Cock and Bull Stories

by Peter Anderson

  Our arrival was all too much for the bull and he was off. Colin reckoned his lameness had improved significantly and we both knew immediately that we were not going to get anywhere near him. We very quickly gave up the pursuit. But while we thought we were wasting our time, Chris the producer insisted we carry on. Eventually we persuaded him that it really was not a very fruitful exercise, us scrambling through the scrub and the bull getting further and further away, and we were sorry we had cost him a good part of the afternoon and a lot of money. However, I was surprised at how delighted he seemed. ‘No, no. It was great. You did so well. The scenery is brilliant and we got all the action. And I know just the music to play with it.’ When it was aired the background music was the toreador song from Carmen and I did think Colin and I were made to look a little inept. However, we are not the ones that make the decision about what appeals to the public, and obviously things going wrong are more interesting to TV viewers than when everything goes nice and smoothly.

  TRUSTING FRIENDSHIPS — PJ

  It’s fair to say that one of the great defining features of the practice that PA and I built up over nearly 20 years was the relationships we built with our farmer clients. The majority of them were not (and still are not) just clients. They were and are our friends. We’ve been to their parties, their woolshed openings, some of the weddings of their children, and of the farmers themselves. It’s something we’re proud of and cherish.

  Being invited into a client’s home is a privilege, and also an opportunity to find out what makes him or her tick: what they like, how they live, their politics, their attitudes. An old farm advisor told me when I was a student at Lincoln College in the early 1970s, ‘Never say no to a cup of tea,’ and he was right — well nearly so.

  So when I finished the pregnancy testing of a few cows at Ross and Chris Beech’s property, at the end of a one-way road in the Awatere Valley, I was delighted to accept the offer of a bite of lunch.

  Now pregnancy testing or PD (preg diagnosis) is a dirty job. Your overalls are usually pretty well caked with cow shit, and I was careful to take them off at the back verandah and leave them out of sight before I entered the lovely old farmhouse Ross and Chris had refurbished in the 15 years they’d been on the property.

  Ross and Chris are special friends, also from Lincoln days, so it was no trouble to spend a bit too long over lunch, and suddenly I was late for my next call, back down the Medway road. I thanked my hosts, grabbed my boots at the door and bolted down the dusty road. Only at the Awatere corner, 15 minutes later, did I realise that I’d left my overalls, but I had a clean pair in the car and carried on with my day.

  A week later, I’d clean forgotten the overalls, when Ross came into the clinic with a paper bag in his hand.

  ‘You might want these,’ he said in his gruff manner.

  His manner might have been off-putting but I knew my man, and after a look at the cleaned, ironed and folded overalls in the bag, I was effusive in my gratitude. In fact I was quite touched. No other client in my memory had washed my overalls, and ironed them too, so it was a special moment.

  Later I put the overalls in the back seat of my car. I had some cows to test for the Griggs that afternoon. After lunch I drove cheerfully up the Taylor Pass Road, not far from Blenheim. The hills were dry and dusty, but the day was fine and I was going to see more good clients, even if I didn’t know them all that well in those days. Now they are friends, and they became people I really enjoyed visiting. But this was earlier in our relationship and I was minding my Ps and Qs. Tony Grigg was half a generation older than me and I’d always been a bit nervous of him, but with his son David there, half a generation younger, it should be OK.

  Tony and David were waiting as I pulled off the road and drove across the bare paddocks to park near the yards. Brian, their farm worker, was there too, a kind and friendly man.

  The cows, about 200 or so, milled in the yards, and I knew I would have a pleasant couple of hours testing them with my gloved arm in the rectum of each in turn. With good company, pregnancy testing was a nice job — dirty, but when you were fit for it, not too strenuous, and as another farmer once said, you could ‘put your mind in neutral and carry on’.

  The Griggs and Brian came over to the car as I got out and reached for the beautifully folded and ironed overalls. I shook them out and climbed into them, then glanced at my hosts, who were all gazing in wonder at my now overall-covered backside. I twisted my neck and could see a beautiful patchwork flower, sewn neatly onto the bum of my overalls.

  Bloody Beeches! Ross can’t sew but Chris is an expert weaver, so I knew who’d done what. It would have been Ross’s idea though. The Griggs were amused and enjoyed the joke with a bit of ribbing as we walked over to the yards. I was amused but embarrassed.

  Back at the car, I’d pulled some shoulder-length gloves out of the box, with a roll of tape to hold them on, then stuffed them into the pockets of the overalls.

  As David and Brian went back to the filling pen to load the race with more cows, Tony stood by to help me tape my gloves on. As I pulled the first glove out of my right pocket, a Durex Featherlight condom, neatly packaged, fell from the pocket and landed at the farmer’s feet. He bent down, picked it up and looked at it. ‘I think this is yours,’ he said non-committally.

  Bloody Beech. He’d double got me. I tried to explain.

  ‘Bloody Ross Beech,’ I muttered, but Tony had turned away to watch the cows trundling up the race. He never mentioned it again, even years later when we sailed together on a friend’s yacht for two or three years. So I’m sure he didn’t believe me.

  But he is a very polite man.

  FLYING AND PASSENGERS — PA

  There are some marvellous quotes about flying. Nevil Shute wrote in Slide Rule: ‘To put your life in danger from time to time … breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities.’ And Antoine de Saint-Exupery: ‘I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things …’ or as someone else once said: ‘Flying is the most exciting thing you have ever done with your pants on.’

  I found that there was no time to dwell on the job just finished or to think too much about the next job when flying between properties. One should concentrate fully while flying and as much of our veterinary work requires full concentration as well, there is often no let-up during the day. It can be tiring. However, I suspect only those of us who fly really understand the feeling of euphoria one experiences when doing so — particularly if it is a calm day. Once you have the bug it is difficult to get it out of the system and you just need to fly. At times I know I have been guilty of forgetting that family and partners and staff at work also worry when I am flying, and I neglect their concerns and fail to keep them informed of progress during the day.

  You do not miss too much from the air — as long as you are not too high. Everything from the air looks different. The countryside looks neat and orderly and looking down everything seems to be moving at a slower pace. So much of my flying has been done on a high, with many memorable days.

  One warm summer evening on returning to the airstrip at home, I passed over a property of good friends. Aidy leapt out of the swimming pool and raced around waving her bikini top in the air. We both circled around the pool a couple of times — she at ground level and me a couple of hundred feet up and getting lower. She has a glorious figure and so I just had to have a swim too. I landed amongst a couple of horses, dressage arena, and practice jumps in the paddock next to the house and had my swim. Word got out about my impromptu swim and a couple of weeks later, I bumped into another friend, Deb, who lived not far from Aidy. She asked with a cheeky smile: ‘You see me the other morning?’ I was not too sure what she was talking about until she revealed that just after having had a morning shower, she had heard me flying around so had raced out onto the lawn in her dressing gown ‘flashing at me’. Unfortunately I was not flying that day but Ray Patchett, who was spraying grapes next door was, and saw a good display. She cou
ld be forgiven — both planes look and sound similar.

  The few difficult times of flying have been well and truly compensated for by some of the most exhilarating and fulfilling days of my veterinary career. Just a few minutes after finishing a job and getting back to the plane, I’m over the range and into the next valley. On the way I might pass a friend mustering on a farm track in his Toyota. Wild goats scatter for cover, a sow with her litter trots on, a couple of deer look up. I land and finish the next job and am back in the plane for another little thrill before the final job of the day, knowing that if I was driving I would still be on the way to the second job.

  There are certain features perhaps rather unique to Marlborough. It is a land of numerous mountain ranges and valleys but without exception no interlinking roads between them. We cannot drive up one valley and cross over and come back down another. To the south and east, we visit clients along the east coast as far south as the Clarence River, two large stations — Bluff and Muzzle stations — in the Clarence Valley, and a number in the Awatere Valley, with Molesworth Station the furthest south, extending as far as Hanmer. To go from one valley to the next requires driving all the way back to Seddon, which lies over the Weld Pass, 20 kilometres south of Blenheim. Similarly from Blenheim we have the Waihopai and Avon Valleys, Wairau Valley which extends to the Nelson Lakes, and to the northwest, Havelock and Rai Valley. Getting between these valleys requires driving back to Renwick — 10 kilometres to the west of Blenheim.

  And then of course we have the Marlborough Sounds. As much as we enjoy visiting Sounds properties, getting there involves hours of driving and possibly some time on a boat. So when driving we try and organise a full day in one valley, or two at most, to make things more efficient and to save on mileage charges to farmers. Farm locality is of course not too much of a problem when flying, and it is not uncommon for me to visit four or five properties in two or three different valleys in one day; two to four hours’ driving in a day versus an hour by air.

  There have been so many interesting flights. I have been an air ambulance to man and beast on more than one occasion. One of my messier jobs was returning a huntaway pup to Graham Black, a delightful, generous and very experienced merino farmer in the Awatere Valley. The pup had been in the clinic for several days with a disease often fatal to dogs, parvovirus. Parvovirus causes severe enteritis, intestinal inflammation, the main symptoms being constant vomiting and diarrhoea, and even when aggressive early treatment is initiated, is often fatal.

  This pup had apparently fully recovered and was ready to go home. Graham was not going to be in town for several days and as I was flying to do a job on his property, I was asked to take the dog with me. I soon found out that he had not recovered fully. While driving from the clinic to the plane at Omaka, he proceeded to vomit through his travel cage onto the back seat of my car. Parvovirus vomit has a distinctive, cloying smell and the scent lingered long after the incident. Swearing and cursing at the poor little vomiting dog, I cleaned up the car as best I could at the hangar and then loaded the plane with my gear and the pup and headed off up the Awatere Valley. Worse than the smell of parvo vomit is parvo diarrhoea. Ten minutes into the flight I again became aware of a distinct parvo smell. Sure enough, looking into the back I could see the poor little miserable pup squirting very watery, blood-stained bowel content all over the equipment and the luggage compartment of the Colt. There was nothing I could do but fly on. Now I also had a plane with a near permanent parvo smell.

  One day I had several jobs in the Sounds when later in the afternoon I was presented with an old huntaway that had been trampled by a cow that morning. He was in severe respiratory distress. There was an obvious broken rib or two and a pneumothorax — a condition where air has escaped from the lungs into the chest cavity and the lungs collapsed. I aspirated some air from the chest, which certainly helped but more work needed to be done at the clinic — more than I could do on the airstrip in the Sounds. He was a quiet old dog and seemed quite content to sit behind my seat in the Colt. Well, he was until we were over Picton. It was then that he decided it was time to bail out. It is not much fun flying with a panicking respiratory-distressed dog clawing at the window, the back of your neck, the seat, the roof, while barking and growling. In fact, just trying his best to wreck you and the plane and get out. I had to fly with one hand, and try and hold him down with the other. Eventually his need for oxygen overcame all else and he collapsed. On landing I managed to drag the semi-conscious dog onto the runway and aspirate more air from his chest. He survived but bits of the interior of the plane didn’t.

  On a visit to Molesworth Station one morning to do several jobs on a few horses, the house cow, and vaccinate some dogs, I noticed Don Reid, the manager, was nursing his arm a bit. Now Don is one of those typical tough high country people who is often more concerned about his animals than himself and didn’t say too much, other than he had a bit of a sore elbow after a mare had clouted it when he was shoeing it a couple of days earlier. However, the elbow was not working too well and when I finally encouraged him to let me have a look, it was obvious that something was broken. So he flew back to Blenheim with me and went to the hospital to get his arm looked at and I continued into the Sounds. When I returned from the Sounds, there he was at Omaka, the local aerodrome, with his arm in a cast and sling. He needed to get back home, so I then flew him home to Molesworth. Two flights to the Molesworth and one into the Sounds where we had to land at a couple of challenging strips may have only been a little over four hours’ flying but it was still a big day for me.

  One thing I soon learnt was that it was important to have a ‘check list’ of the day’s requirements. This is usually done the day before flying. It is important for two very good reasons. Firstly, with a check list I could tick off all requirements for the day including simple things like boots and overalls as they were loaded into the plane. Once that was done I could give full attention to the very important pre-flight check of the plane. Being distracted by thoughts of what you might have forgotten while doing the plane check and missing something could have nasty consequences. The other reason was that running out of important drugs, such as tuberculin for TB testing, which has happened two hours’ flying away, interrupts the day somewhat when you have to fly back to town and collect more. This has happened, as has finding on arrival at one property that I was going to have to manually pregnancy test 350 cows without gloves or lubricant. The arm hairs get a fair pummelling when that happens. So the check list is very important.

  Passengers can actually be an issue. When it is a beautiful day, the strips are not too demanding, and your passenger enjoys flying, then it’s a thrill to have someone with you to enjoy what you are doing and seeing. However, when the weather is a little inclement, or the strips are a challenge, or they are not enjoying it, then passengers just become another responsibility and stress factor. I am now far more hesitant about agreeing to take passengers with me, especially in the Pawnee where the passenger is fairly crammed in the dickie seat, which is behind the engine and in front of the hopper. The pop-up canopy used when I have a passenger alters the view for the pilot and also seems to have some influence on the aerodynamics of the plane.

  Some passengers I have not enjoyed. I remember a German vet student who came with me to some remote magnificent areas of the province, but all he could say when I asked him if he enjoyed what he saw was ‘Ja’. I had done the flight many times before and as usual was buzzing from the trip and he couldn’t demonstrate even the slightest bit of enthusiasm. Another final year vet student, an American girl who spent two months staying at our home, complained about everything including the weather, the food, and when she came on a flight, my landings. She only had one flight with me!

  However many, especially some of the locals, who have flown with me have come away on a high, buzzing from the experience. They have seen country for the first time from a different aspect — country they have lived relatively close to all their lives, and
never really appreciated.

  Once we had a South African vet staying with us. He lived next to the Kruger National Park and knew all about spectacular sights. He spent a day with me when I flew into the Clarence and Awatere Valleys. It was a calm early spring day and when we flew between the two valleys, I took him up the snow-covered gullies and ridges of Mt Alarm and then along the ridge and around the summit of Mt Tapuae-o-Uenuku. It was a magnificent sight and the whole way I got this one-word running commentary:‘Beautiful, beautiful.’ That man has become a friend for life.

  A delightful Danish veterinary student, Tina, who ended up living with my family for over two months and with whom we still keep in regular touch, came flying with me into the Sounds one day. However, before we went there our first stop was at Rainbow Station, at the head of the Wairau Valley. There is a good top-dressing strip there, running parallel to the main road, but this day the grass was long and it was hard to see where the actual strip was. I definitely missed it and touched down a couple of metres to one side where the ground was very rough. The Pawnee immediately became airborne after hitting a rise and then went through several severe rocking motions when we touched down again as one wheel then the other went into a hollow as we careered up the paddock alongside the strip. It was a very rough landing and thankfully we were in the Pawnee and not some more fragile machine. When I climbed out, shaking a little, and let Tina out she had this enormous grin on her face.

  ‘That was so exciting,’ she said. ‘I love this coming to the ground bit at the end best of all. Oh Pete, that was sooo … much fun.’