The Larkspur Vet

Two weeks before calving, a Kittredge cow lies dead in the near pasture in fair flesh, and the family would rather she stayed bad luck. By turnout there are five, and the county has reached for the answer it reaches for every spring — grass tetany, an act of God, nobody's fault. The Co-op has trucked a pallet of high-magnesium mineral up that draw.

Wes Carver has been in the valley two months. He has a lab three hundred miles off, a hand that will not do fine work, and two facts that will not sit together: the mineral is not working, and these cows go down quiet when tetany goes down loud.

Deacon is an eighteen-year-old buckskin three generations deep in one family. The grandfather heeled steers off him from here to Sheridan; the granddaughter runs barrels on him; on the Saturday of the county fair they place second and take state finals money. By half past eleven that night he is pawing craters in a stall floor and trying to go down.

Eleven days earlier Wes Carver stood in another barn with a stomach tube and watched an old man's last horse die of the lesion he used to fix two hundred times a year. He is the one man in three states who can tell those two colics apart.

Royal Sutter is sixty-six and not in trouble. He is done. Four hundred and ten mother cows and sixteen bulls, complete dispersal, the twenty-fourth of October — his sale outfit, his auctioneer, his date, his terms. His daughter finds out from a sale bill on the Co-op counter, a roll of hose half ordered.

Wes Carver palpates that herd in four days and calls twenty-two of them open, which costs the family real money and is why a buyer will believe him in October. Then he tells Royal how to ship the calves, and Royal says no, and gives four reasons, and not one of them can be argued with.

Three days before Christmas a thirteen-year-old cow at the Tandy place goes off her feed. She is not hot. Her chest is clean, her stomach is where it belongs, her ketone strip stays the color it started, and her rumen turns over once in two minutes where it ought to turn three. Wes Carver stands in a corral at nineteen degrees and tells Lyle Tandy he does not know what is wrong with her.

Six days later there is a second one — and one cow in December is a cow, and two is a feed problem. It is a short hay year, and a third of what goes out on that hill was bought.

Kip Vosler is three years into a contract for deed on a place still called the Delzell place. Two hundred and six cows, a payment every March, five bulls up an alley of used pipe on the fifth of May. Four come back satisfactory. The fifth is the best-looking animal on the outfit and nothing on him is wrong that a man can see.

What is under the lens on the tailgate is not close. Wes Carver reads three slides before he writes the word at the bottom of the form. Deferred. Not a cull — look again in sixty days. Turnout is the first of June. He can say what is on the slide. He cannot say what did it.

Hondo is the Enrights' good young one, the one Orva would put anybody on. On a still July afternoon he sets back on a lead rope for no reason anybody ever finds, comes forward hard, and puts a hind foot through the corral panels leaning where they have always leaned.

He is up before anyone moves, and he stands on it. Wes Carver kneels in the yard and watches clear fluid string off the hair and not break — out of a closed room where nothing can fight. Thirty-six hours is the outside of it. Bozeman is four hours off and has no table until Thursday. Three ways to go, and he lays all three on a tailgate.