Tales from a Young Vet

by Jo Hardy

  When I got back home I missed South Africa, so when Jacques got in touch a couple of weeks later to say that he and his friend Daniel were taking a trip up to Kruger National Park and would I like to come along, I didn’t hesitate. I blew my savings on a ticket and six weeks later I returned. One of the other volunteers, an American girl called Abby, had been travelling round Europe and Jacques invited her, too.

  South Africa is enormous, many times bigger than the UK, and people there drive huge distances without even thinking about it. Johannesburg is a fifteen-hour drive from the reserve where Jacques was living. He and Daniel drove up to meet us at the airport and then we drove for another four or five hours up to Kruger National Park in the north east. One of the largest game reserves in Africa, Kruger covers over 7,500 square miles. Abby and I had the perfect companions as Jacques and Daniel were both qualified guides, and we spent two weeks watching the game and the extraordinary landscape. We ate rusks and drank coffee for breakfast, drove all day and set up camp at night, sitting round the fire barbecuing steak and drinking shots of Jägermeister that Jacques kept in a freezer in the back of his car.

  One night we heard something banging about among our pots and pans. Jacques unzipped the tent, saw a hyena a few feet away, rapidly zipped it back up and told us what was going on. I was so glad we all slept in one big tent – on my own I’d have been terrified. As it was I was still pretty nervous. Hyenas are large, carnivorous and have incredibly powerful jaws that could chew your arm off without much trouble.

  ‘I’m going to stay here in the middle of the tent away from the sides, OK?’ I said nervously, looking at Jacques who was reaching for the zip again. ‘Maybe you should come away from the door.’

  Jacques laughed. ‘Don’t be a wimp. It’s not going to get in the tent. I’ll scare it off.’

  ‘What?! No, don’t …’ but it was too late. Jacques had stuck his head out of the tent and was shouting and waving at the hyena, which after turning to snarl at him, ran off across the campsite.

  ‘You’re crazy!’

  ‘That hyena knew it couldn’t take me on,’ he said with a wink. I shook my head and went back to bed. Jacques really was a man of the bush and completely fearless.

  After the camping trip I stayed in Jacques’ staff house back at the game reserve. He went back to working with volunteers and I got a voluntary job with a local company breeding horses and running horse trails. I helped with breaking in some of the sturdy young Arab horses and led groups of tourists on trails along the stunning sand dunes and wide, sandy beaches of the Eastern Cape.

  One afternoon I was asked to ride one of the newer horses, a stallion, to help one of the trail leaders take a group of people out. The horse I was on kept acting strangely, shaking its head and hesitating. As we went to descend a large sand dune the horse lost its footing and fell, trapping my leg under it. We slid down the sandy bank until we hit a tree, at which point my left leg was trapped between the horse and the tree. I tried to get the horse to move, but it was unresponsive. I had to wait until the group leader, Jono, came back to find me and got the horse to its feet, freeing my leg.

  By the next day my leg was black and I couldn’t feel much below my knee. I saw a doctor, but there wasn’t a lot to be done. I had severe soft-tissue bruising and nerve damage, and it would take time to recover. I would just have to wait and see if the sensation in my leg returned.

  After a few days the bruising was healing and some of the feeling had returned, though my leg never completely recovered. Bored with being stuck in the house, I went back to work, where I discovered that the horse I had been riding was going blind. No one had realised until our accident.

  A couple of weeks later I began to feel feverish and nauseous, and I ached all over. Another trip to the doctor confirmed that I had tick bite fever, caused by a bite from the tiny pepper tick. They’re so small that you don’t even realise you have one on you. The bite looks like a mosquito bite, and that’s what I thought the innocent-looking mark on my hip was, until after a few days it had developed a brownish-black ulcerated scab that looked anything but innocent.

  I felt so ill I thought I was dying but Jacques was relaxed about it. He’d had it several times and he knew the drill – antibiotics, lots of rest, fluids and time do the trick. He looked after me and reassured me that the first time you get it is the worst.

  I looked at him in horror. I couldn’t imagine having to go through it all over again.

  I stayed for two months, working, lazing in the sun and spending time with Jacques. He was an Afrikaner and Afrikaans was his first language, though he spoke perfect English. He was into hiking and camping, cricket and rugby, and he cooked up a mean braai (Afrikaans for barbecue). But he was also thoughtful, concerned about animals and conservation, and bright; he was about to start a Masters degree in Environmental Management. Like me, he loved books, but while I enjoyed a good novel, Jacques preferred to spend hours poring over books on geology, the environment and wildlife. He had a thirst for knowledge and a passion for animals, and I really liked that about him.

  I knew I couldn’t possibly get involved with someone so far from home, especially not when I was just about to go to vet college and start a whole new phase of my life. So we became great friends and spent our evenings talking under the stars. Romance didn’t happen until a year later, when I went back to do a work placement with Jono’s horse trails company at the end of my first year of college. We were expected to get in some work experience every summer, so it was the perfect excuse to head back to South Africa.

  Jacques invited me to stay with him again and one weekend, when he took the gap-year volunteers camping, I went along. We camped by a river and swam under the full moon. It was wonderfully romantic until Jacques insisted I stopped being a wimp about cold water, and picked me up and threw me into the deeper water. As I came up from under the water I glared at him, but he was just laughing, and I couldn’t help laughing, too.

  The next evening we all gathered for drinks in a tree-house that hung suspended in a huge tree in between Jacques’ house and the house where the volunteers stayed. As everyone drifted off to bed Jacques and I were the only two left listening to the sound of the cicadas and the distant grunts of a lion. And that’s when we looked at one another and realised that, no matter what the obstacles might be, we were kidding ourselves thinking that nothing could ever happen over long distance. We were perfect for each other and crazy about each other.

  Four years on we were still together. In fact, I couldn’t imagine wanting to be with anyone else. Jacques was studying for his Masters alongside work, he’d got the university job and I was on the last leg of my training. Between us we had criss-crossed the world many times, visiting one another, meeting each other’s families and getting to know our very different cultures.

  As soon as I got back home after each visit I started saving for my next air ticket and planning my next trip. But inevitably it could only be a handful of times a year and there were key moments in each other’s lives that we missed.

  This time I was combining my visit to Jacques for a short holiday with a work placement. College always encouraged us to get experience abroad and they were very happy to let me do some of my extra-mural weeks in South Africa.

  I had been taken on by Thys, an old Afrikaner vet, deeply tanned with a white beard and an accent so strong I couldn’t always understand him. I had first contacted him the previous year, when I’d emailed several vets working in the area where Jacques lived, but only Thys replied, warmly inviting me to go and work with him. That summer I flew out to see Jacques and met up with Thys, who immediately took me under his wing and treated me like a daughter. He called me Jo the Englishman, and when we were out working he’d call me Englishman and so would his clients. He was a real family man and he included me in his family with his wife, Johma, and son, Johannes, taking me back to their home for cold drinks and snacks in the breaks in between jobs. Thys lived on a large farm in the middle o
f nowhere, and despite the long days on the road he loved to come home in the evenings to help out on the farm. Johannes ran it while he was away, looking after the cattle they were rearing for market and the horses they bred for people who wanted to compete in endurance events.

  As well as the cattle and horses, Thys had some rather interesting pets, which he took great delight in showing me. He had a whole pack of pitbull terriers, which he would let out at night to guard the house. I was a little nervous of pitbulls, given that they were illegal in England and all I had ever heard were horror stories about them, but Thys’s dogs were far from savage. They were bouncy and playful, and true testament to the fact that dogs respond primarily to the way they are raised and treated.

  But the pitbulls were definitely not the most unusual of Thys’s pets. In a large pen behind his house he had a caracal, a species of wild cat with long ears. He had rescued it as a kitten after a farmer had killed its mother when she was hunting his sheep. Thys had raised it and now it stood about the size of a medium dog, but because it was tame he couldn’t release it back into the wild. In addition to the caracal, Thys kept four crocodiles in a fenced area on his farm. He took great pride in his crocs, which were all fully grown and incredibly large.

  ‘Come meet them,’ he said to me one day.

  ‘Erm, really? Are they not dangerous?’ I enquired nervously.

  ‘Yes. But it’s a cold day. They will be slow, and you look fast,’ he joked, and walked through the gate. I hesitantly came in after him. ‘Watch where you’re going, Englishman! I can only see three of them. I don’t know where the last one is.’

  I followed him, always making sure I had a clear path to the exit should something go wrong, but Thys was far from worried. He loved a bit of danger and thrived on the adrenaline.

  ‘Look, you can touch it,’ he exclaimed, demonstrating. The crocodile didn’t stir. ‘Go on!’

  ‘Wow, um, OK.’ I reached down to touch the bumpy skin at the base of the crocodile’s tail, constantly keeping an eye on his head, which thankfully didn’t move.

  I turned to Thys. ‘This is really surreal and fascinating, but equally terrifying. Can we please go now?’

  ‘All right, Englishman.’ With a last pat he turned from the croc and we headed for the gate.

  Thys was always full of surprises. He spent his life in turquoise overalls, white wellington boots and a safari hat. He saw the occasional dog and did some wildlife work, but the bulk of what he did was looking after cattle on local farms. We would rattle up the red dirt roads in his old truck while Thys talked philosophy and I tried to ask him about his practice. He’d give me a brief answer and then go back to discussing existential theories and ideas about the origins of the universe, which all fascinated him.

  The farms we visited were much more basic than British farms, and there was a far greater variety in size. The average farm in the UK has between 150 and 300 cows; in South Africa they either just have a few animals or upward of 1,000.

  When we arrived at each remote farmstead, Thys got me involved in everything he did and was confident about throwing me in at the deep end. We’d herd the cows from the field into a smaller yard and then shoo them down the race. (A cattle race is also known as a chute, a run or an alley, depending on which country you’re in. Both the UK and South Africa use the term ‘race’ for the narrow corridor built of parallel wooden fences into which cattle are herded, single file, so that we can line them up for examination.)

  Thys and I would then go along the line of cows, checking them rectally for pregnancy, taking blood to look for any indicators of foot and mouth disease, or injecting the antigen for TB into their necks.

  The problem was that these cows were wild Brahman beef cows, notorious for being jumpy and unpredictable, if not plain crazy. Brahmans have a hump and a dewlap – a big flap of skin beneath the neck – and they’re so highly strung that, unlike well-behaved (well, mostly) British cows, they regularly tried to jump out of the race and a couple always ended up hanging on the fence, front legs over and back legs still inside.

  It was Thys who taught me the best way to do a pregnancy check on a cow. He insisted I go in with my left hand as the stomach is on the left-hand side of the cow, so the uterus is always pushed to the right. That makes it much easier to examine the uterus, instead of trying to contort the right arm backwards into an uncomfortable position.

  It felt odd using my left hand at first, as I’m right-handed, but it was much easier to press down on the rim of the pelvis to feel for the uterus and see whether it was enlarged.

  Thys was keen to give me experience, so when I mentioned to him that I hadn’t done much work with pigs and didn’t feel very confident with them he said, ‘OK, Englishman, leave it with me.’ A couple of days later, he said, ‘There’s a small rural community near here and I owe them a favour, so I offered to repay it by having you come and castrate their two boars.’

  ‘Their what?’

  ‘Boars. Don’t worry, they’ll be fine.’

  When we arrived on the smallholding Thys turned to me. ‘The owners have got no money for anaesthetic so the way we’re going to do this is the old-fashioned way. We will inject the boars’ testicles with barbiturates, and that will send them off to sleep as it is absorbed into the blood. But barbiturates are pretty dangerous drugs, so time is of the essence to castrate them before too much is absorbed.’

  I looked at him in disbelief. Barbiturates are used to put animals down, and using minute amounts as an anaesthetic is old school and very dangerous. Use too much and they’re dead. On the other hand, it’s a whole lot cheaper than using modern anaesthetics. I made a mental note that I would never do this when I was qualified, but at that moment Thys was in charge.

  ‘We’ll get them up on the tailgate of my truck and you’ll need to cut off the testicles while they’re asleep. Just try not to be too slow about it,’ Thys said, peering at me from under the rim of his safari hat.

  ‘Thys, I’m not sure I can do this,’ I said, looking anxiously at the emasculators he was laying out.

  ‘Of course you can. And you’d better be quick about it,’ he chuckled.

  ‘I’d much rather you helped me, Thys.’

  ‘Ah, you’ll be fine, Englishman.’

  And with that he rounded up the two boars, injected them, and once the first was asleep he heaved it onto the tailgate of his truck. Then he picked up his video camera, stood back and started filming.

  I took a deep breath, I’d done this on a horse but never before on a pig. I looked at the boar’s extremely large testicles. They were as big as grapefruit. I was going to have to cut the skin on the scrotum, push out the testicles, then apply the emasculators, which both cut off the testicle and clamped the blood vessels of the stump left behind. The clamp has to be the side of the animal, the cutter the side of the testicle. I remembered being told ‘nut to nut’. There was a nut and bolt on the emasculator, and the side of the nut had to be the side of the testicle, to make sure they were the right way around.

  ‘Come on, Englishman,’ Thys roared. ‘You’ve got about two minutes before you really need to be done.’

  I grabbed the blade in one hand, the scrotum of the boar in the other – and cut through the skin.

  Two minutes later the boar was stirring and his testicles lay on the ground at my feet. Our method may not have been clinical, conventional or elegant, but it did the job and Thys, roaring with laughter, slapped me on the back. ‘Well done, Englishman, well done!’

  After my fortnight with Thys, I had two weeks’ holiday to spend with Jacques before my flight home. We went on a lot of game drives, often taking a picnic with us and spending the whole day in the reserve. As we drove, Jacques told me tales of animals in the wild, their environment and the delicate ecosystem that they depend on for survival. His eyes were like those of a hawk. He would see a small speck on the horizon and be able to tell it was a rhino, or a black dot far above in the air and identify what sort of bird it
was. Until then I had thought my eyes were pretty good but I made a mental note to get them checked.

  At one of our picnic stops I laid out a delicious ciabatta loaf I’d bought that morning. I turned to call Jacques and looked back to find a cheeky little vervet monkey clutching my bread. ‘Oi, give that back,’ I shouted, grabbing the other end of the loaf. For a second we both pulled, until the monkey bared his extremely sharp little teeth. I hesitated, and that was it. With one deft yank, he pulled the loaf out of my hand and headed up the nearest tree, where he sat munching on it while I glowered at him. Jacques thought it was hilarious – until he realised there was no bread for lunch.

  When we weren’t out looking at game we headed for the beach. One spot in particular was our favourite. On a beautiful large sand dune, covered in small bushes and flowers, there was a sandy clearing, and from it an incredible view across the ocean and further along the beach. We would sit there looking out to sea, regularly spotting whales, or pods of dolphins playing in front of us. It was the spot where I hoped Jacques might propose to me one day – I’d certainly dropped enough hints! We knew that we wanted to be together but, as Jacques pointed out, we had a few things to sort out first, like which side of the world we would live on. We both had work, families and lives in our different continents. Bringing them together permanently would mean making a lot of tough decisions.

  When the time came to leave at the end of my stay, I didn’t want to go. The thought of leaving Jacques for several months was miserable. I had kissed Jacques goodbye and was heading for the departure gate, in floods of tears, when I bumped into Thys, who was flying up to Johannesburg for a veterinary conference for a few days.

  He patted my shoulder. ‘Don’t cry, Englishman,’ he said. ‘We’ll see you again soon.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘What Seems to Be the Problem?’

  ‘So, Jo, what do you think is wrong with its toes?’