Thomasina. Paul Gallico
shrieks, squawks, mews and general animal hurrah for a loved human.
Willie, who just about came up to Mr MacDhui’s shoulder in height, was seventy, and fifty of those years he had devoted to the love and care of animals. MacDhui had inherited him from the man from whom he had bought the practice. Spry and alert, he had a friar’s atoll of white hair about his skull and melting brown eyes that gave away his character and kindness of heart.
This was The Hour. Dogs stood up frantically on their hind legs inside their cages, pawing and shouting at him, birds shrieked, cats stiffened their tails and rubbed their flanks against the cage doors in anticipation, even the dogs too sick for greater demonstrations managed at least a waving and a thumping of their flags.
“Now, now –” Willie said, surveying the pandemonium with the most intense satisfaction – “one at a time now, one at a time!” He stopped at the first cage of a fat dachshund who went hysterical in his arms when he took him out, screaming, wriggling, licking his face, singing a passionate obbligato over the general chorus of enthusiasm. “There there, now, Hansi – dinna excite yersel so, or ’twill appear on your chart no less and the doctor will read that I’ve had ye oot for a spell. Ye’ll be awa hame tomorrow or the next day –”
Thus he went from cage to cage, bestowing love, the secret medicine which surely effected as many cures as the doctor’s drugs, or helped them along. Cats and dogs that were well enough he had out for a hug, or a bit of play, the sick had their ears and bellies rubbed, the parrot his head scratched, the lot of them pampered, petted and spoiled until each had had its turn and been calmed down, when the regular routine of care and medication went forward.
The morning was misty and the smell of sea salt mingled with coal and peat smoke was in the air from the breakfast fires as Mr MacDhui drove through the streets of grey stone or whitewashed houses, tall, narrow and slate-roofed, down to the quay where the waters of the loch were grey too, and a blue fishing boat with a stumpy mast and the forward well loaded with lobster pots, floats and gear chuffed out of the harbour.
The veterinary breathed the smell of mingled sea and land, wild sea and rugged woodland and man and habitation smells with no particular enjoyment, nor did he look to the flight of gulls, or the curl of the tide lapping the shore; the beauty of the blue boat on the grey mirror of the loch in the pearly morning mist already shot through with the light of the mounting sun was lost upon him. He turned the jeep northwards on to the Cairndow road, crossing the river Ardrath by the old saddleback bridge and, when he reached Creemore, took the left fork up into the hills.
When he had climbed somewhat he could see the gipsy encampment lying at the foot of a fold in the valley to the south and noted from the smoke and the number of wagons that it was a large one. He recalled what Mary Ruadh had told him of it as seen through the eyes of Geordie McNabb, and the run-in that Constable MacQuarrie had had with them, but he shrugged the whole matter off as none of his business. If the police chose to let them remain there, that was their affair. There would no doubt be the usual neglect of their horses and livestock amongst these people who in some instances even in this day and age continued to live themselves like animals, but as long as the police were satisfied he did not care. This the curious paradox of the animal doctor who did not love animals.
But he would have denied vehemently and truculently, and had, in just such an argument with Mr Peddie, that he was a cold or loveless man, and with much outjutting of his beard had cited his affection for his daughter Mary Ruadh as the keystone of his life. Yet he admitted to loving little or nothing else but her.
The minister with whom he liked to tussle philosophically just because he was so unpredictable, and whose range was from the erudite through the theological to the poetic, had surprised him by indulging in flights of the latter in his reply.
He had maintained that in his opinion one could not love a woman without likewise loving the night and the stars that made even more of a mystery of her presence, or the soft air and sun that warmed and made fragrant her hair; that you could not love a little girl without loving too the field flowers, limp and wilted, with which she returned from a foray into the meadow, clutched in a damp hand. And he had said that you too would have to feel love for the mongrel she adored or the cat that she carried and even for the stuff of the frocks that clung to her body. He said that if you loved the wild sea lashed in storm, then you could not help loving the mountains too, which with their swelling hills and jagged and snow-topped peaks swirled by the wind like sea-froth imitated the waves and presented to one’s gaze the miracle of an ocean petrified in mid-storm. He declared that you could not love the bright, hot, lazy summer days without loving also the rains that came to cool them; that one could not love the flight of birds without loving too the flash of the trout or salmon in the dark pool, that one could not love man, any or all of him, without loving the beasts of the field and the forests, or the beasts without loving the trees and the grasses, the shrubs and the heather and the flowers of meadow and garden.
And here, dropping the rhetorical style into which he had drifted, and, truth to tell, held MacDhui rather speechless with astonishment, he slyly descended to a more ordinary and matter-of-fact routine of speech and said that it was difficult to understand how a man could love all or any of these without loving God as well from any point of view, philosophically, practically, theologically, or just plain logically. The result of course had been the usual scornful and indignant snort from MacDhui, who declared that Peddie was better and at least more plausible as poet.
Mr MacDhui turned in at the wagon track leading to the Birnie farm and, parking the jeep, entered the stone stalls of the stables with an expression of deep disgust upon his face. The stench was overpowering. Fergus Birnie, a wizened farmer, was almost as dirty as his cowsheds. He greeted the vet sourly at the entrance and complained: “’Tis the Lask come back again. Yon medicine ye gied me was gey unchancy. Ye swyked me wi’ it, Mr MacDhui, an’ I’ll thank ye fur the shillings back I laid oot fur it.”
MacDhui minced no words. With his red beard thrust into the farmer’s face as near as he could bear the smell of him, he bellowed, “Ye’re a filthy dog, Birnie. Yer cattle are in diarrhoea again because ye live dirtier than any swine wallowing out yonder in their ain glaur. I’ve warned ye often enough, Fergus Birnie. Noo I’m takin’ awa’ yer licence for the herd and the selling of yer milk until ye change yer ways.”
He went outside and removed a small metal plate from the door of the barn and put it in his pocket while Birnie stood there regarding him bleakly. “I’ll be back here within the hour,” the veterinarian said. “Call your misbegotten sons over here and wash down thee stables and sheds – and yourselves along with it. And wash those cattle until they are clean enough to buss. If there’s so much as a smitch of dirt about here when I return I’ll charge ye to Constable MacQuarrie for endangering the public health and it’s to jail ye’ll all go.”
He drove on to the Maistock farm back in the hills, a well-run place where he complimented Jock Maistock for giving him an early warning of the symptoms in one of his long-horned, fringe-browed Ayrshire cattle of the dreaded blackleg. He ordered the suspected animal slaughtered at once, vaccinated the remainder of the herd against the disease, and placed a temporary quarantine on them until time should reveal the extent of the immunity obtained.
He called in at the Macpherson chicken farm and calmed the fears of the widow Macpherson that she was in for an outbreak of the gapes, a disease of fowls caused by worms in the windpipe. The laboratory report had been negative and the suspected chicks were suffering from a harmless respiratory attack and were already perking up in their isolation pen. MacDhui certified them for release.
He called in at the farm of a wealthy experimental cattle farmer who was trying out a herd in the hills, and gave the cattle the Tuberculin Test, visited several other small farms and crofters’ cottages for minor complaints, and on his way back looked in again on Fergus Birnie’s stalls.
Fear of loss of bread and butter had worked upon the farmer, and stables and cattle were in passable condition, clean enough at least for the veterinarian to get on with the treatment. He inoculated each animal, promised to restore the licence when the disease had abated, provided the standard of cleanliness was maintained. With a final threat to drop in any day