walked slowly round the field, but there was nothing unusual to be seen; it took even the grass all its time to grow on these wind-blown hillsides and there was no great range of other herbage. I could see bracken higher up the fell but none down here; Billy would have cleared it years ago.

“Mrs. Dalby,” I said. “I think you’d better give these stirks another dose of the worm medicine just to be sure and in the meantime I’m going to take some samples of the manure for examination at the laboratory.”

I brought up some sterile jars from the car and went painstakingly round the pasture scooping up as wide a range as possible from the pools of faeces.

I took them to the lab myself and asked them to phone the results through. The call came within twenty four hours; negative for everything. I resisted the impulse to dash out to the farm immediately; there was nothing I could think of doing and it wouldn’t look so good for me to stand there gawping at the beasts and scratching my head. Better to wait till tomorrow to see if the second dose of worm medicine did any good. There was no reason why it should, because none of the samples showed a pathogenic worm burden.

In these cases I always hope that inspiration will come to me as I am driving around or even when I am examining other animals but this time as I climbed from the car outside Prospect House I was barren of ideas.

The young beasts were slightly worse. I had decided that if I still couldn’t think of anything I would give the worst ones vitamin injections more or less for the sake of doing something; so with Charlie holding the heads I inserted the hypodermic under the taunt skins of ten of the little creatures, trying at the same time to put away the feeling of utter futility. We didn’t have to drive them inside; they were easily caught in the open field and that was a bad sign in itself.

“Well you’ll let me know, Mrs. Dalby,” I said hoarsely as I got back into the car. “If that injection improves them I’ll do the lot.” I gave what I hoped was a confident wave and drove off.

I felt so bad that it had a numbing effect on me and over the next few days my mind seemed to shy away from the subject of the Dalby stirks as though by not thinking about them they would just go away. I was reminded that they were still very much there by a phone call from Mrs. Dalby.

“I’m afraid my cattle aren’t doing any good, Mr. Herriot.” Her voice was strained.

I grimaced into the receiver. “And the ones I injected…?”

“Just the same as the others.”

I had to face up to reality now and drove out to Prospect House immediately; but the feeling of cold emptiness, of having nothing to offer, made the journey a misery. I hadn’t the courage to go to the farm house and face Mrs. Dalby but hurried straight up through the fields to where the young beasts were gathered.

And when I walked among them and studied them at close range the apprehension I had felt oh the journey was nothing to the sick horror which rushed through me now. Another catastrophe was imminent here. The big follow-up blow which was all that was needed to knock the Dalby family out once and for all was on its way. These animals were going to die. Not just half of them like last year but all of them, because there was hardly any variation in their symptoms; there didn’t seem to be a single one of them which was fighting off the disease.

But what disease? God almighty, I was a veterinary surgeon! Maybe not steeped in experience but I wasn’t a new beginner any more. I should surely have some small inkling why a whole great batch of young beasts was sinking towards the knacker yard in front of my eyes.

I could see Mrs. Dalby coming up the field with little William striding in his tough, arm-swinging way by her side and Charlie following behind.

What the hell was I going to say to them? Shrug my shoulders with a light laugh and say I hadn’t a single clue in my head and that it would probably be best to phone Mallock now and ask them to shoot the lot of them straight away for dog meat? They wouldn’t have any cattle to bring on for next year but that wouldn’t matter because they would no longer be farming.

Stumbling among the stricken creatures I gazed at them in turn, almost choking as I looked at the drooping, sunken-eyed heads, the gaunt little bodies, the eternal trickle of that deadly scour. There was a curious immobility about the group, probably because they were too weak to walk about; in fact as I watched, one of them took a few steps, swayed and almost fell.

Charlie was pushing open the gate into the field just a hundred yards away. I turned and stared at the nearest animal, almost beseeching it to tell me what was wrong with it, where it felt the pain, how this thing had all started. But I got no response. The stirk, one of the smallest, only calf-size, with a very dark roan-coloured head showed not the slightest interest but gazed back at me incuriously through its spectacles. What was that…what was I thinking about…spectacles? Was my reason toppling…? But yes, by God, he did have spectacles…a ring of lighter hair surrounding each eye. And that other beast over there…he was the same. Oh glory be, now I knew! At last I knew!

Mrs. Dalby, panting slightly, had reached me.

“Good morning, Mr. Herriot,” she said, trying to smile. “What do you think, then?” She looked around the cattle with anxious eyes.

“Ah, good morning to you, Mrs. Dalby,” I replied expansively, fighting down the impulse to leap in the air and laugh and shout and perhaps do a few cartwheels. “Yes, I’ve had a look at them and it is pretty clear now what the trouble is.”

“Really? Then what…?”

“It’s copper deficiency.” I said it casually as though I had been turning such a thing over in my mind right from the beginning. “You can tell by the loss of the pigment in the coat, especially around the eyes. In fact when you look at them you can see that a lot of them are a bit paler than normal.” I waved an airy hand in the general direction of the stirks.

Charlie nodded. “Aye, by gaw, you’re right. Ah thowt they’d gone a funny colour.”

“Can we cure it?” Mrs. Dalby asked the inevitable question.

“Oh yes, I’m going straight back to the surgery now to make up a copper mixture and we’ll dose the lot. And you’ll have to repeat that every fortnight while they are out at grass. It’s a bit of a nuisance, I’m afraid, but there’s no other way. Can you do it?”

“Oh aye, we’ll do it,” Charlie said.

And “Oh aye, we’ll do it,” little William echoed, sticking out his chest and strutting around aggressively as though he wanted to start catching the beasts right away.

The treatment had a spectacular effect. I didn’t have the modern long-lasting copper injections at my disposal but the solution of copper sulphate which I concocted under the surgery tap at Skeldale House worked like magic. Within a few weeks that batch of stirks was capering, lively and fully fleshed, over those hillside fields. Not a single death, no lingering unthriftiness. It was as though the whole thing had never happened, as though the hand of doom had never hovered over, not only over the cattle, but the little family of humans.

It had been a close thing and, I realised, only a respite. That little woman had a long hard fight ahead of her still.

I have always abhorred change of any kind but it pleases me to come forward twenty years and spectate at another morning in the kitchen at Prospect House. I was seated at the same little table picking a buttered scone from the same tray and wondering whether I should follow it with a piece of malt bread or one of the jam tarts.

Billy still smiled down from the mantelpiece and Mrs. Dalby, hands clasped in front of her, was watching me, her head a little on one side, the same half smile curving her lips. The years had not altered her much; there was some grey in her hair but the little red, weathered face and the bright eyes were as I had always known them.

I sipped my tea and looked across at the vast bulk of William sprawled in his father’s old chair, smiling his father’s smile at me. There were about fifteen stones of William and I had just been watching him in action as he held a fully grown bullock’s hind foot while I examined it. The animal had made a few attempts to kick but the discouragement on its face had been obvious as William’s great hands effortlessly engulfed its fetlock and a corner of his wide shoulder span dug into its abdomen.

No, I couldn’t expect William to be the same, nor Dennis and Michael clattering into the kitchen now in their heavy boots and moving over to the sink to wash their hands. They were six footers too with their father’s high-shouldered easy slouching walk but without William’s sheer bulk.

Their tiny mother glanced at them then up at the picture on the mantelpiece.

“It would have been our thirtieth anniversary today,” she said conversationally.

I looked up at her, surprised. She never spoke of such things and I didn’t know how to answer. I couldn’t very well say “congratulations” when she had spent twenty of those years alone. She had never said a word about her long fight; and it had been a winning fight. She had bought the neighbouring farm lower down the Dale when old Mr. Mason retired; it was a good farm with better land and William had lived there after his marriage and they ran the two places as one. Things were pretty good now with her three expert stocksmen sons eliminating the need for outside labour except old Charlie who still pottered around doing odd jobs.

“Yes, thirty years,” Mrs. Dalby said, looking slowly round the room as though she was seeing it for the first time. Then she turned back and bent over me, her face serious.

“Mr. Herriot,” she said, and I was sure that at last, on this special day, she was going to say something about the years of struggle, the nights of worry and tears, the grinding toil.