Village Horse Doctor (11 page)

By the time the herders were about fifty feet away, I had filled a 50-cc. syringe with calcium gluconate and had put a two-inch 16-gauge needle on the hub of the syringe during the time I was pretending to get the spare tire out of the back of the car. At the right moment I told the ranchero for him and the herders to surprise the bandito and overpower him, and then I would give him a shot of
real stout
medicine.

Mr. Bandito had become so relaxed and so sure of himself that it was easy for the herders to sneak up behind him, throw him to the ground, and tie his hands behind his back while the ranchero jerked his pistols away from their scabbards. Of course, the calcium gluconate wouldn’t hurt a sheep or a Mexican either, but that two-inch 16-gauge needle and the mass of calcium gluconate being forced into the muscle structure was painful when I jabbed him in the thigh with it.

While I was doing this, I told the ranchero to tell him that this would give him the disease of the sheep, and he would give it to the rest of the banditos when we turned him loose, and in a little while we would be rid of them all. When I jabbed him with that big needle, he howled at the
top of his voice, and as he got up and stumbled back through the sheep when we turned him loose, he was hollerin’ to the other banditos to bring him his horse.

We had a big laugh, sat around awhile in the dark, and all of us pretended to go to bed. It’s not often that sick, fevered, vomiting sheep smell good, but that bunch smelled real good around my car till morning.

Most of the sheep were lots better the next morning, and I left plenty of medicine for them to be treated as long as they needed it. The ranchero thought he would help keep the banditos off by going back with me. He got out at the bar, and I drove on down to the port of entry at the bridge.

When one of the Mexican officers at the port of entry looked into the back of my car, he showed considerable shock that I still had both spare tires, had a pocketful of money to pay my fee, and was still wearing my gold watch. This couldn’t have bothered him any more than it did me, wondering how the grapevine worked from the Mexican boy to the banditos.

There was a little slack in my practice, which was usual in the late summer, and I was trying to shape up my own horse business. I had a good many mares and colts scattered around, pasturing them with different ranchers, and I had made a deal with Con and Concho Cunningham for some more mares.

These mares, with the exception of one, were all smooth-mouthed and up to eighteen years old. The filly colts were left on the mares in the deal and were great big colts, ready to be cut off. We had these mares in the railroad stockpens in Fort Stockton and were roping the colts and dragging them out of the pen when Gid Reding rode up.

Gid was an old-time cowboy who had gained fame, if not notoriety, for having some sort of a peculiar kinship with animals. He broke the worst of outlaw horses to ride, and
they never bucked with him. Nobody’s guard dog would bite him; instead they would wag their tail and come up and meet him, and they would carry on some type of conversation. Horses had no fear of Gid, and he could walk into a band of wild mares and rub around over them and pull their tails and get on one if he wanted to. Gid always swore that he never knew what it was about him that caused him to get along with animals, and I guess he was telling the truth because I never knew what it was about me and other people that caused us to put up with him.

He came into the corral and bemeaned and reprimanded us for draggin’ his “little friends” around at the end of a nasty rope, and after sufficiently bemeanin’ us for our brutality and ignorance in no uncertain terms, he walked in among the mares and colts and what he said to them, I’ll never know, but they must have liked it.

They nuzzled around on him and he pulled the mares’ tails, played with the colts, and in a few minutes he came walking out of the bunch of horses with his arm over a colt’s neck, talking to him. They seemed to be having a very enjoyable visit as they strolled out of the corral into the next pen, where I was holding the gate open. When Gid turned around to walk back into the pen, the colt, believe it or not, turned and tried to follow him, with me standing there tryin’ to shut the gate.

In a short time, Gid had all the colts “visited” away from the mares and into the other pen. He remarked that one mare in there particularly appealed to his fancy. She was a seven-year-old outlaw mare that didn’t have a colt—a nice, big, black half-thoroughbred-looking mare with white markings.

I told Gid that he was welcome to the mare if he would like to have her, so he walked over into the bunch of horses, scratched around on this particular mare, who was known
to be an outlaw and had hurt a few cowboys, and in a few minutes we looked around and saw Gid sitting on top of the mare, no rope, no bridle, no nothin’. He said he didn’t believe he would take her, but that he was glad to make her acquaintance.

Several
times during my late summer and fall practice, an occasional cow would be found dead in an alfalfa field. It was the practice of alfalfa farmers after they baled their last cutting of hay to start grazing the alfalfa stubbles until cold weather. Each time I was called for one of these cases, I would find no apparent sickness in the rest of the herd, and the cow that had died would be lying down in a normal resting position with her legs under her and head laid back on her shoulders. There was never any sign of a death struggle on the ground.

When doing post-mortems on this kind of a case I would find an enlargement of the spleen and discoloration of the
liver, and these indications were the usual symptoms found in the contagious disease of anthrax. However, it was common knowledge that you never have just one case of anthrax. It is a spore disease and spreads rapidly through a herd and cattle would die in bunches. This evidence was kept so we wouldn’t start a scare. These scattered cases through the years caused me some unrest but there had been so few of them that they had not been a serious part of my practice.

In late September, Alton Simmons, who farmed and ranched north of Fort Stockton on the Pecos River near Imperial, called me late one afternoon. His tone of voice almost reached a stage of excitement when he said that he had two cows dead and two more down. From his description it seemed to me to be a recurrence of that same trouble I had not yet been able to solve.

I got to his place a little before dark, and we cut open one of the dead cows to look at the vital organs and intestinal tract. Here again was the same enlarged spleen and discolored liver. I treated the two cows that were down, and they offered no resistance when we took hold of them. They had no fever and did not appear to be too sick, except that they refused to get up.

I didn’t know what I was treating and used a shotgun remedy for general poisoning and told Alton, “I’m only trying and haven’t positively diagnosed what’s the matter with the cattle.”

By daylight the next morning he called to tell me that both cows had died and there was another showing signs of sickness. I hurried out. I tried a different medication on this cow. However, before I gave the cow any medication, I took a sterile syringe and drew a 500-cc. vial full of blood and sealed it for later analysis in my laboratory.

Alton looked at the amount of blood that I pulled out
of the jugular vein and said, “Doc, be careful that you don’t drink some of that stuff. You ain’t the best vet I ever saw, but you’re the only one we got.”

I asked Alton what he was feeding these cattle, and he told me that they were grazing in the field and he wasn’t feeding them any sack feed.

For want of better information, I told Alton that I thought these cattle were being poisoned by fertilizer and asked him about the possibility of some used fertilizer sacks being scattered around the field. He said that this couldn’t be—that the land had not been fertilized for two years.

The cattle were drinking from the irrigation ditch that ran through the field. There couldn’t be anything wrong with that water because cattle all over the district were drinking from that same irrigation ditch and these were the only sick ones. This case, like many others in my veterinary practice, caused me to be as much of a detective as a doctor.

Alton had over a hundred cattle in this field and he was losing from one to three cows every twenty-four hours without any apparent sickness in the rest of the herd grazing around where we were treating the sick and the dying. He was a heavy-set, good-natured, middle-aged fellow who had always worked hard and these losses were hurting. He said, “Doc, I sure hope that you find out pretty soon what’s killin’ these cattle ’cause I’ve bragged on you so much to the neighbors, I would hate to have to buy some more cattle for you to finally prove to them I’m not lying.”

I hadn’t been able to isolate any toxic substance in the blood samples I had been collecting. One night I took a 100-cc. vial of blood from a cow that was dying, drove to the airport at Midland, and shipped it packed in ice to my good friend in New York City who was recognized as an outstanding analytical chemist. I knew my limitations in
chemical research and had always thought it was smart to know people who knew things I didn’t and I developed good contacts in all fields of research.

By noon the next day I had a wire from my friend telling me that there were five hundred times more nitrates in the blood than is normal for any domestic animal.

I drove out to Alton’s and showed him the wire. We walked the field out in sections and didn’t find anything of a foreign nature that could possibly have any agricultural or industrial nitrogens. As we came to the irrigated ditch on the east side of the field, I noticed Alton had moved his fence before the last cutting of alfalfa. There was a strip across the ditch that had been hard to get to with machinery, and he had neglected cutting it the last time he baled hay.

This alfalfa was tall and ragged because the cattle had tromped through. It was not as tender as the alfalfa that had been cut, and probably only a few head would graze across the ditch. The blooms were completely gone and the seed pods on this alfalfa were almost mature.