Village Horse Doctor by Ben K. Green

these bands of sheep were being herded on open range, good vegetation was sparse, and I had a pretty good idea that the sheep had been grazing on a combination of poisonous weeds and vines.
    The road got progressively worse for the full ninety miles. We turned several times off of well-traveled roads onto lesser-traveled ones, but none of this was any shock to me since I was used to the road conditions of the country. I was driving a high-wheeled car and had two extra spare tires and an extra tank of gas under the back seat.
    We pulled around a high bluff and down in the valley below I saw a typical Mexican sheep camp. There were about twenty acres, I guess, under the south foot of the bluff that had been fenced by hand by laying native stone without any form of cement. This rock fence was tall enough for sheep but would not have held cattle or horses. There was a camp at the foot of the bluff from under which a fair-size spring ran out. A stone wall had been laid around it to protect the spring from the sheep, and the water that ran away from the spring and under the wall down into the draw was left unfenced for the sheep to water. This little camp around the spring was almost a luxury spot to a sheepherder. It had shade from the summer heat, protection from the winter winds, a fair supply of snarly oak trees along the ridge for wood, and an abundance of good cold water.
    There were five bands of sheep with fifteen to seventeen hundred in each band. They were taken into the mountains to graze and were not always brought back at night, depending on the distance and the availability of natural water over the rest of the range, which I gathered from conversation was about three hundred thousand acres in American figures.
    Since there were so many
malos
(sick sheep), they were all being herded in the nearby hills so that they could be brought to this headquarters corral. Each herder had two dogs, a pack burro, and a riding burro; however, most of their herding was done afoot and the burros were used mostly when they moved camp around over the range. There were about eight thousand sheep in all; more than one third of them showed varying degrees of sickness, and some symptoms were visible on the rest of the sheep.
    This was typical of a call to a sheep ranch in Mexico. It had to be of a serious nature and border on what was generallytermed a die-out before the Mexican ranchers felt they could stand the expense of a veterinary doctor, since there were very few in that region. I was well acquainted with what to expect and always carried a large supply of any drugs and vaccines that might be needed since it would be such a great distance back to where drugs would be available.
    These sheep had a combination of
garvencia
poisoning generally called rattle weed, and a large percentage of those sick showed some signs of having been on lechuguilla.
    We ate a noon meal of mutton, frijoles, and tortillas, and the herders washed it down with coffee strong enough to kill while I went to the spring for water two or three times to put out the pepper fire in my belly that helped burn up the grease and frijoles. One reason a white man ought to learn to eat hot pepper is that’s what makes those Mexicans able to digest a batch of that stuff that give Gringos indigestion.
    There were several hundred sick sheep and a good many dead ones that they were pulling the wool off of near the spring, and to satisfy myself as to my diagnosis, I cut open a few of the sheep that had just died. While we were doing this, the bands of sheep were being brought in from the hills by the herders and their dogs into the rock trap or corral. All the herders were anxious to help doctor the sheep, and they brought them in in small bands into a corner of the fence with the help of the dogs. The dogs would hold the sheep in the corner while the herders would pull the sick ones out by the hind leg. Then they would hold them by the hind leg for me to give hypodermic