Don't Turn Your Back in the Barn (Adventures of a Country Vet) Read online

  Introduction

  Sweet William

  “Star light, star bright”

  Ferry Contrary

  Poor Wee Thing

  Party Line Blues

  Doris

  Moving In

  The Yahk Circus

  Virgin Territory

  Ladies’ Man

  A Day at the Beach

  My Kids

  This Little Piggy

  Plum ’72

  Meine beste Freundin

  Blood Brothers

  The Trouble with Cows

  My New Car

  The Freeloader

  Mouse

  Such a Good Girl

  The Cruel Month

  DAVE’S PRESS INC.

  Copyright © 2000 Dave’s Press Inc. Third printing, 2001.

  Fourth printing, 2002.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without prior permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote a passage in a review.

  Published by Dave’s Press Inc. Box 616, Lister

  British Columbia

  Canada V0B 1Y0

  Cover and book design by Warren Clark Illustrations by Wendy Liddle

  Edited by Betsy Brierley

  Printed and bound in Canada Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data ISBN 0-9687943-0-0

  ISBN 0-9687943-0-0

  Don't turn your back in the barn 1. Perrin, David, 1948– 2. Veterinarians—British Columbia— Lister—Biography. I. Liddle, Wendy. II. Title.

  SF613.P47A3 2000 636.089'092 C00-911122-0

  To all the Dorises of my life

  Sitting here thinking about all the wonderful people who have helped me over the years, I wonder how I could have been so fortunate. When I was in practice, they worked side by side with me at all hours of the day and night. I owe them so much. They were the ones who made the task bearable and kept me going when my reserves ran low. All too often, they were not given the credit due them, by either my clients or myself.

  Thank you, Doris Currie, Shirley Shopa, Linda Roth, Margaret Rogers, Margaret Berg, Faith Clayton, Alan Clayton, Dorothy McKenzie, Helen Turner, Jan Horsnell, Shiela Wilson, Lynne Hornslien, Roxane Schmalz, Jennifer McCartney, Katerina Hegerova, Leslie Lorencz, Delilah Milne, Terry Mattison, Rebecca Huscroft, and Annie Wile.

  Gordon and Ruth Veitch helped me so much in my first years of practice. Thank you, Ruth, for treating me as one of your family. My memories of Gordon, who taught me the meaning of friendship, are alive and well.

  Tackling this book was not much easier than starting my own practice, and once again I was blessed with supportive people who encouraged me and helped me to carry on. Thank you, Betsy Brierley and Gary Katz, for your tireless efforts in editing. Wendy Liddle, you are not only an incredible artist but a great human being, and your efforts have helped bring my stories to life. Bill Blakely, Ron Carlson, Christopher Hart, Rob McLeod, and Bruno Schiefer, you have been great critics; your comments and questions have helped me shape my narratives.

  This book is essentially a work of nonfiction. Many of the people are very real and just as rich and full in character as they appear. Most of them have been good clients throughout the years and have been the best friends a man could ask for. In some cases, I have changed names and altered details to protect people's identities.

  Again and again, I was pulled from school concerts and family events to fulfill my duties. My family tolerated me and supported me throughout that time. Thank you Ruth, Joan, Marshall, Gordon, and Alicia. I love you all.

  I have known Dave Perrin first as his employee, then as his partner, and now as a reader of his first book. He has recorded these real-life adventures with the same vigour he showed in his twenty-six years of veterinary practice in the Creston Valley.

  Don't Turn Your Back in the Barn follows his year as a rookie country vet—from early summer of 1973 through a striking Kootenay autumn and miserable winter to the prospect of spring. His narratives are an accurate portrayal of the life of a rural practitioner—one filled with challenges, frustrations, and great rewards.

  The reader will find tales of victory and failure, pathos and humour, as Dr. Perrin experiences the rigours of a practice that balances the full range of creatures from kittens to cows. While the science of veterinary medicine has advanced over the years, how people and their animals interact has not changed. Dave's stories highlight the people who rejoice and anguish as their pets and farm animals give birth or succumb to illness or rally to become once more vital and productive.

  This book should be required reading for aspiring veterinarians. Anyone who has ever cared about an animal will empathize with the main characters, whether those characters walk on two legs or four. Anyone who thrives on the chaos of life will take pleasure from this read.

  Dave Perrin is not afraid to display his emotion in his writing nor to reveal his own frailties. But the element that runs through each story is his passion—for his work, for his patients, and for the mountains and fertile flat lands that surround the Kootenay River in the southeast corner of British Columbia.

  Dr. Rob McLeod, Creston, B.C.

  SWEET WILLIAM AT STUD read the bold print. Beneath, in ordinary script, was Purebred Nubian Goat available for service. $50 breed fee.

  The ad in the local newspaper caught my attention. I smiled. He might not be the only old goat in town available for stud, but he was probably the only one worthy of a fifty-dollar fee.

  I was looking at the classifieds in the Creston Valley Advance to try and come up with a notice of my own. As soon as I got a phone installed, I was going to have to get my name out there.

  "Hello, anyone here?"

  "Yes, just a minute." I tucked in my shirt and headed for the door.

  A slight woman in her twenties stepped back as I opened the screen door. She wore tight blue jeans, a red plaid wool jacket, and well-worn men's hiking boots. Her cascading dark brown hair framed a pleasant, if discerning face. She had a confident, nononsense air about her.

  "Are you the new vet?"

  Yes, I'm Dave Perrin.

  Hello, Dr. Perrin, I'm Jean Melba." As she extended her hand, I could detect an unusual combination of fragrances—the musk that was popular with the hippies of my era and just the faintest trace of garlic, but what else?

  "I was visiting one of your neighbours down the road. She told me that the MacKays said you're starting a new practice in the valley."

  "That's right. I just arrived a few days ago; haven't exactly gotten things off the ground yet."

  "Well, we're new to the area, too. We just moved up here from the Fraser Valley with a herd of Nubian goats. We wanted to introduce the breed locally and are hoping to sell our stock. So far, I've been disappointed in the attitude of a lot of the breeders." "Why is that?" I really didn't want to get into a discussion about another breeder. They could be a difficult lot.

  "I was talking to one of them about her deworming program—she uses garlic once a month. I have a healthy respect for garlic, but I maintain a regular deworming program as well."

  "I'm a big proponent of preventive medicine, Mrs. Melba, and certainly agree with you."

  "Would you have time to deworm my goats?"

  "Sure thing. It's getting a bit late tonight, but I'd be happy to pop by tomorrow morning."

  Mrs. Melba wrote out the directions to her home on a piece of paper, and I watched her retreat down the driveway to her pickup. I smiled as she turned and waved—a real live client!

  I settled in
to rummaging through the boxes of drugs and miscellaneous household goods that were scattered throughout the house.

  It didn't occur to me to question why I was here. Why, after spending seven years at university in an ivory tower with the best of equipment, would I even consider establishing my own practice here—in Creston, British Columbia, with an old log house as a facility and only a few cardboard boxes full of drugs and equipment?

  I was determined not to tie myself to a telephone, not to lose sight of my personal life. So why was I so bent on establishing a one-man practice that couldn't possibly succeed without my twenty-four-hour attention?

  Was it the overwhelming beauty of the Creston Valley, the relationships I had already established with some local farmers, or the failed negotiations to buy Dr. Marling's practice?

  Whatever the reason—fate, enchantment, or stubbornness—I was ready to give this venture one hell of a try!

  Sitting in front of the kitchen window, I sorted through the medications, looked up prices that Cathy Morganthaler had put on the invoice, and marked the individual prices on the bottles. Many of the drug names were completely foreign to me and, only by finding their generic names, could I decide what they were for. It would take time to get used to all the new names.

  The fact that I had no previously established links with any of the drug companies had been a worry. I hadn't the slightest notion which of them produced what and no idea where to start ordering my supplies.

  It was Dr. Morganthaler in Trail who came to my rescue. When I stopped at his office to discuss my plans with him, he provided me with both phone numbers and catalogues. I was on my way out the door to leave for Creston when he said, "Tell you what, I'll give you a bit of a stake to get started—you pay me when you get the chance." That led to a whirlwind trip through his clinic, with his wife Cath following in his wake.

  "You'll need six or eight grams of Biotal, maybe a couple of the five-gram size for horses."

  "What about some atropine and Demerol," Cath prompted, "and probably some Atravet."

  So it was that a couple of hours later I departed from the West Kootenay Animal Hospital with everything I was likely to require during the coming weeks.

  As I marked the last bottles of injectable vitamin ADE, the kittens distracted me from my task. Perched on a rickety old washstand, they paused in their pursuit of an elusive bat that led them from one end of the building to the other. The two mischievous felines which I had chosen from a litter at my parent's home had spent the better part of the last half hour chasing the creature, and they were now exhausted. I had to admit that this building was better suited to a bat than it was to a veterinarian.

  Poor Grandma would roll over in her grave to see the condition of her once picturesque home. I thought back to the last time I had visited my grandparents in this house—it was their final day in West Creston. Grampa had just been hospitalized with rampant high blood pressure that launched him into fits of rage and left him unconscious for ever longer periods of time. Poor old Granny, her huge frame no longer able to support her weight, was being loaded into our waiting car. Her eyes brimmed with tears as my parents plunked her on the seat and struggled to squeeze first one leg, then the other, into a space that was too cramped to accommodate her.

  She sat stoically looking out the window as my father locked the doors to a part of her life that she would never revisit. As we drove away, she turned to gaze at the log cabin that had been a refuge for the last twenty years of her life. I could only imagine how she felt, knowing that she would never lay eyes on it again.

  That had been eight years ago; since that time the house had been left to a stream of vagrant renters, and it had been more than a year since the last of them had vacated.

  A leaky roof had left gyproc and paper dangling from the ceiling and walls, but a myriad of spiders had done its best to weave a matrix to hold the structure together. Everything, including the kitchen sink and the moveable parts of the cupboards, had disappeared with the last renters; the furniture that I managed to scrounge from my parents did little to fill the void.

  The kittens curled up in the box of blankets at my feet. "You girls have had enough too, haven't you? It's time to call it a day—I'd better get the light going, or we'll soon be groping in the dark."

  With lantern and matches in hand, I collapsed in a chair in front of the living room window. Pumping away at the lamp, I was about to light it, when the view brought me to a halt. The valley below lay like a picture glued to the wall—peaceful and captivating.

  Four years of flat, expansive prairie landscape had left me with an insatiable thirst for rugged mountain splendour; like a drunk with sudden access to booze, I strained to get my fill.

  I threw open the screen door and stepped down to the verandah that ran the full length of the old house. At the far end, I straddled the rail and focused on the untamed beauty of the Kootenays.

  The yellows, greens, and browns of the flat lands blended into the darker greens and blues of the surrounding mountains. The Kootenay River, whose lavish dumps of silty loam had created the Creston plateau, meandered its way from the south to the north end of the

  valley, its large, lazy S-shaped curves reflecting like a mirror in the fading light.

  The road that crossed the flats in a north to south direction lay like a ribbon along the river's length. An irrigation canal running parallel to it sent out perpendicular ditches to carve the land into the blocks of a patchwork quilt—the light green of the pastures dotted with grazing cattle, the lusher green of alfalfa fields, the dark brown of freshly plowed earth, the green-tinged brown of newly sprouted barley and oats.

  Gazing across the valley, I knew what had kept my grandfather captive for the twenty years he had lived in his house on the hill. Nightly, he would sit on this same verandah in his rocking chair watching this very scene unfold before him. Watch, as the lights of Creston and Erickson blinked on. Watch, as the benches above the flats and below the massive Thompson Mountain became a beacon in the enveloping darkness.

  A pickup truck appeared at the southern end of the flats and, in deliberate, ant-like fashion, crawled its way in a northerly direction. At Rogers' landing on the south side of the river, it stopped. Within a few minutes, the mirrored surface of the Kootenay was disrupted by the lights of the ferry as it left the north shore and cut its way towards the waiting vehicle.

  A dog barked in the distance, and the fat old gelding in my neighbour's pasture below the road turned his head. Assured that the noise was without consequences, he returned to grazing.

  I watched until the darkness stole the last of the mountains, the entire valley floor, and the sprawling river. Drinking in the tranquillity, the croaking of the frogs, the chirping of the crickets, and the soft wooing of the nighthawks, I remained transfixed on my perch.

  The chill of the evening eventually broke the spell. A shiver originating from the base of my skull rippled throughout my body—time for bed.

  I felt my way through the living room clutter into the bedroom. Shedding my clothing, I crawled into my sleeping bag and stared into the darkness. I don't know what it was that made me feel so good about what I was doing. Yet, I was assured that I had made the right decision about starting on my own.

  Mrs. Melba met me at her gate the following morning. She was relaxed and in a bubbly mood.

  "Good morning, Dr. Perrin. You get to meet all of my children this morning. I have eight of them." She chuckled, as if responding to a well-told joke. "Six of them are goats, one's a cat, and there goes the other one."

  I turned just in time to see a sheltie dog disappear around the corner of the log house. Introductions complete, I reached into the back seat of my car and retrieved my stainless steel bucket.

  "Can I have this about half full of warm water please, Mrs. Melba?"

  "Certainly." She walked briskly up the path and disappeared into her house. Typical of the homes that had been raised in the early part of the century, hers was on
e of the first built in Arrow Creek. The logs had been hewn with a broad ax and placed upon large rocks at each of the corners. Over the years the house had settled, so now the bottom logs showed rot where they were exposed to ground moisture. Many of the cedar shakes were missing from the roof, and others were rotting. Large chunks of the sand and mortar chinking had broken out to be replaced with mud or rags. A layer of ivy covered everything.

  I rummaged through the back of the car to come up with a dose syringe and the enema tube that was so handy for administering fluids to calves and goats. Supplies in hand, I strode down the worn dirt path in search of Mrs. Melba.

  When she didn't appear, I settled on a rock in the back yard to wait. What a gorgeous setting! Sandwiched in a draw between two ridges, we were removed from the noise of the highway and of human activity in general. The surrounding mountains were rolling, wooded, and green to the very top. I glanced at my watch. Mrs. Melba was taking her time with the water.

  "Everything all right?" I called, knocking at the screen door. "Oh yes, fine. There's no hot water in this house so we'll have to wait for it to heat on the stove."

  "That's all right, just bring what you have. I'm sure the girls won't mind getting a chaser of cold water."

  She grabbed the bucket. "Living here is really special. It's so peaceful and perfect for the goats, but it's not without its drawbacks. It's harder living without hot running water than I thought it would be, and the house is literally crawling with mice."

  We walked to a small listing shed surrounded by a temporarylooking corral constructed of newly cut rails. They hadn't been peeled before they were put up, and the goats were busily working at the task.

  Mrs. Melba was attentive as I mixed the thiabendazole powder with water. I had eyeballed several of the goats as they came up to nuzzle her hand through the makeshift bars of the shed. In excellent condition, they were probably the least wormy goats I was likely to encounter.

  "This beautiful little girl is Lizzy. You're my favourite baby, aren't you sweetie?" She gave the floppy-eared goat a big hug. Talking as though to a child, Mrs. Melba stroked the animal's sleek head, repeating to her what a pretty girl she was.