All Things Bright and Beautiful Read Online Free PDF Page A

suture silk in the boot.
    The in-lamb ewes were in a field by the roadside and my heart gave a quick thump as I looked over the wall; arms resting on the rough loose stones I gazed with sick dismay across the pasture. This was worse than I had feared. The long slope of turf was dotted with prostrate sheep—there must have been about fifty of them, motionless woolly mounds scattered at intervals on the green.
    Bob was standing just inside the gate. He hardly looked at me. Just gestured with his head.
    “Tell me what you think. I daren’t go in there.”
    I left him and began to walk among the stricken creatures, rolling them over, lifting their legs, parting the fleece of their necks to examine them. Some were completely unconscious, others comatose; none of them could stand up. But as I worked my way up the field I felt a growing bewilderment. Finally I called back to the farmer.
    “Rob, come over here. There’s something very strange.”
    “Look,” I said as the farmer approached hesitantly. “There’s not a drop of blood nor a wound anywhere and yet all the sheep are flat out. I can’t understand it.”
    Bob bent over and gently raised a lolling head. “Aye, you’re right. What the hell’s done it, then?”
    At that moment I couldn’t answer him, but a little bell was tinkling far away in the back of my mind. There was something familiar about that ewe the farmer had just handled. She was one of the few able to support herself on her chest and she was lying there, blank-eyed, oblivious of everything; but…that drunken nodding of the head, that watery nasal discharge…I had seen it before. I knelt down and as I put my face close to hers I heard a faint bubbling—almost a rattling—in her breathing. I knew then.
    “It’s calcium deficiency,” I cried and began to gallop down the slope towards the car.
    Rob trotted alongside me. “But what the ’ell? They get that after lambin’, don’t they?”
    “Yes, usually,” I puffed. “But sudden exertion and stress can bring it on.”
    “Well ah never knew that,” panted Rob. “How does it happen?”
    I saved my breath. I wasn’t going to start an exposition on the effects of sudden derangement of the parathyroid. I was more concerned with wondering if I had enough calcium in the boot for fifty ewes. It was reassuring to see the long row of round tin caps peeping from their cardboard box; I must have filled up recently.
    I injected the first ewe in the vein just to check my diagnosis—calcium works as quickly as that in sheep—and felt a quiet elation as the unconscious animal began to blink and tremble, then tried to struggle on to its chest.
    “We’ll inject the others under the skin,” I said. “It’ll save time.”
    I began to work my way up the field. Rob pulled forward the fore leg of each sheep so that I could insert the needle under the convenient patch of unwoolled skin just behind the elbow; and by the time I was half way up the slope the ones at the bottom were walking about and getting their heads into the food troughs and hay racks.
    It was one of the most satisfying experiences of my working life. Not clever, but a magical transfiguration; from despair to hope, from death to life within minutes.
    I was throwing the empty bottles into the boot when Rob spoke. He was looking wonderingly up at the last of the ewes getting to its feet at the far end of the field.
    “Well Jim, I’ll tell you. I’ve never seen owt like that afore. But there’s one thing bothers me.” He turned to me and his weathered features screwed up in puzzlement. “Ah can understand how gettin’ chased by a dog could affect some of them ewes, but why should the whole bloody lot go down?”
    “Rob,” I said. “I don’t know.”
    And, thirty years later, I still wonder. I still don’t know why the whole bloody lot went down.
    I thought Rob had enough to worry about at the time, so I didn’t point out to him that other complications could be expected after