Every Living Thing (44 page)

He went on with his stroking for some time, then nodded his head. “All right.”

“When?”

“Ah’ll let ye know.”

Adam came in again. “You see. He won’t say, because I can tell you now that ’e never will bring her in to you. He’s made up ’is mind that Meg’s going to die.”

“That’s daft, Bob,” I said. “I tell you I’m pretty sure I can put her right. Will I take her away with me now? How about that?”

Still looking down, he shook his head vigorously. I decided on shock tactics.

“Well, let me do the operation now.”

He shot me a startled glance. “What…right here?”

“Why not? It’s not as big a job as you think. It doesn’t involve any vital organs, and I always carry an operating kit in my car.”

“Good idea!” burst out Adam. “It’s the only way we’ll get it done!”

“Just one thing,” I said. “When did she last eat?”

“She had a few biscuits this morning,” Adam replied. “But that’s all. Bob always gives her her main meal last thing at night.”

“Fine, fine. She’ll be just right for the anaesthetic.”

Bob seemed stupefied and he didn’t say a word or make a move as Adam and I began to bustle about with our preparations. I had always been interested in the relationship between these two middle-aged brothers. They were opposites. Adam had never had an alcoholic drink in his life but seemed totally uncritical of Bob’s beer-orientated life-style, and when Bob was at the Lord Nelson Adam was usually attending night classes at the village school, rug-making being his latest interest. Adam wasn’t a farm worker; he was employed by the big dairy that collected the milk from the Dales farms. He was small and slightly built, finicky and fussy in his manner, unlike his burly, stolid brother.

After I had boiled the instruments we got Meg on the table and a quick injection of intravenous barbiturate sent the old bitch into deep anaesthesia. I made her fast on her back with bandages to the table legs and then all three of us scrubbed up at the kitchen sink. Bob, still wearing his cap, displayed a growing lack of enthusiasm, and when I handed the brothers an artery forceps apiece and poised my scalpel he closed his eyes tightly.

My system with these tumours was to cut out an ellipse on the skin, then proceed by blunt dissection with my fingers. It looked a bit crude, but greatly reduced the amount of haemorrhage. I had made my first incision and had started to peel back the skin, and it was just at the moment when I had taken the forceps from the brothers and was clamping a couple of spurting vessels that Bob opened his eyes. He gave a hollow groan and tottered to an old horsehair sofa, where he slumped and buried his head in his hands. His frail brother, however, was made of sterner stuff, and though he lost a little colour he set his lips firmly and gripped both the forceps on the vessels with a steady hand as I tied them off.

Once started, I went about my job with gusto, working my way with my fingers round the spherical growth, pushing back the adhering fascia from the skin. Some of these things almost shelled out, and though this one wasn’t quite as easy as that, I was doing fine. Soon I had the whole tumour in my hand except for a mass right at the bottom and I knew from experience that there would be a big vessel down there. “Get ready with your forceps, Adam,” I said, tearing carefully at the tissue, but almost as I spoke a crimson jet fountained up into his face.

Bob chose this moment to uncover his eyes and after one appalled glance at his brother’s blood-spattered spectacles he gave a strangled grunt, lifted his legs and flopped onto his back on the sofa, pulling his cap over his eyes with a limp hand.

“Well done, Adam,” I said to the little man as he stood resolutely at his post, the forceps clamped on that final vessel while I ligated it and removed the tumour. “We’re about finished now. Just a few stitches to put in.” I inserted a row of nylon sutures and stood back, well satisfied.

“The old girl looks a lot better without that horrible thing,” I said and swept my hand across the unsullied abdomen. Unfortunately my fingers struck the tumour, which was lying on the table, and it fell to the floor with a bump and rolled towards the sofa.

Bob turned a startled face towards the source of the noise and his mouth fell open as he spotted the grisly object bowling in his direction. “Oh, bloody ’ell,” he moaned, then turned his face to the wall.

There he stayed as I helped his brother carry Meg over to her basket, scrub the table and generally clear up the debris.

When all signs of our operation had disappeared Adam carried the kettle to the kitchen sink. “I don’t know about you, Mr. Herriot, but I could do wi’ a cup of tea.”

“I’d love one,” I said and dropped onto one of the oaken chairs.

Adam turned to the prone form on the sofa. “How about you, Bob? Are you goin’ to have a cup?”

Bob stirred, sat up and looked warily round the room. “Nay…nay…” He got to his feet and went over to a cupboard, from which he extracted a bottle of brown ale. He poured a glassful and took a long swallow, then he went over to the dog basket and peered in at the flat abdomen and the neat row of stitches. He crouched there for some minutes, stroking the sleeping animal and fondling her ears, then he turned and looked at us and a slow smile of utter contentment spread over his face.

“Well,” he said, “we did it.”

“Aye, Bob, lad,” said his brother, smiling back at him. “We did it.”

When I removed the stitches ten days later I was able to reassure Bob that microscopic examination had shown the tumour to be benign and that his worries were over.

After that I didn’t see him for nearly a month until, one evening, I spotted his cap above the crowd in the Lord Nelson. It was nearly closing time and as I pushed my way towards him he rose from his stool, and Meg appeared from below and began to amble after him to the door. She looked younger and brighter without her disfiguring appendage. I watched the pair through the pub window, and once outside she flopped down with her nose on her paws, waiting for her master to go through his routine.

Bob seized his bike and gave it a good shake as though to let it know who was boss. He took only two efforts to get astride, and though he poised there immobile, working the handlebars from side to side, there was an authoritative look about his movements and it wasn’t long before he took off on his journey home. I watched man and dog till they were out of sight, and though there were frequent pauses I could see that there was no danger of a catastrophe.

Bob wasn’t going to fall off tonight. He was himself again.

C
ALUM INSERTED THE LAST
stitch after one of his dexterous operations and looked down at the sleeping cat for a few seconds.

“Jim,” he said, without raising his head. “I’m afraid I’m going to leave you.”

“Oh.” My heart gave a lurch, and I couldn’t think of anything to say at that moment. Calum had been with us for two years and, like all young vets, there had to come a time when he wanted to branch out on his own. But there was only one thought in my mind—I didn’t want him to go.

Receiving no further reply, Calum went on. “Yes, I’ve had the chance of a job I think will suit me.”

“Oh…” My restricted vocabulary was making me feel like an idiot. “Well…I understand, of course, Calum. Where will you be going?” My brain was starting to work again and one certainty loomed large—it would be somewhere isolated, somewhere in the wilds. Most likely the north of Scotland…maybe in the Western Isles.

“Nova Scotia,” he replied.

“My God!” I realised suddenly that I didn’t fully know him after all.

He laughed. “I thought you’d say something like that. I’ve been in touch with a chap who runs a practice out there, and the prospect seems right for me. It covers a wide area of a rural district with some quite primitive conditions—a lot of the countryside in its natural uncultivated state; unmade roads, rough farms, wonderful variety of wildlife. Some quite desolate country nearby, I understand.” A faraway look crept into his dark eyes as though he were glimpsing the promised land.

I began to laugh, too. “Oh, hell, Calum, I’m sorry to be like this. It was a bit of a shock, in fact two shocks, but it does sound like your cup of tea and I hope you’ll be very happy out there. What does Dierdre think about the idea?”

“Loves it. Can’t wait to get started.”

“I don’t doubt it. I think I hear Siegfried coming in. We’d better tell him.”

We met my partner in the passage. He looked a bit solemn as we gave him the news, then, like me, he put on a cheerful face and thumped Calum on the shoulder. “I’m so glad you’ve found something you really want, my boy. I’m sure it will be the very thing for you and I wish you and Dierdre every happiness and success. But dammit, I’m going to miss you.”

He stopped suddenly and pointed wordlessly at an enormous feathered creature stalking past him. “What…? What…?” In the darkness of the passage it looked as big as an ostrich.

The young man smiled happily. “Just a heron. I picked it up a few days ago, down by the river. Wandering around, couldn’t fly. Obviously damaged a wing, but seems to be improving.” As he spoke, the great bird spread its wings and flapped round the corner and out of sight. “Ah, look. Soon be completely recovered.”

“I hope so…I do hope so.” Siegfried stared at him, then cocked an ear at the scrabbling of a couple of recently adopted tortoises on the tiles farther along the passage. Then he grinned suddenly. “Yes, I’m going to miss you, all right.”

The few weeks before Calum’s departure fled past and after he and Dierdre had gone, I had that empty feeling again as I went into the deserted flat. John Crooks and now Calum—they had become my friends and both had left a gap, but with Calum the change was even more traumatic. The silence in the absence of the menagerie was almost palpable, and as I looked out of the window in the room where he had demolished that cake on his first day, many things rose and lingered in my mind. “Permission to eat, sir,” “I’ll just put Dierdre up a tree,” Herriot’s duct and, most emotive of all, the picture of his rapt face and dark eyes as he squeezed “Shenandoah” from my children’s little concertina.

Calum had been an acutely interesting man during his stay in Darrowby, but it was nearly as interesting to follow his career after he had left. I received regular letters telling me about his growing practice among the dirt roads and untamed countryside. His bursting energy led him to start the first auction mart in the district and he was trying to develop small-animal work. A sentence sticks in my mind: “Doing quite a few cat spays—Herriot’s duct much in evidence.” The letters often ended in “Permission to fall out, sir,” which pulled me back to the old days.

Training Border collies was another of his passions and he gave frequent public demonstrations of his skill, several generations of his dogs being descended from prize-winning sheep-dogs he had bought from a farmer friend during his stay in Darrowby. He bought a farm, too, in Cape Breton, as though he didn’t have enough to occupy him.

I also was kept abreast of the regular arrival of his children, noting with growing wonder as they mounted up to six. He brought up all of them in his own image, loving the outdoors and the wild creatures, scorning the soft things of life as he had always done, camping and backpacking in the forests and mountains.

Often as I read those letters from Calum the thought recurred that at last he had found his ideal environment, but I was wrong.

Twenty years after he left Darrowby I was treating a cow for his farmer friend, Alan Beech. Alan was holding the animal’s nose and he spoke over his shoulders. “Have you heard the latest about Calum?”

“No, what is it?”

“He’s leaving Nova Scotia.”

“Never!”

“It’s right. And where d’you think he’s going?”

A jumble of thoughts spun in my mind. At last, with the advance of middle age, he was finding it too rough and tough out there. Felt it necessary to take his family to somewhere that offered a more gentle life. Maybe he was coming back here.

“I’ve no idea,” I said. “Tell me.”

“Papua New Guinea.”

“What!”

“Absolutely right.” Alan’s face broke into a wide grin. “Would you believe it!”

“My God, from cold and snows to steamy heat. It could only be Calum! Maybe Nova Scotia was too soft and sophisticated for him?”

“That could be it. He doesn’t seem satisfied there—wants a place where there’s still a lot o’ cannibals about, from what I’ve heard. By heck, he’s a rum feller!”

I’d heard that description of Calum a thousand times from the farmers around Darrowby and now it seemed to be more strikingly proven than ever. I looked up Papua New Guinea in the public library and read that it wasn’t till 1930 that the first white man had made contact with the million inhabitants of the unexplored highlands where Calum had gone. It was a whole intact civilisation that had had no contact with the outside world.

I looked at pictures of fierce-looking, almost naked men with slivers of bone transfixing their nostrils and brandishing bows and arrows as they glared into the camera. These frightening people would be his neighbours and there was nothing surer than he would love them all and especially those wide-eyed little black children.

The letters started to arrive from Mendi in the southern highlands. Calum, as expected, was utterly entranced by it all. The agriculture was Stone Age in character with pigs the only livestock, most of the settlements unchanged from when the first whites discovered them, and the primitive farmers, though a bit careless about keeping appointments when he tried to teach them animal husbandry, were charming chaps. Dierdre and he were already firm friends with all of them.

As the months and years passed he was clearly absorbed in the development and improvement of the country. I learned how he introduced cattle, sheep and poultry into the local agriculture, educated the farmers and immersed himself with all his energy in the life there.

In 1988 one of his daughters, Sarah, wrote to me. She said, “Dad still amazes me with his knowledge of the local vegetation and wildlife and on his station farm he has 11 Border collies, 2 pig dogs (Labrador crosses), 2 water buffalo, 5 horses, many cattle, sheep, goats, an assortment of chickens, ducks, guinea fowl and a huge flock of homing pigeons.”