Village Vets

by Anthony Bennett

  ‘You got a better idea?’

  Mark went and got a towel from the car. He pegged it to the top of a 20-litre plastic bucket. It was going to act as a filter. We needed to remove the balls but keep the fluid, because the bull was going to want it back. He needed the liquid part, but more so he needed the community of bacteria that lived in it. Ruminants don’t live on grass itself. When they swallow grass it feeds the microbes in their rumen and those microbes then produce the nutrients that the cow or bull needs to survive. If we took this bull’s bugs and replaced them with plain water, it would almost certainly kill him.

  I picked up the pump and dropped the pipe into the bull’s rumen, and with both of us holding the pump steady we started to wind the handle. Fluid filled with these balls started gushing out in spurts onto the towel and through into the bucket. I’d stop pumping and Mark would clean the balls away, then we’d resume. After we pumped about half the rumen out, I pulled the pump out of the bull and put it in the bucket. We then proceeded to pump the fluid from the bucket back into the bull, before reversing the process again. We did that three or four times until there were virtually no balls coming through any more. We filled him up one last time. His rumen was about half the size it had been and he looked far less misshapen. His breathing was on the improve and he looked to be brightening up. Mark sewed up his rumen, reinserted it, then sewed up his muscle and skin, and we gave him plenty of antibiotics and anti-inflammatories.

  We let the bull out of his makeshift crush and he wandered back into the holding yard behind the race, looking pretty relaxed. Jason threw him some hay to tide him over until morning.

  We got back in the car and drove home marvelling at our success and creativity. We rang Jason the next day and he reported the bull was doing just fine. ‘But, geez, you guys are pretty wild putting a diesel pump inside a bull.’

  ‘Not wild at all. Just mild-mannered vets doing our job.’

  The bull survived his ordeal just fine. I sent a sample of the black balls off to a lab but they were unable to identify them. A few months later I heard that he broke his leg fighting another bull and had to be put down. Such is life on the farm.

  ONE OF THE FAMILY

  Anthony

  I’ve never considered myself a cat or a dog person; I’ve always loved both. When I was a kid, my sister and I really wanted a dog. But Mum and Dad worked long hours and didn’t feel that it was fair to have one, given all the time dogs demand. Even then I could see it was a sensible decision but it didn’t stop us nagging.

  I was about ten or eleven years old when we lost our family cat, Wilton. Dad relented to the badgering and went to buy us a dog. He had a black labrador earmarked but he got there and decided it was a bad idea and backed out. I’d begged to go with him but wisely he wouldn’t take me. There was no way I would have let him leave that place without a dog on our leash.

  Soon after, we were driving to the farm from Sydney and just before we got there, Dad saw a sign at the Old Toolijooa Schoolhouse advertising kittens for sale. He didn’t say anything about it to us, though, and when the opportunity arose he ducked out of the house to have a look at them.

  At this stage in life, I was glued to Dad’s side. Whatever farm work was being done, or whatever else he was doing, I had to be there helping. So when I realised he’d jumped in the car and driven off without me, I was filthy.

  I stormed up to Mum. ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘He’s just ducked into town.’

  ‘Why’s he ducked into town? Why wasn’t I allowed to go?’

  ‘He’s just gone to the co-op,’ she said.

  ‘I want to go to the co-op. I love going to the co-op. I wanted to go to the co-op.’

  I was absolutely beside myself, displaying all the nagging skills that Dad was so wise to escape on the dog trip, and I continued on in my rage until I heard the car return. I shot out to the garage to give him a piece of my mind. ‘Where have you been? Why wasn’t I allowed to come?’

  ‘Look, I’ve got something to show you,’ he said.

  We went to the back of the Range Rover and he opened it to reveal a cat carrier holding two blue-point Siamese kittens. My anger evaporated. ‘Oh Dad! Where did you get them?’

  Before he could answer, I heard Mum’s voice from the other end of the house: ‘Them? What do you mean “them”?’

  ‘Honey, I couldn’t choose between them. The big one was so relaxed and floppy and sooky, but the little one was so in-your-face and purring and wanting attention, I couldn’t decide. Stuff it, I thought, I’ll get both.’

  We were in the car back home to Sydney at the end of the weekend with the kittens in the cat carrier on the back seat. Mum turned to my sister, Jackie, and me. ‘You guys had better come up with names for these kittens. One can be Anthony’s and one can be Jackie’s.’ We thought about it for a while and I plucked the name Wesley Thomas Bennett from somewhere, and Jackie, who must have been about seven, named hers Stuart Charles Bennett.

  Mum was like, ‘Okay . . . They’re very formal. What about something like Snookems or Diddems or Silky?’

  ‘No. I like Wesley,’ I said.

  ‘And I like Stuart,’ said Jackie. And that was it. The names stuck and they never let us name a pet again.

  Siamese cats demand attention, so Stuart and Wesley were like dogs. They’d follow us everywhere. They’d come to the farm with us, and when Dad and I were out moving cows, you’d turn around and see their two tails poking through the long grass as they followed us – even when we were kilometres from the house. You’d be right up the back of the property with no idea the cats had seen us leave, and then you’d hear a noise – something like the distant whine of a chainsaw. That was their version of a meow.

  We’d pretend they’d herd the cows like sheepdogs though they were much more hindrance than help. The cows found them so fascinating that they’d stop going where they were meant to go and come back for a sniff and a look. If we could have got the cats in front of the herd they would have been much more useful; the cows would have happily followed them anywhere.

  So these cats were a big part of our lives. Wesley was the big sooky one with a very laid-back personality. Stuart had a lot more aggression and ticker. Stuart was the boss, except when food was around. Stuart could bash Wesley up all day, have him cowering on the dining room chair, too afraid to move, but bring dinner out and Wesley was like the Incredible Hulk. He’d just change into a scary monster cat.

  One day towards the end of high school, I got home from school during a heavy rain storm. I saw Wesley outside under the clothesline in the tiled courtyard taking a pelting from the heavy, soaking raindrops.

  Gee, that’s weird for him to be out in this and not moving.

  The rain was so heavy he was lying in an inch of water on the tiles. His fur was spiked out from the wet. As I approached, I saw blood and gouges on his torso, and I knew he’d been mauled by something. His body was cold and rigid when I picked him up. With a sense of horror and helplessness that was new to me, I took him inside and phoned Dad at work. Dad would know what to do.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do,’ Dad said. ‘If he’s dead, he’s dead. Maybe you could think about burying him, or if that’s too difficult you can leave him and I’ll bury him when I get home.’ I thought about it and decided it was something I wanted to do. It was very sad but I guess it was part of that healing process. I dug a hole and laid him in it, holding a sodden little ceremony in my head, then just sat out in the rain for a while, thinking about Wesley and the way he left us. I had a bit of a cry. I was fragile for months.

  I got home from school the next day. We had a steep driveway that went down towards the river and bush all around us. There were cement stairs through the bush, to the neighbour’s house higher up the slope. I remember coming down the driveway and looking back up to my left into the bush and there was the prime suspect, the neighbour’s brown kelpie cross. Coming back for seconds. Blood boiled in me. I saw a quarter brick a
nd reached for it. I was pretty sporty and had a good arm. I went to throw the brick and the dog took off up the stairs when he saw my arm go back. At the last minute I changed my mind. I realised I couldn’t hammer a dog with a brick. I didn’t want to hurt it. As upset as I was, I knew it wasn’t the dog’s fault. It was in the dog’s nature to chase cats. I threw to miss and yelled, the brick cracking into the step behind it.

  The dog never came back. And Stuart Charles Bennett became an indoor cat after that. We never let him out. I suppose Wesley’s loss made Stuart an even more valued member of the family. He was always on us and with us. I remember driving to the snow when I was in second year at uni. James was there, along with our other good friends Alex, Mitch and Kate. The circle of friends was consolidating into a tight group by then, but we were still getting to know each other. I was chatting away about Stuart and I said, ‘He’s such a fussy eater he’ll only eat Hill’s pet food.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Kate said, somewhat incredulous. ‘Stuart eats cat food?’

  ‘Yeah. Why wouldn’t he?’

  ‘How do your parents allow it?’

  ‘They’re the ones that give it to him.’

  And then she twigged that she was missing something. ‘Stuart is your brother, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s our cat.’

  ‘But you talk about him like he’s your brother, like he’s a family member.’

  ‘Well, he is a family member. Stuart Charles Bennett.’

  WHO YOU GUNNA CALL?

  James

  The phone rang at 5 a.m. ‘James. James. Wake up. Get out of bed.’ The voice was urgent, rapid, faking pain.

  ‘I’m up,’ I said.

  ‘You’re a liar. As if you’d be up this early on a Sunday.’ It was Wayne McAndrew, a local dairy farmer that everyone called Mook. I knew him well from touch footy and cricket and it seemed that he knew me even better. I have a reflex where if someone calls me at 3 a.m. and says, ‘Sorry for waking you.’ I say, ‘No, no, I’m awake.’ It comes from me never having liked getting out of bed as a kid and Mum devoting hours to getting me up to go to school. She’d be at the door yelling at me and I’d just reflexively lie, ‘No, no, I’m awake,’ and promptly go back to sleep. The words would come from my mouth before I even realised.

  Wayne had got me out of bed before so he knew the procedure: startle me. ‘Get out of bed, you lazy bastard. I’ve got a prolapsed cow.’

  We had a final-year student, Jandy, staying with us. She was doing the weekend on call with me, so I sleepily shuffled down the hall and knocked on her door. ‘Jandy, get up. We’ve got to go see a cow.’

  We drove to Mook’s place in that early Sunday morning fug, but Mook, like so many dairy farmers, seemed to have inexhaustible energy. ‘Come on, I’ve been up for hours.’

  The cow had calved in the middle of a blackberry bush and then the uterus had followed the calf out. A prolapse. The uterus was hanging from the back of the cow, which was lying on the ground in the middle of all these blackberry thorns. So we had to get a tractor in with a device called a hiplifter attached to the front. Mook got the tractor into the blackberry bush and lifted the cow into a standing position. I quickly administered an epidural to stop her pushing and to numb the area.

  Jandy and I then had to spend fifteen minutes cleaning the uterus off before we could set about pushing the thing back in. Now, to put this in perspective, imagine a potato sack filled with meat and you can start to imagine the size and weight of a uterus. Jandy had to take the weight of it while I tried to tuck the potato sack back into the cow. It’s a hard physical job, holding this big slippery thing while applying gentle pressure to push a bit of it back in before re-adjusting to grasp the next bit of uterus and push that in. It requires a particular type of strength and endurance in the forearm muscles.

  We got it in then used a special needle, a Buhner needle, to stitch the vulva shut. A Buhner needle is a fierce-looking implement: about 25 centimetres long with a large handle and a curved point that has a central hole in it to thread your stitching material through. You need to make sure your epidural is working well before you pierce the skin with such a formidable tool, running it up and down, parallel to the vulva, so the uterus doesn’t fall out again.

  We fixed the cow up pretty well and Mook lifted her right out of the blackberries and it was job done.

  Our overalls were a bloody slimy mess and we changed out of them before jumping in the car to drive the 40 kilometres back to town to enjoy the rest of our Sunday. There had been rain recently and the countryside had a lovely green tinge to it that enhanced every aspect of rural life. The sun was poking its first rays over the small escarpment to the east of the Manilla–Barraba road, throwing light on the much taller, jagged range that jutted out of the landscape to the west. It looked like being a glorious day.

  As we approached the outskirts of Barraba, dwarfed by massive old silos where the speed limit starts to drop, my phone began to rumble its cheery tune. When you’re on call, your phone ringing is anything but cheery. There’s a small part of you that hopes that it might just be someone you know ringing for a chat, or perhaps a wrong number. But who was I kidding at 7 a.m. on a Sunday? I looked at the screen and it was a Manilla number. I picked up. A horse had a badly cut leg at a property back out on the road we’d just come down – 20 kilometres past Mook’s place. So we turned around and went back the way we came.

  We arrived at the property on the green river flats, driving past a neat weatherboard cottage to what looked like the stable and yard areas. We found a tiny blonde girl covered in blood. She must have been only eight years old.

  ‘Oh my God, are you okay?’ I asked, wondering what we’d walked into here.

  ‘Yeah, I’m okay but Rocket’s not so good,’ she said.

  On closer inspection, we could see the whole yard was spattered like a forensic police drama. And there was the victim, a buck-skin quarter horse with a bloody bandage on its front right leg skulking in the corner.

  ‘It was squirting blood so I got the bandage on,’ the girl said.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Rosie.’

  ‘Okay, Rosie, you’ve done a fantastic job. You might have saved Rocket’s life.’

  ‘It’s my horse so I wanted to help it.’

  Rosie’s mum was holding Rocket, who was twitching with nerves, but he let me approach and I got a sedative into him. I took the bandage off and saw that he had severed his digital artery. Horses’ feet need a strong blood supply so the blood is pumped in under enormous pressure. If these digital arteries get severed, the blood can spray out for metres. And if Rosie hadn’t got this bandage on, Rocket would likely have bled to death. I redid the bandage, packing it very firmly, and told the family to leave it on for about three days and Rocket should be fine.

  By this stage it was well after breakfast time. Jandy and I had worked up an appetite. We drove the now 60 kilometres back to Barraba to refuel and get something to eat at the service station. But just as we pulled into the driveway, the cheery ringtone burbled again.

  ‘Yeah, g’day, Duncan Thompson here. Barry’s just eaten a bucket of 1080 fox bait.’

  Barry was Duncan’s red kelpie. ‘Okay. That’s not good,’ I said. Normally the tiniest sniff of 1080 will kill a dog. ‘Is he still breathing?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s right as rain at the moment.’

  ‘How much of it did he actually eat?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s eaten the whole bucket. I was putting out chicken heads. I had ’em in the front seat of the ute, but I left the window down slightly and the dog took a giant running jump and managed to get through. He ate the whole lot before I caught him.’

  The way fox baiting works is that they inject the poison into the eyeballs of the chickens so the fox swallows the whole thing and is then killed when digestion begins.

  ‘Gee, that doesn’t sound promising. That’s enough poison to kill him fifty times over. I’m not sure that we can do muc
h but get him here as fast as you can; we might be able to ease his suffering.’

  ‘All right, I’m on me way.’ Duncan sounded pretty cut up about it. He really liked Barry.

  I refuelled the car while Jandy went inside to buy us a pack of salt-and-vinegar chips each, then we raced over to the clinic to wait for Barry and Duncan. They were thirty minutes’ drive away, and while I knew they’d be driving hard, I half-expected that we wouldn’t even see them. Barry would probably die on the front seat of the car and Duncan would turn around to dig a hole back at home.

  But the ute came screeching into our shed and Barry jumped out the door with his tail in the air and his nose down, sniffing at all the exotic animal smells that vet clinics provide. He was a proper working dog, thin and muscled with a shining coat.

  ‘Are you sure he ate the bait?’ I said. ‘He should be dead by now.’

  ‘I saw him polishing off the last of ’em,’ Duncan said. ‘Shoulda seen how guilty he looked. He knew he was going to get in big trouble but he’d obviously figured it was going to be worth it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Vets have a bit of a party trick in this situation. There’s a drug called apomorphine, a close friend of morphine, which has a little bit of the opioid sedative effects of morphine and a really exaggerated nausea effect. We can dissolve the tablet in water and inject it, or we can just take the tablet and pop it under the lower eyelid of the animal, where it absorbs really quickly. So I did that and Duncan looked at me strangely, just as people always do when you put it there. ‘My dog needs to vomit,’ they’re thinking. ‘Why are you putting something in his eye, you moron?’ But before you’ve had time to finish explaining, the dog will be puking on the floor, and that’s what Barry started to do. First one chicken head then another and another, till we had the whole finger-licking bucket load on the floor. He vomited up more chicken heads than I thought a dog could possibly swallow.