But today others were taking care of her needs and he could dismiss her from his thoughts and concentrate on why he was in Williston.
The fresh data feed started promptly at 7:00 as Mike sipped his second cup of coffee. Surprisingly, the hotel, likely near one of the few telecom towers in the area, offered a decent download speed. Mike studied the charts.
Three more kids and two adults had presented with the same symptoms in the target area over the last 24 hours. Whatever it was, it was on its way to becoming an epidemic, and the reporting hospitals still couldn’t identify a probable cause. The CDIC rep had apparently triggered the hoped-for yellow-plus alert late yesterday: computers in the region would be talking to one another now, and hospitals and clinics across the tri-state area would be on the lookout for similar symptoms in patients. Case doctors would be in team discussions when any new cases presented and their results would feed back to the national database in near real time.
It wouldn’t be long, Mike knew, before the media would get involved. The alert wasn’t high enough yet to trigger a public health concern, but news of this sort couldn’t help but be leaked. Whether it was the case doctors or the CDC field reps coming up with the answers, they would need something soon to respond to the barrage of questions reporters would soon be asking. When it came to health concerns, people tended to demand instant gratification and, if they couldn’t get immediate satisfaction, tended to start making accusations—as if threats and pressure were needed to spur health organizations into action.
We like to think of ourselves as civilized, Mike thought, until we’re faced with a crisis. Panic tends to bring out the flight-or-fight instinct in even the best-intentioned.
He took a final sip of coffee, packed up his Pad-L and headed out, intending to find some of the answers today.
Chapter Twenty
DONNA BAILEY RUBBED THE BACK of her neck trying to soothe the tension there that was shooting bolts of pain into her head. Next stop, she promised herself, she’d raid the drug cabinet for something stronger than the two aspirin she’d taken that morning.
The last months had been relentless. Every other animal on her ranch calls, it seemed, had some form of neurologic disorder. With the first ones, she’d been convinced if she’d just been called out sooner she could have mitigated escalation of the animals’ motor dysfunction and neural degeneration and prevented their ultimate deaths. She’d secretly blamed the farmers and ranchers for trying to scrimp on veterinary costs and for prioritizing profit margins over the animals’ welfare.
As more animals started to present with the same symptoms, though, she realized the fault lay not with the owners—whom she had to absolve—but with her profession’s collective lack of knowledge. In a way, that realization made things worse, not better. It was far easier to be angry at a negligent owner. Far easier to berate someone else for not doing right by an animal that depended on them for its every breath than it was to berate herself and her colleagues for not being able to identify the pathogen and provide a known treatment.
Ethically, she was torn, not just over how to go about treating the animals but what to charge her clients. Vets in nearby counties who were dosing patients with large amounts of steroids or bromide or phenobarbitol had been met with limited success. A lessening of symptoms for a day or two, then a resurgence that negated any short-term benefit produced. Yet, because they had nothing else in their arsenal, they continued to ply stricken animals with drugs that weren’t working under the assumption that owners expected some course of treatment. That it was their obligation to never walk away from a patient without dosing it with something.
That meant the vets could experiment at will with little consequence to their bottom line no matter the outcome. They put the business risk in the owners’ pockets, not their own. The owners gambled with their own money over the life and death of their animals, while the vets pocketed their fees whether those animals lived or died.
Some of Donna’s colleagues bragged that business in the summer had never been this good.
In the beginning, when Donna could put the burden of blame on the owners, writing out bills for animals who got no better hadn’t much bothered her. There would always be times when, based on her training and knowledge, she’d do her best and animals would still worsen and die. Now though, she was faced with a dilemma of conscience. Did she experiment with other people’s dying animals, trying to find a drug that would reverse their symptoms, and charge the clients when these experiments failed because she couldn’t afford to treat them for free? Or how was she to justify not charging clients for telling them that she couldn’t do anything when equipment and building loans still demanded to be paid monthly?
She plunged her fingers deeper into her neck and shoulder muscles wishing for a companion in the cab to distract her from thoughts that were making her head feel worse right now. But Chad, the stoic cowboy, had taken a few days off to shake whatever he’d come down with, and Alfie had simply refused to get in the truck this morning. Smart dog. Probably sensed my mood and knew to steer clear.
Plus, the horse she’d just seen didn’t help things. Jill Newcombe’s pretty little Arabian mare had been attacked in her pasture almost two months ago. By what, it had been hard to tell as the mare only had a single, very deep and very messy bite that had ripped a chunk out of her haunch. Likely her hard, heavy hooves had dissuaded her attacker from further damage.
Jill had found the horse in the barn soon after the incident and Donna had flushed the wound and stitched it up as best she could. Missing skin and muscle made it a difficult wound to treat, and the mare was going to be left with a permanent large dimple in her rear quarters. But Jill had been diligent about caring for the wound and after a couple of weeks of downtime had been excited about getting the mare back in condition for barrel racing in the fall. It was clients like Jill who loved their animals and worked with them daily and took full partnership in the healing process that made Donna glad about her profession.
The mare was her first call this morning, and Donna was expecting a quick recheck and to approve the mare for more vigorous exercise. What she wasn’t expecting was a horse stumbling over her own feet and crashing repeatedly into the corral bars.
Jill had been in a panic. “I tried to keep her up in a stall, but she put her head under the wall and nearly strangled herself. It’s not rabies, is it? From when she was bitten? Oh God, please tell me it isn’t rabies.”
Donna watched the horse for a long while, pretending to study it, buying time before she had to tell Jill the inevitable truth. “I don’t think it’s rabies.” The instant relief on the cowgirl’s face made Donna wince. “But I do think it’s something just as bad for the mare.”
Together, she and Jill made the painful decision to put the mare down. Donna had wished desperately for Chad’s help then so Jill wouldn’t have to be party to the euthanasia, but Jill expertly roped and secured the mare and through her tears held the horse’s head still as Donna injected the pentobarbitol. The cowgirl sang the mare a lullaby, her voice breaking again and again, as the mare sank to her knees, rolled to her side and took her final breath.
Jill knelt beside the mare and bowed her head, her long hair hiding her tear-streaked face.
“I’ll call someone to come collect her,” Donna had said, and Jill simply nodded, not moving, her grief palpable under the warm summer sun.
She was still sitting there when Donna, driving off, looked back in her rearview mirror before turning on the road to her next appointment at the Rocking Sun Ranch.
Chapter Twenty-One
IF MIKE SHAFER HADN’T SEEN the stylized sign over the entrance announcing the name of the ranch, he probably would have driven right past it. The houses and barns sat back off of the FM road, hidden among the rolling hills. And for dozens of acres to either side of the entrance to the cattle ranch, there was not a cow to be seen. Plenty of barbed wire and plenty of open fields, but no cattle.
It was onl
y about half a mile down the driveway that Mike, in his rented SUV, understood why. Cows, probably a hundred of them, all a deep, glistening black, stood packed into two lots—one on either side of the drive—near two huge metal barns.
Were they waiting to be moved or shipped out? Mike wondered. Or waiting to be fed or wormed or slaughtered?
As he neared the pens and slowed, he could see something else. A third lot into which cattle were being chuted, a handful of cowboys culling the two herds and prodding the occasional steer along. There were already about 25 or 30 head in the third lot and it didn’t take a practiced eye to see that those steers had issues. Several lay on the ground, moaning loudly. A few teetered around the pen like drunks, tripping over the ones lying on the ground. The rest were shaking their heads or pacing up and down on stiff, unbending legs.
The sound of a horn behind him made him jump. He rolled the remaining distance to the pens, then pulled his SUV off to the left side of the drive. The driver in the truck behind him pulled off to the right. McKenzie County Animal Clinic. He read the magnetic sign on the door, then watched as two booted legs in snug boy-cut jeans slid off the seat and out of the truck. The door closing revealed the rest of the driver. An auburn-haired lady in her early 30s in a plaid shirt that looked remarkably like the shirts the cowboys were wearing—only it draped better on her.
She started toward the pens and one of the cowboys was already coming out to greet her. The cowboy said something Mike couldn’t quite catch then looked over at the SUV and nodded at it with his chin. The lady vet shook her head, and that’s when Mike realized he was the subject of their conversation and that he hadn’t even turned the vehicle off yet. He grabbed his voice recorder and camera and tried to strike a pace that was somewhere between hurrying and a professional business strut as he made his way to them.
“May I help you?” The cowboy’s tone was polite, yet his face was anything but welcoming. Clearly he felt Mike was interrupting some important business.
“I’m Mike … Mike Shafer.” He stuck out his hand. Slowly, reluctantly, the cowboy reached out to shake it. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions about what’s going on out here?”
“Do you mind if I ask you why you think it’s any of your business?” The man’s voice was calm, as if he were simply discussing the weather. But Mike knew better. The man looked to be in his late 50s, and was tanned and muscled from working 50-plus of those years outside. Quiet confidence. Mike envied how neatly he was able to pull it off. Standing there alone, he would have actually been intimidated. But he’d brought credentials with him.
He slid his wallet from his pocket and flipped it open, hoping the card inside the vinyl sleeve flipped out rightside up. As a statistics analyst and not a field agent, it wasn’t a move he’d really practiced. “I’m with the CDC—and it looks like you have some sick cattle.”
The cowboy slid a long look at the vet.
“I assure you, Mr. Taylor, I didn’t call him.” The vet rounded on Mike. “I’m Dr. Donna Bailey. Do you mind telling me what interest the CDC has in these cows?”
“I’m simply following a lead. We’re seeing a number of emergency room visits in the area, and beef from this ranch has come under suspicion.”
“Food poisoning?” The cowboy showed real concern. Whether for the business or the patients, Mike couldn’t yet be sure.
“Not exactly. More along the lines of neurological disorders. Tremors, involuntary muscle movement, memory loss, seizures—”
“My God.” Donna stared at Mike. “It’s happening to people?”
Mike nodded. “That’s how I felt when I saw your cows. I don’t know what I expected. Just not this.”
“Why here? These cows?” The cowboy’s confident air had left him. “We haven’t sold any of them in six months. Certainly not since this started.” He nodded toward the third pen where steers continued to stagger.
“We have reports that beef from this ranch may have been donated to a school party in Williston.”
“A school—?” That was weeks ago to celebrate the end of the school year. Yeah, we slaughtered a steer. A healthy one. What we didn’t donate we kept.”
“You kept it?” Mike tried to contain his excitement. “For your personal use?”
“Well, yeah—”
”Do you still have any of that meat?”
“Probably.”
“Mr. Taylor, we’ll have a lab team on the ground here tomorrow. You’ll need to turn over whatever you have left of the steer to them.”
“So you know what it is?” Donna held her breath in anticipation of the answer.
“What it—?” Mike looked a bit sheepish. “We don’t really know if there’s even a link. Or we didn’t know until today. Seeing these cows pretty well confirms it. Your truck says you run the McKenzie County Clinic—are you seeing any more animals like these in the area?”
“Why?” Donna was fiercely protective of her clients; she wasn’t going to implicate any of them prematurely.
“Because the kids at school aren’t the only ones affected. We think there may also be some dairy connections. Or possibly pigs or chickens. Like I said, we’re just following the dots right now. Some of the ideas, I hope, will turn out to be deadends. If we can at least narrow whatever it is to just one species, that’ll give us something solid to go on.”
“That’s a lot of dots, Mr. Shafer.” Donna forced herself to speak calmly even though she could feel a panic building in her chest. “How are the kids doing? I wouldn’t think the CDC would be out here if it wasn’t something serious.”
“We just sent an alert out for Montana and North and South Dakota. We’ve got 37 kids affected—three of them dead.”
The cowboy sagged back against a fence.
“None of your school kids, Mr. Taylor.” Not yet at least, Mike added mentally, but the guy was obviously shaken enough already. “We have some spikes in adults showing neurological symptoms, too, but it’s harder to separate out stroke victims and early-stage Parkinson’s and other adult-onset disorders. A lot of the patients, though, are toddlers, just going off the bottle and onto cow’s milk, so we want to look at the local milk supply.”
“You said there’d be a lab team here tomorrow?” Donna asked. “Then send them to the clinic. We’ve run just about every test imaginable on milk, blood, urine, muscle tissue, you name it. My colleagues and I have been trying to isolate this pathogen for the last two months. Whatever it is, it’s new. Or a form of something known that’s been so mutated our normal tests don’t recognize it. Beef cattle, dairy herds, goats, sheep, alpacas—I’ve seen individual animals and groups in all these species with it. I just put down a horse with it this morning.” Donna hadn’t had a chance to take anything more for her headache and it was getting harder to think and process through the pain. But, like Mike had said, there were connections that needed exploring, and one of them jumped out at her, prompted by the flow of the conversation. “Pigs, too, you said?”
“There’s a locally made hotdog brand—Dakota Dogs. Seems to be popular among the kids.”
Donna nodded. “Some of my clients supply them. Most of them are small piggeries that grow their own feed. Then they supplement that feed with whey and other surplus from the dairies. If this thing started with cows, that’s a possible transmission route.”
Mike cocked an eyebrow. “You obviously know a lot about a disease that seems to be running rampant out here, Doctor. Did you not think to inform anyone about what’s going on?”
“If you mean did I inform anyone beyond the State Board of Veterinarians, communicating with numerous colleagues in this region, sending hundreds of samples and detailed reports to state and national laboratories, and consulting with area universities, then no, I did not. This has all been one big coverup and now you’re here to expose the scandal and, oh, I’m running scared.” More than just the headache was making her touchy now.
“You’ll find we’re mostly honest business folk out here, Mr.
Shafer. No one wants to sell diseased animals or tainted milk that’ll affect any downstream consumer, whether it’s a person or another animal. But most pathogens are very host specific. I need proof of the transmission route before I can even think of shutting down hundreds of businesses.
“Believe it or not, I welcome your lab teams, and my clients will welcome them as well. My sources have come up dry and we need to know what this is so we can stop it now before it gets worse, and then we can start over fresh if we have to. In fact, if the CDC gets involved, the ranchers may even get some government relief money to offset any losses. So don’t start making accusations, Mr. Shafer, before you know a few of the facts.”
Mike threw up his hands in mock surrender. “Just doing my job here, lady. Getting everything out in the open so we can get to the truth as fast as possible.”
“The truth, huh? The truth. Do you know why I’m out here today, Mr. Shafer? Do you know what those men are doing?” She pointed to the cowboys still culling cattle, but who were also obviously keeping an eye and ear on the conversation going on outside the cattle pens.
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