Village Horse Doctor (16 page)

Dry feed that was being hauled and shipped in for hundreds of miles was a poor substitute for the lush growth of spring and summer weeds or cured mesquite and grama grass for fall and winter grazing. By now, nearly all the ranchers for about a year had been feeding hay as well as some stronger supplementary feed, and as these small ranchers used up their borrowing power, they began to go out of business. Some of the larger ranchers had begun to lease ranches in other parts of the country that were not affected by the drouth.

It was during the following year that many West Texans transplanted themselves to the Arkansas-Missouri grass country to the east and north and the hardier and larger operators moved into Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.
Those that went to Colorado bettered themselves only for a short season or so because the drouth was spreading that direction.

I still had a practice that afforded some relief from the drouth and I even began to hate cats and dogs and the people that owned them a little less. When Mrs. John Lancaster called me in the middle of a hot day in July to deliver some pigs, I almost welcomed the change.

Mrs. Lancaster lived in the irrigated valley north of town. John was in the oil-field-supply business and was gone from home a lot of the time. They weren’t really stock people to begin with; however, they had bought this farm and were raising, among other things, some hogs. She had called to tell me that one of their big hogs was trying to have some little hogs, and she didn’t think that the old sow was going to be able to have them and could I come right out.

I got there real quick and the sow had just that minute died from being overfat and gettin’ too hot tryin’ to have her pigs. Mrs. Lancaster was just sick about the whole deal, but when I put my hand on the sow, I realized the pigs were still alive.

As I did a Caesarean, I told her we might save the pigs if we didn’t waste any time. She just thought that would be marvelous and had never heard of such a thing; but if we could save them she would raise them on the bottle. By the time I handed her the first one, she had gotten some big beautiful bath towels, any one of which was worth more than the pigs. As I handed her four of them, she wiped the little things off. While they wiggled and squealed, she just beamed; she was tickled pink to be the mother of four little pigs.

Then she asked, “What can I put them in where they will be clean and cool?”

There wasn’t a clean place outdoors nor a cool one, and
in a reckless tone of voice I said, “Why don’t you put them in the bathtub”—not thinkin’ that she would put them there. But she did take the pigs into the house and put them in a deep bathtub, where the little things couldn’t crawl out!

She fed them on a bottle, and I think bathed them as often as she did the children and raised four of the cutest squealing little pigs you ever saw. They were pets and were the most spoiled things that were ever in or around a house, but were in the house more than out. Of course, the trouble with pet pigs is that they grow up to be hogs, and the thought of eating one of the little dears was entirely out of the question. She hired a man with a pickup to come and get them when she was gone, so the parting wouldn’t be too painful, and she sent them to a boys’ ranch where she just knew they would have a good home.

A stock farmer from up on Pecos River east of Imperial came into my office one day and described the condition of a small herd of cattle—some were sick and others weren’t doin’ too good.

He was a fellow for whom I had done lots of practice, and without going to look at his cattle, I told him from his description his cattle had been drinking crude oil out of a slush pit that some oil company had failed to fence in. The cattle that had gotten the biggest amount of it would eventually die, I said, and some of the others would recover, but it would be slow and he would have a bunch of poor cattle on hand for a year or so.

I explained to him that if he wanted to have a case against the oil company that I would have to go and do a post-mortem on a cow and firm up the evidence so that I could help him collect damages from the oil company. We discussed this and he said it was a slow process to get damage money out of an oil company that had your land
leased and he believed that the short way would be to sell ’em.

I said, “Well, I would send them to San Angelo or Midland to one of the stockyards and get them out of the country.”

He didn’t commit himself as to how he intended to sell them, and I didn’t charge him anything for the advice because I had actually done no real work on the case. At the time I supposed that that would be the end of it.

Several days later Charlie Baker, who was sheriff of Pecos County and bought and sold cattle on the side, came to me and said that he had a bunch of cattle that he had bought so cheap that he felt like he stole them. Being the sheriff he ought to be ashamed of a deal like this, but he said it was a grown man that sold them and took his money, so he guessed it was all right, but the cattle weren’t real good and he thought maybe they needed some mineral supplement or maybe they were wormy. He wanted me to go look at them and see what I thought they ought to have.

I said, “Charlie, I’ll be glad to look at the cattle. Where are they?”

“Well, I bought them from old So-and-so (this happened to be the man I had advised to sell ’em) and he’s lettin’ me keep them in his alfalfa field since he’s already got his last cutting for the year until I find a place to put ’em.”

I was practicing medicine. I wasn’t referee’n cow deals, and I was in no position to divulge what information I already had, so I told Charlie that I would meet him at the field right after noon that day and we would look at the cattle. There were twenty-eight head of these cows and yearlings and they were good-quality Hereford cattle as far as breeding was concerned, and the ages of the cows were good, but every cow and every yearling showed marked signs of having drunk oil.

I had to tell Sheriff Baker that the bargain he got he needn’t feel too guilty about since these cattle would slowly dry up on the bone and a few of them would die and the others would not be thrifty for at least another year.

Charlie turned pale and looked surprised that his good constituent would have sold him these cattle when he surely must have known what was the matter with them. I reminded him when he was tellin’ me about the deal, he said that the fellow sellin’ the cattle was a grown man and he guessed it was all right. I said, “You know, the fellow buyin’ the cattle was a grown man too.” He let out a weak laugh as we walked to the car.

On the way to town he told me that he had sold that fellow some cattle that weren’t “just right” about a year before this. As we drove along, he got reconciled to the deal and said, “I guess he has evened the score and I don’t believe that I’ll be mad at him for it.”

I said, “Charlie, that’s big of you, but you still got the cattle.”

“Oh, I’ll send them to Midland to the auction and get rid of them.”

We stopped at the Stockton Pharmacy and had a drink together and he paid me for my call.

In about ten days I got a call from Monahans, Texas, and the man said on the phone that he wanted me to come look at a bunch of sick cattle. Well, this was a common sort of a comment when somebody called me, so I said, “Sure,” and told him when I would be there.

It was late afternoon when we drove up to his pasture, and sure enough, there was this same bunch of oil-sick cattle. I was still in no position to let on that I had ever seen the cattle before so I explained to him during a careful examination in his presence what had happened to the cattle. By now the mucous membranes from the inside of
the mouth and tongue had begun to sluff off and as we looked into some of their mouths, I explained to him that this same condition was present in the stomach and intestinal tract and that some of these cattle would recover, but most of them were slowly going to die off. I couldn’t tell him and wouldn’t ask, but I could see as I looked at the cattle that there were already five missing since I had first seen the cattle three weeks prior to this time.

I told him, as I had told the rest of them, that these cattle ought to be shipped to an auction and announced in the ring that they had drunk oil and let the purchaser be aware and pay what he wanted to for them. He agreed with me that that would be the fair thing to do and he would just take his loss and forget about them.

A few days after this, a man called me from Pecos and said that he had bought a bunch of cattle and before he put them on feed, he would like them vaccinated for shipping fever and do whatever was necessary to them that I would suggest so they would get the most good out of the feed he was going to give ’em.

When I got to Pecos, here was the same bunch of cattle with three more missing. I still had no professional right to divulge the history of the cattle, so I went into detail and we caught some of these cattle and looked into their mouths and I explained to him about oil poisoning. He immediately decided that he had better not put them on feed as that would be an expensive way to watch them die. I told him that they should go to a public market with an explanation at the time they were auctioned and sell them for whatever they would bring.

This fellow was a good operator and willing to take his loss rather than to misrepresent the cattle so he sent them back to the livestock market and had the auctioneer announce from the stand that these cattle had drunk crude
oil, and he wanted anybody who bid on them to have full knowledge of their condition.

Three days later, a cow trader that was “a wire cutter and a speculator” called me to come and look at some sick cattle that he had pastured close to the Pyote Air Base. He was a pretty sharp old boy and had lied, stole, and cheated until he was fairly well fixed financially. When we drove out to see the cattle, he had them standing next to an oil well with an open slush pit and he told me, “These cattle been poisoned on drinkin’ that oil and I’ve got to sue the oil company so I’m gonna have to have you to testify.”

I said, “These cattle drank oil at Imperial, were sold to Fort Stockton, were sold to Monahans, were sold to Pecos, and were sold to you, and you’re the only man that has bought them with the understanding that they had previously drunk crude oil, but you are crooked enough to know how to try to make a lot of money out of ’em and when you file your case against the oil company and call me as an expert witness, I’ll be able to tell the court (as I pointed to the slush pit) that it was not this oil that poisoned the cattle—and to further add to your overhead, get your checkbook out and pay me thirty-five dollars for this call.”

Needless to say, I lost the wire cutter and speculator’s practice.