All Things Bright and Beautiful Read Online Free PDF

the Alsatian episode. I wasn’t surprised when I had a call to the Benson farm within days.
    I met him again on the hillside with the same wind whipping over the straw bale pens. The lambs had been arriving in a torrent and the noise was louder than ever. He led me to my patient.
    “There’s one with a bellyful of dead lambs, I reckon,” he said, pointing to a ewe with her head drooping, ribs heaving. She stood quite motionless and made no attempt to move away when I went up to her; this one was really sick and as the stink of decomposition came up to me I knew the farmer’s diagnosis was right.
    “Well I suppose it had to happen to one at least after that chasing round,” I said. “Let’s see what we can do, anyway.”
    This kind of lambing is without charm but it has to be done to save the ewe. The lambs were putrid and distended with gas and I used a sharp scalpel to skin the legs to the shoulders so that I could remove them and deliver the little bodies with the least discomfort to the mother. When I had finished, the ewe’s head was almost touching the ground, she was panting rapidly and grating her teeth. I had nothing to offer her—no wriggling new creature for her to lick and revive her interest in life. What she needed was an injection of penicillin, but this was 1939 and the antibiotics were still a little way round the corner.
    “Well I wouldn’t give much for her,” Rob grunted. “Is there owt more you can do?”
    “Oh, I’ll put some pessaries in her and give her an injection, but what she needs most is a lamb to look after. You know as well as I do that ewes in this condition usually give up if they’ve nothing to occupy them. You haven’t a spare lamb to put on her, have you?”
    “Not right now, I haven’t. And it’s now she needs it. Tomorrow’ll be too late.”
    Just at that moment a familiar figure wandered into view. It was Herbert, the unwanted lamb, easily recognisable as he prowled from sheep to sheep in search of nourishment.
    “Hey, do you think she’d take that little chap?” I asked the farmer.
    He looked doubtful. “Well I don’t know—he’s a bit old. Nearly a fortnight and they like ’em newly born.”
    “But it’s worth a try isn’t it? Why not try the old trick on her?”
    Rob grinned. “O.K., well do that. There’s nowt to lose. Anyway the little youth isn’t much bigger than a new-born ’un. He hasn’t grown as fast as his mates.” He took out his penknife and quickly skinned one of the dead lambs, then he tied the skin over Herbert’s back and round his jutting ribs.
    “Poor little bugger, there’s nowt on ’im,” he muttered. “If this doesn’t work he’s going in with the pet lambs.”
    When he had finished he set Herbert on the grass and the lamb, resolute little character that he was, bored straight in under the sick ewe and began to suck. It seemed he wasn’t having much success because he gave the udder a few peremptory thumps with his hard little head; then his tail began to wiggle.
    “She’s lettin’ him have a drop, any road,” Bob laughed.
    Herbert was a type you couldn’t ignore and the big sheep, sick as she was, just had to turn her head for a look at him. She sniffed along the tied-on skin in a non-committal way then after a few seconds she gave a few quick licks and the merest beginning of the familiar deep chuckle.
    I began to gather up my gear. “I hope he makes it,” I said. “Those two need each other.” As I left the pen Herbert, in his new jacket, was still working away.
    For the next week I hardly seemed to have my coat on. The flood of sheep work was at its peak and I spent hours of every day with my arms in and out of buckets of hot water in all corners of the district—in the pens, in dark nooks in farm buildings or very often in the open fields, because the farmers of those days didn’t find anything disturbing in the sight of a vet kneeling in his shirt sleeves for an hour in the rain.
    I had one more visit