All God's Creatures

by Carolyn McSparren

  Dr. Parmenter never questioned me about my plans, although I was up to working four afternoons a week and all day Saturday for him. I had also graduated to doing most of his anesthesia and was learning how to stitch up wounds on old innertubes.

  One hot afternoon as he finished neutering a tabby cat, he looked over those glasses at me and asked, "Well, do you really want to do it?"

  I nodded. I knew what he was talking about although we had never actually discussed my becoming a veterinarian.

  "They won't like it," he said, and clipped the last suture.

  "If you mean my parents, they already don't like it."

  He pulled off his gloves, balled them up and tossed them overhanded like a basketball into the waste receptacle in the comer. "Goal." Then he turned to me and sighed. "Assuming you get into vet school, and that's a mighty tall assumption, your professors won't like it, your colleagues won't like it, and if you should graduate, a great many po tential clients won't like it."

  These days more than half the graduating veterinarians in this country are women. But not then. There were women vets, of course, but more up north than in the mid-south. Tennessee didn't yet have its own vet school, so that meant I'd have to vie for a place at Auburn or Alabama or Mississippi State. Against all their native good of boys.

  "Why should they care?" I asked. Because I spent twelve years in a girls' school environment, I had never worried about competition with males, and Southwestern at that time demanded good brains from both genders.

  He lifted one scrawny hip onto the edge of the examining table and clicked off the reasons on his fingers.

  "Your professors will not wish to waste their time teaching you as you will undoubtedly get married, quit the profession and raise babies."

  I snorted.

  "Your male colleagues will dislike you because you are taking a place that should have gone to a man. Your female colleagues will resent you because they wish to be queen bees. Finally, your potential clients will think you're incapable of being as good a vet as a man, particularly if you should decide to treat large animals."

  "Why should I want to be as good as a man?" I asked. "I intend to be a damned sight better."

  Chapter 2

  In which Eli Scheibler saves Maggie's bacon for the first time, but not the last

  Back in the Pleistocene era when I went to vet school, female students were a rarity and not a blessed one. In class I was the invisible woman. The professors ignored my questions. They wrote snide comments on my papers, and graded me harder than any of the male students.

  One professor said to me, "You are not precisely stupid, Miss Evans. Go to nursing school. Become a secretary. Teach kindergarten. You don't belong here. You take up time I should be spending with the real students." Meaning, of course, the men.

  "I am a real student."

  "You're a city-bred dilettante. Even if you do manage to graduate, you'll spay toy poodles for a couple of years until you marry and have babies."

  "The men will marry and have babies too. Some of them already have wives and families."

  "Miss Evans, men have careers. Women have jobs until they become mothers."

  Someone slashed the tires of my bicycle. I couldn't afford a car. The male students stole my equipment and tried unsuccessfully to sabotage my lab work. They told endless filthy jokes and cussed extensively whenever I was within earshot. I learned not to react.

  They made passes that stopped just short of actual assault. One charmer pinched my rear end so hard I had a bruise on my rump for a week. After I stomped his instep he never did it again.

  The book learning was no problem for me, and I certainly didn't mind dissecting dead creatures. I'd been assisting Dr. Parmenter for two summers. I could stitch up an inner tube like a plastic surgeon. Despite the sniping from colleagues and professors, I felt cocky. Noarrogant.

  There's an old saying that she who rises fast and far, falls faster and harder.

  In theory, I realized that once in vet school I'd be working with every sort of animal-mammals to fish to reptiles. That's one of the so-called joys of veterinary medicine as opposed to human medicine. MD's only have one species to treat.

  During my first few weeks, I still entertained some vague illusion of continuing the work I had been doing with Dr. Parmenter-dogs and cats with the occasional cockatoo or box turtle. After all, Dr. Parmenter had already intimated that he'd take me into his clinic once I graduated.

  Mississippi State, however, took its role as a producer ofveterinar- ians able to treat livestock very seriously. Most of my classmates were big, strapping men who had grown up on farms and were at ease with everything from guinea hens to Brahma bulls. I did my damedest to act as though I was ready and willing to castrate every bull that ran in Pamplona without benefit of anesthetic. In reality, if I'd been faced with even one bull to castrate, I'd have been the one needing the anesthetic. Assuming I didn't faint first.

  I was not looking forward to working with live critters of the bovine, equine and porcine persuasion. I prayed my first day in the stock barn area I'd be assigned to treat something smaller than a draft horse or a full-grown cow. "Lord," I prayed, "Give me a pygmy goat or a week-old lamb or even a baby pig. I promise I'll get around to the big stuff if you'll just let me start small."

  What's that old saw about being careful what you wish for?

  Before dawn on one of those December days in Starkville when the fog hung in the air on the verge of turning to ice, my colleagues and I assembled at the stock barn for our first real session. Despite two layers of heavy sweaters and long johns under my jeans and wool-lined parka, I had already lost contact with my toes. I noticed that the guys were all wearing heavily padded khaki jumpsuits and wool John Deere caps with earflaps. Most of them were large to start with. Encased in their jump suits they looked not only monumental but monolithic.

  How come nobody told me what to wear?

  When little Eli Scheibler, the only other woman in this class, came in, I saw that she hadn't been informed of the dress code either. She looked even colder than I did in jeans and parka.

  I caught a snicker from Zach Hitchens, leader of the anti-feminist brigade, and realized that they had intentionally left us out of the information loop.

  Although we shared lasses and labs, Eli and I weren't yet friends. I knew her real name was'Elizabeth, although everyone called her Eli. I knew she lived alone in an apartment across Starkville, an unheard of luxury for the rest of us. We either lived in rented rooms or shared apartments with other people. She drove a ratty truck. I rode a bicycle.

  I knew she had been married. Whether she was a widow or divorcee nobody knew. She kept herself to herself.

  Eli stood under five feet tall and weighed maybe ninety pounds. She had short brown hair cropped short, wore no makeup on her pointed little face, and seemed to be dedicated to blending into the woodwork.

  I couldn't blame her. The other members of the class and the professors all treated her with offhand contempt when they weren't actually calling her names like Tinker Bell'

  The professor, Dr. Crawford, a burly, bearded Tweedledum close to retirement age, curled his lip, looked Eli and me up and down, and said, "Ladiiiiiiieees, in future please dress appropriately for this class."

  Behind me Zach-or somebody else-snorted. I felt my face flame and started to turn around, but felt Eli's small fingers bite into my arm with surprising strength. "No," she whispered.

  I had already learned to dislike Dr. Crawford and knew he reciprocated in spades. This morning, he assigned Eli and me to work together for the first time. He probably thought it was great to segregate the only two women on the rotation so we couldn't get in the men's hair.

  "Miss Evans, Mrs. Scheibler," he said and pointed, "in that stall is a sow with twelve piglets born yesterday. They all need to be sexed, examined, their ears clipped, weighed, measured, entered into the registry and given their first shots. Do it." He strode off to deal with what he no doubt con
sidered real students.

  I'd never seen even one live piglet. Here I was stuck with a dozen my first day.

  "Come on," Eli said, "Let's find one of the treatment carts and set it up."

  I followed meekly. "You didn't get the word either, did you?"

  Eli cut her eyes at me. "About the stupid jumpsuits? I never wore anything but jeans and a jacket on Daddy's farm. We sure couldn't afford uniforms." She made the word sound like an oath. "I'll bet it's not listed as a requisite for this class either. Dr. Crawford's just being a jackass."

  "A role he was born to play."

  I caught a grin at the comer of her mouth.

  Eli and I found the steel rolling treatment cart and set it up with scales, rulers, log book, a dozen worming and antibiotic shots, and alcohol to treat the piglet's umbilical cords. We worked silently, and then congratulated ourselves because we'd gotten the cart set up properly without once referring to Dr. Crawford's checklist.

  One up for us.

  We walked over to look at our patients. The pen that held the sow and piglets stood waist high with a three-foot wide gate of lumber with metal strapping.

  Pigs have a reputation for being dirty. They are, in fact, extremely dean. Given sufficient space in their enclosure, pigs will choose one comer in which to wallow, another to use as a latrine. The rest of the pen will remain dry and clean.

  All my life I have heard my daddy say, "I'm sweating like a hog in August." In actuality, pigs do not sweat. That's why they need their wallow, to cool off and to coat their bristly bodies with mud to lower their body temperature and avoid fly bites. Pigs are also extremely intelligent. So intelligent that they regard human beings with suspicion and generally refuse to do anything we ask of them unless they see the sense of it for themselves.

  Eli and I leaned over the edge of the pen and peered at the sow. "She a Yorkshire," Eli said.

  "Same as an American White?" I asked.

  "Uh-huh. And a big one."

  In theory I knew what I was supposed to do with the babies. I simply had never done it. Eli seemed to be familiar with live pigs, rather than pigs in books. Was I the only city person in the class?

  Then I looked down at those piglets. One baby pig might be cute, but a dozen was twelve times cuter. All my fears about my inexperience evaporated in sheer lust to get my hands on those babies. They looked like small bundles of pink velvet with wiggly snouts and fat little bellies, and they made soft little snuffling sounds as they nursed. Occasionally they'd squeal tiny little bat squeaks. How could something so cute be a problem?

  "Momma's asleep. Good." Eli sounded very professional. I was beginning to feel like a real dude. If I couldn't sound knowledgeable, I'd have to act like an expert.

  The pen in which the new mother nursed her piglets was large enough to provide separate areas for food, wallowing and toilette. It was bedded with straw and wood shavings. At the back left hand comer hung a triangular trough for Momma to root around in when feeding time came. It would be some time before the piglets would eat solid food, but when they did, they'd fight to be first to get their noses into that trough.

  The sow lay propped against the back wall of the enclosure with her eyes closed. She snored softly while the piglets rooted around her belly searching for a teat to latch onto. Since she didn't have a dozen nipples, somebody was always on the outside butting in, but she didn't seem to notice.

  Even Eli was making cooing noises at the babies. We must have looked like a pair of dotty matrons at the window of a hospital nursery.

  Eli got her senses back first and turned away, once again all business. "I'll roll in the table."

  I decided not to wait for Eli to bring the cart. She might have some experience of pigs, but she was itsy-bitsy. She wouldn't be able to hold more than one or two of those piglets at one time.

  I, on the other hand, could gather five or six in one armload. I'd go in to the pen, sweep up as many as I could carry, deposit them in the empty pen to the right, and return for the rest. Before Eli had the cart in place, I'd be set to bring the first piglet out for processing. We could do our thing and return each one to Momma as we finished, thereby avoiding the necessity of handling the same piglet more than once. Fast and efficient and impressive as hell.

  "Piece of cake," I said.

  I opened the gate to Momma's pen, stepped in and shut it behind me. Momma opened one eye and stared at me, but didn't move. She seemed completely serene.

  As I took a step toward mother and young, I heard Eli whisper, "Lordy, Maggie, back out. Fast."

  "I'm fine," I said.

  The sow surged to her feet. Piglets clung to her teats and hung on for dear life.

  Eli yelped.

  I froze.

  "Nice piggy" I crooned.

  She stood her ground and glared at me.

  "Go back to sleep like a good girl."

  She opened her mouth to reveal three-inch tusks she must have inherited from a prehistoric wild boar.

  "Oh, shit," I whispered.

  That's when she charged. She rained piglets into the shavings like hailstones.

  If she hit me, I'd go down.

  That was blood lust in those piggy little eyes. Once she got me down, she'd eat my liver.

  I didn't hear the gate behind me open, but I felt somebody yank me backward into the aisle so hard I toppled over backward.

  "Quick. Kick the gate shut," Eli wheezed.

  I kicked with both feet and felt the gate connect with the sow's snout. She screamed in rage and backed up. I kicked again and heard the gate latch an instant before she hit it for the second time.

  The safety latch held, but the sound of hog against steel and wood echoed through the barn like a mortar round. She hit the gate three more times before she gave up and sauntered back to her piglets. She'd made her point.

  "Get off," Eli wheezed. "I can't breathe."

  I hadn't realized I'd fallen on Eli.

  I rolled off to the side, pulled myself to my hands and knees, and reached down for her. "Are you all right? "

  "Assuming she can still breathe." A male voice spoke from behind me. I looked up to see Dr. Crawford, hands on broad hips, scowling down at both of us.

  The rest of the lass was hanging out of their respective pens laughing their guts out.

  I started to gabble about having done this many times with Labrador Retrievers, but Eli brought her knee up into my gut. I shut up.

  "If you have quite finished your comedy routine, Miss Evans, Mrs. Scheibler, may I suggest you complete your assignment?"

  I saw the glee in his nasty little gray eyes. This was a damned setup.

  "Certainly, Professor," I said through clenched teeth. How the hell were we going to do it?

  "The normal method is to begin by leaning over the side of the pen from outside the fence, snubbing a line around the sow's neck and hauling her up tight. One of you can then go into the pen and tie all four legs together. That, my dear Miss Evans, is why it is called hog-tying."

  I could have killed him with my bare hands.

  "You have so far successfully avoided her teeth. Take care that you avoid her hooves as well. They are sharp. She is quick. I would prefer not to risk having those piglets hurt by another show of irritability on her part. A distressed sow will eat her own babies."

  Well, great. Now I was going to be responsible for porcine cannibalism.

  "Thank you, Professor," Eli said quietly. Without another word she walked away to get the chains and rope to hold the sow.

  Eli and I worked well together. Once the sow was immobilized, she simply went back to sleep while we treated her piglets.

  We watched her after we released her to check her reaction. She showed no signs of mistaking her babies for lunch. Thank God. She probably weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. We couldn't have stopped her.

  As we were trundling the cart back to the staging area, I asked, "How did you know what would happen when I went into that pen?"

  She s
hrugged. "Daddy used to raise hogs when I was little. Not to sell, just to smoke hams for us and the relatives at Christmas. Sows and boars are mean as water moccasins."

  "So if I'd waited for you... I am so sorry. You saved my life."

  She grinned up at me. "No, just your bacon. I'm not so sure about your grade."

  I later found out that Dr. Crawford had paired the male members of the class so that each twosome weighed, measured and registered one lamb with one hundred pound ewe apiece to deal with, while Eli and I were assigned a mighty hog and a dozen piglets.

  "The old bastard did it on purpose," I said as Eli and I left the barn together.

  "He'll do it again too. The next time we'd better be ready to do the job he gives us without screwing up."

  I felt my face flame. "You didn't screw up. I did. I have never been that close to a pig in my life. Or a cow, for that matter."

  "Then you'd better stick close to me," she said and looked me over. "I can use your brawn."

  "And I obviously can use your brain." She didn't deny it. "At least I owe you lunch."

  From that time on, Eli and I have saved one another 's bacon innumerable times. After a while, we stopped keeping score.

  Chapter 3

  In which Maggie loses a mouse, but a gains a man

  Those first two years of vet school I remember only that I was exhausted all the time, but I kept up a four point average. The summer before my senior year my grades landed me a really plumb assignment.

  A private corporation in Olive Branch, Mississippi, just south of the Tennessee State line from Memphis and Germantown, had been conducting a long-term study on the effects of obesity on rheumatoid arthritis. They were searching for a combination of vitamins and minerals that could alleviate both the obesity and the arthritis. I don't think they had much success. Two years later they closed that lab and moved the entire operation to Arizona to start another study on hanta virus.

  Despite some of the horror stories to come out of animal labs in the 1960s, most reputable labs treated their animals with kindness. This lab treated the monkeys and white mice they used in their tests like royalty. Once their part in the experiment was finished, they were sent to zoos or retired to live happy lives-not that mice live that long.