An Irrigation Ditch Runs Through It

It must be springtime in AK: The ravens are courting.

Lately there've been a lot of pair-flights in my neighborhood, little duos of ravens wheeling and dipping over the treetops, flying their swirling, romantic, aerobatic courtship displays, grace on the wing. This is, for me, an unmistakable sign of spring here. Even though I have that brain perversion that makes me think spring happens about the end of January, I think nearly everyone would agree with me that the juice is rising now. There's daylight both on my way to and on my way home from work, I've decreased the heat in my house, and things buried for months in my back yard are starting to emerge from under the snow.

Mind you, at a casual glance, one might be decoyed: It's the season of brown.

Summer here is unrelentingly green, and fall is often gloriously golden. Winter, of course, is white - at least in the daytime - bracketed at dawn and dusk with the most glorious shades of red and gold and peach and violet. But early spring (which in my mind is mid-spring) tends toward brown: the snow is disappearing, but the green-up hasn't started yet. Even MY twisted little brain can't make it look green... yet. That's coming - along with the return of the swans, the swift bullet-flights of the ducks, the evocative calls of the cranes and the haunting songs of loon and grebe. Then my lake will be open water, glimmering in the long light of summer, a thing of peace to be found, always, at the slightest glance out my windows.

I like living on the water. There was a time when I lived literally ON the water, in a boat: a 40-foot 1960 Chris-Craft yacht, to be exact. Now I live more metaphorically on the water, in the sense that my house is situated on a peninsula into a lake. Back in vet school, though, I had to make do with an irrigation ditch.

I lived on a property that had a small acreage, two frontages, several mature apple and cherry trees, a small house, a detached garage (which I rented out to a friend) and an irrigation ditch running through the fenced pasture area. Mind you, this was really quite pleasant and much prettier than it probably sounds. I'll grant you than in the winter the ditch was dry, which wasn't as pretty, but did have one advantage: It allowed my mustang mare to go across the ditch to a part of the pasture that she would not dare approach in the summer. The thoroughbreds would cross at will, fording the fast-flowing water without the slightest concern, but the mustang would not even consider this behavior, no matter which side her best friends and pasture-mates were on.

The down-side of the winter-dry ditch became apparent one day when a trio of adolescent boys came trundling down the ditch, evidently using it as their own personal highway, without regard to property lines or trespassing. They appeared unexpectedly from under the bridge that spanned the ditch where it passed under the adjacent road. I happened to be outside at the time with a classmate, Jean. We were treated to the experience of seeing all three horses in my pasture startle and bolt at the appearance of the boys. They ran down the fence-line, two of them crowding my mustang against the fence. Trapped tight against the wire, she leaped over it into the neighboring pasture, taking down the top wire as she did.

I bolted after the horses, hopping the remaining wire to catch up my mustang and inspect for damage. Jean, who had at one time been a Sheriff's deputy, took several brisk strides toward the ditch, calling in a deep, authoritative voice, "You kids are trespassing! Get off of this property!" It was quite a transformation: Jean is normally soft-spoken and rather gentle in her body language, and all of a sudden she's striding along like a colossus out to bust some heads, and her voice had dropped an octave and risen in volume by a factor of ten. The kids all leaped a half a foot in the air and turned, scrambling, to run back the way they had come.

I never saw them again. Quelle suprise. Not.

Meanwhile, my mustang, blowing and snorting, eyes wide and ears swivelling madly to catch any hint of threat, consented to pause by the far fence of the neighbor's pasture as I approached her. She held her head high and tense, surveying the ditch, but when the boys disappeared under the bridge she dropped her head a little and allowed me to sort through her dense winter coat for the source of the blood I could see streaked against her grey dapples. Nothing too bad: three parallel cuts, not quite full-thickness through her skin. Lucky it wasn't one of the two thin-skinned thoroughbreds, in which case I was fairly certain I'd be doing stitches.

Ah, well. That was the worst of the things that came of having an irrigation ditch run through it.

Most of the time it was rather a delight to have the ditch there. It meant I didn't have to worry about water if I decided to empty out and scrub the stock tank, and it was home to a family of muskrats and one of ducks. It was a delightful thing, of a morning or an evening, to go down and sit by the ditch with my notes and perhaps a cup of coffee, studying and sipping and enjoying the quiet sound of flowing water and the antics of the wildlife... well, sometimes studying and sometimes not. The muskrats would generally disappear when I first arrived, only to venture forth again a few minutes later, after I had failed to do anything frightening. They would swim up and down the ditch, sometimes emerging on the far bank, sometimes paddling along against the current, diving now and again with a little flash of their long bare tails. Once in a while one of the babies would climb out on the bank and huddle there, peering nearsightedly at me and sniffing the air for a while - until my evident boringness caused them to lose interest and they disappeared amongst the grasses on the bank, or slid seamlessly back into the water.

Most of the time, if I was sitting by the ditch, Cassie the mustang mare would come join me. Sometimes she would nuzzle at my coffee cup, attempting to taste the contents, or else sniffing deeply and then turning her upper lip up to funnel the aroma into her nostrils. Sometimes she would riffle softly through my hair with her thick velvety lips, blowing and snuffling gently at my skin, twitching her upper lip side-to-side to give me a companionable scratch. Sometimes she would lay down nearby, taking advantage of my guardianship to have a little lie-down. Sometimes she would simply stand next to me, head drooping companionably to the level of mine, her eyelids half-mast and blinking sleepily. Every once in a while she would poke her nose over my shoulder, peering at my notes and trying to turn the pages with her nose. She was insatiably curious, and relentlessly social - both useful traits for a wild horse, I imagine. Having been caught at approximately a year of age, Cassie had had the lessons of the wild to reinforce her own natural temperament - a lucky thing for me, given the number of times she devised a new means of escaping from the pasture. She was always to be found a few pastures down, visiting the nearest neighbor horses, but the moment I showed up she would turn away from them, bright-eyed with interest, to walk up to me. You could almost see her thinking "Hi! What are YOU doing here? Got anything to eat?"

Most fortunately, I could walk Cassie back home without benefit of halter or rope. All that was necessary was to reach under her throat-latch and pinch about 18 of her mane-hairs between my thumb and forefinger. This seemed sufficient lead by which to convince her to walk home with me, the other horses trailing in her wake. As she was always fascinated with whatever boring thing I was up to - and there was every chance she might be rewarded with food for accompanying me - she was more than willing to walk along home with me. I sometimes wondered what passing motorists thought of this odd little parade: Me (usually dishevelled, having been woken out of a sound sleep at 6 in the morning by some helpful stranger pounding on my door and yelling "Hey! Your horses are out!"; walking at my right shoulder, a sturdy and beautifully dappled grey mare wearing a bright, interested expression but nary a halter nor rope nor anything else; and two chestnut geldings clopping happily along single-file in our wake.

The pasture was a peaceful refuge for me on many an evening when I'd driven my brain hard all day and needed a little mental break before putting it back to work for the evening's studying. Quite often my little old dog Merrik - then 12 years old and missing one eye as a consequence of cancer, but still tough and active and otherwise bursting with health and energy - would accompany me out into the pasture, wandering around and sniffing things, sifting through the feed dishes for stray bits of sweet feed, milling peacefully amongst the horses, all of whom tolerated her presence without the slightest animosity. It was a lovely, restful, soothing ritual, often repeated throughout vet school.

Except for the day Merrik saw the ducks.

Merrik was pathologically fearful of water. Like many dogs, she dreaded being bathed, and spent the entire time attempting to escape the tub (or sink, or wherever I was bathing her). She was a relatively small dog (only 20 pounds) but she had the magical ability to gain twice her usual weight - not to mention several extra limbs - whenever I tried to pick her up to put her in the tub. Outside, she would skirt all but the smallest puddles. She would certainly go up to the irrigation ditch for a drink, but she was careful to place her front feet on the bank where she could balance herself securely without risk of getting wet.

One day, though, while walking around the pasture with me, Merrik happened to notice the duck family on the waters of the irrigation ditch. Well, this is an enticement not to be ignored: There, right in front of her, is a large mallard with four or five babies trailing in her wake. Who could resist chasing that?

Merrik takes off, growling low in her throat, darting at a shallow angle toward the ditch. The duck babies immediately begin paddling rapidly for the far shore. The mother duck begins swimming fast against the current, but hugging the near shore to decoy the dog away from her babies as Merrik (ignoring me as I try to call her off) closes in. At the last minute, the babies all having made the safety of the far bank, the mother duck churns it into overdrive, angling sharply across the water to follow the babies. At the same moment, Merrik - focused now on nothing in life but that duck - makes her leap.

She missed, of course.

The rest was like a cartoon. Merrik, on hitting the dread miasma of (gasp!) water, leaps strait up in the air. It's like watching a rocket launch, spray flying everywhere as she explodes out of the drink. Somehow, about two and a half feet above the surface, she manages to change direction and comes down on the bank rather than falling back into the ditch. This is rather a relief to me, because the laminar flow in the ditches - deceptively smooth and calm on the surface - is swift-flowing and powerful under the surface, capable of drowning adult humans. Apparently the shock of landing in water is enough to completely short-circuit Merrik's brain, and she races madly about the pasture for the next ten minutes, making wide, swift loops and zigzags and barking incessantly the entire time. Meanwhile I laugh helplessly, unable to catch my breath long enough to call her to me to reassure her, and slightly unhinged by the relief of not having my beloved dog sucked into the undertow to her death. The horses look on in bemusement, their heads turning to watch Merrik's progress as she criss-crosses the pasture at top speed. Cassie, excited by the activity, trots a few strides, tossing her head, but then stops again to watch the show.

Eventually Merrik outruns her shock and horror and slows down, and I am able to catch my breath and call her to me. She is panting and muddy, and her one remaining eye is wild with excitement. I take pity on her and decide not to bathe her; instead we hang out under the apple trees until she dries and I brush the mud out of her coat.

Merrik is many years in her grave - she lived to be fourteen, and the four years we had following her diagnosis and treatment for cancer were the best of her life. We did everything together, every fun thing I could think of for a person and a tough little terrier mix dog to do together. I suppose I will always miss her; but I can't help but smile when I think of her. She was the perfect sidekick to me for many years, and (bless her heart) saw me through vet school and into internship. She was everything charming and delightful and engaging and sweet, everything tough and cheerful and good-hearted and adorable a dog could be. She made me laugh more times than I could ever count, and makes me smile to this day whenever I think of her. I don't think I ever saw a dog more conscious of her dignity, yet more willing to abandon it when the opportunity presented itself. I'll have that afternoon always in memory: the sun slanting golden in the late afternoon, the green of the pasture, the muddy brown of the water, dappled with sun... the horses wandering about, copper and smoke drifting over the grass, and my little silver-black dog, racing wild-eyed through the mix, barking hysterically the while.

It might not have been quite as good as having a river run through it.... but the irrigation ditch was a pretty decent substitute.

The (Tall) Thin Man

When I was in vet school, I had a mustang mare, Cascabella by name . She was actually a Christmas present form my sister M. An accomplished horsewoman, M had adopted Cassie from a group that had underestimated the mare's age. Once M realised that -and that consequently Cassie wasn't likely to grow much more and would therefore be a little smaller than M likes to ride - she started thinking about placing her.

"Well, she's the perfect height for me, so wrap her up and mail her," I said, jokingly. But as it happens, my sis thought that was a dandy idea, so she shipped Cassie to me mid-winter of my first year of vet school.

Well, how cool is that? I got a pony for Christmas. I was 28 years old at the time, mind you, but hey: It pays to keep asking.

Cassie arrived in good trim late one night in November. (Okay, so she was an early Christmas present.) She was wearing a custom-fitted black denim horse blanket (lined in gorgeous teal green wool) and matching shipping boots - all custom made by M, who is (besides being an accomplished horsewoman) also an excellent seamstress, a software engineer, a professional dancer (belly and ballroom) and a sheep farmer.

What can I tell you? It's an interesting family. We might be described any number of ways - some less flattering than others - but "dull" never enters into it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch - or at least, sophomore year of vet school - Cassie decides one morning to lacerate her pastern in some manner I have yet to determine. I go out to find that she has a cut that encircles two thirds of her pastern. Blood has run down her hoof, staining it a dark red-black color, and I can see little crusty half-moons in the dirt where she has stood long enough to leave standing blood, now clotted into small, grim coronas on the ground.

Well, hell. I have class this morning - a cadaver surgery rotation, and moreover it's the first day of the rotation, the one least likely to have any flexibility in schedule. On the other hand - this is my horse. I love her, and even if I didn't, I am responsible for her. Any horseman knows the saying: "No hoof, no horse". This isn't something to be blown off.

I step between the strands of the fence and pick up her foot. I can see tendon along the back, a sight that makes my heart leap into my throat, leaving a sick, hollow place behind. Cassie doesn't seem unduly distressed; in fact, she seems markedly impatient for her breakfast. She stands on the injured leg without complaint or lameness and attempts to encourage me to feed her by means of judicious nudging and nickering deep in her throat. I look at my hands; the blood on her hoof is dry, leaving not the slightest trace or stickiness on my hands. This didn't just happen; she did it sometime in the night.

I feed up and go inside for Neosporin, which I slather liberally over her laceration, and, thinking furiously, I get ready for school. I sort through my options and place a call to the University's Equine Ambulatory service, who needs to know when I want her looked at: They need me to be there to catch her up and hold her.

"I don't know," I say. "I'm a vet student and I have rotations this morning. Let's plan on noon, and I'll go in and ask my professor if I can come back earlier."

Once at school - 15 minutes early, and in a welter of nerves - I hunt down the tech who is assisting with the surgery lab and set out my dilemma in front of her.

"You're in luck," she tells me. "The lab is being run by Dr. Sydney, who used to be an equine surgeon. He'll know whether you have to go back right away or if it can wait til noon."

I set up beside a cadaver - a dog that was euthanized at Animal Control, one of the heartbreaking cadre of animals who have no home. As sad as it is that these animals die for lack of homes, it's a small comfort to know that their sacrifice is redeemed at least a small bit by allowing us to learn surgical skills on animals who will not suffer should we make mistakes. In this way they serve us... but they also serve our future patients, their brethren, by letting us learn where our errors can do no harm.

Dr. Syndey arrives in due course and I explain my circumstances. He looks at me, his eye both keen and calm.

"Was the blood on her hoof still wet?" he asks me.

"No," I say definitely, having checked specifically.

"Then it won't make a bit of difference if you see Ambulatory now or at noon. I'll let you go now if you want, but I promise you that if the wound has already dried, a few hours will make no difference. She'll be fine," he adds with a smile, seeing the tension in my body. His voice and manner show not the slightest doubt,and I feel my shoulders loosen and drop, reassured by his expertise.


"I don't want to miss the lab," I say. "I'll stay and do it, if you're sure."

"I'm sure," he says, with a smile. His eye is level and kind, and he pats me sympathetically on the shoulder.

Comforted, I do the lab without distraction, and make it out to my house in good time. Ambulatory calls me to tell me they'll be there in 20 minutes and to be sure of the directions to my house. I give these to the student on the phone, who I can hear relaying directions to the clinician (who is, of course, the one driving).

"As a by-the-way," I add to the student, "this is a mustang mare. She's very manageable, but she'll be a little shy at first. It would be best if you didn't all just pile out and mob her all at once. She'll need a minute to get used to you."

"Gotcha," says the student. We hang up and I go catch Cassie up, bringing her out of the fence and letting her graze on the lawn while we wait.

A few minutes later Ambulatory pulls in in their big white truck. This is a crew-cab pickup, absolutely jammed with vet students. All four doors pop open and vet students come boiling out like clowns out of a VW beetle, so many that you can't figure out how they all fit in there. They immediately descend on Cassie and I like a plague of locusts. Cassie takes two quick steps back and tries her best to hide behind me. I step in front of her face, offering what protection I can, and tell the vet students, "Whoa, stop! You have to go slow with her, she's a mustang. She's going to flip if you crowd her."

The students nod and essentially ignore me, fanning out to either side, pulling stethoscopes from around their necks and getting out clipboards. The clinician, an extremely tall, lanky fellow wearing a battered Stetson and worn cowboy boots, unfolds himself from the cab. At a glance he takes in the situation. Behind me I can feel Cassie starting to coil like a spring, preparing for flight but unsure where to go; she trusts me, but she is a wild horse. The first two years of her life she lived where flight was a matter of life and death, and though she is unusually good at managing her fear - you can see her thinking when presented with a new situation, evaluating it to see if she should stand or run - when she decides it's time to run, she does it as if her life depends on it - which, often enough, I'm sure it did.

"You all want to hold up now and back off of that horse," says the clinician in a quiet voice. His tone is conversational but the effect is immediate: The students seem to suddenly melt back and stand off to the sides. Cassie is still vibrating like a recently-plucked guitar string, pressing her head against my back and feeding her tension into my body. The clinician ambles up to her, unhurried and relaxed. In his stocking feet I imagine he is at least 6 foot 5, and the battered heels of his boots add another couple of inches to that. I step to the side, giving him room, and he sets his feet apart, straddling them wide to bring his face closer to Cassie's without leaning over her. He takes the sides of her halter in his long hands, his knuckles curled up against her cheeks, and gives her head a gentle shake.

"Hey, babe," he says to her in his deep, quiet voice.

The effect is instantaneous and astonishing. Cassie, who one second ago was barely controlling her need to bolt, relaxes instantly into his hands. Her ears relax, her eye half-closes, and she lets her head fall into his hands, taking a half-step forward to butt her head up against his sternum. This, her body tells me, is my kind of person. Here is someone who speaks my language. Here is someone I can trust.

"Why don't you all get a temp, pulse and respiration," he says then, in his mild way. "Dr. Stace," he adds, nodding at me. I look at him, cradling Cassie's head, and close my hanging jaw.

"Pleased to meet you," I say. "Although not half as pleased as she is," I add with a crooked smile, looking at my mustang, who now has her eyes closed and is rubbing her forehead on Dr. Stace's clinic coat as vet students swarm around her. "Sorry about your smock," I say, as black and white hairs begin to accumulate on the front. Dr. Stace gives me a slow smile and looks back at Cassie, who is now allowing him to rub her ears.

"She's all right," he says, dismissing his increasingly hairy clinic coat as a matter of no importance.

The students report their findings and Dr. Stace has a look at Cassie's pastern. Completely relaxed now, she stands patiently while everyone looks, while she is given a mild sedative and clipped and scrubbed and sutured up, while she is bandaged and injected with antibiotics. Her sedation wears off while Dr. Stace details her aftercare and she gives him a little nicker as he hands me the meds she'll need. He gives her a little sidelong smile, a secret thing, that warms the back of his eyes: something that is just for the two of them, some shared recognition.

"That's a nice little mare," he says in tones of approbation, gives me a nod, and takes himself off into the Ambulatory truck, now tightly sardined with vet students once more. I find myself staring after them as they back down the driveway and disappear down the road.

"Well. I never saw anything like that before," I say to Cassie, who is now lipping at her aftercare sheet with an interested expression, as if contemplating eating it. I walk her back to the pasture and offer her a carrot instead, which she feels is a fair trade. I turn her loose and she wanders off, her bright blue bandage jaunty against the steel grey of her leg. In the end she healed well, with barely a scar to show for her adventure.

I never got to go on rotations with Dr. Stace, as he left the University and went back into private practice before then; he missed it, he said, and I could see why. The next time I needed a horse vet I tried to get him - willing to bypass even the student discount I got from the University's Ambulatory service - but as it turns out he had as many clients as he could handle and wasn't taking new ones. Well, I can understand that; there's only so much time in a day, and anyone lucky enough to have Dr. Stace as their horse vet isn't likely to give up their spot. But even though I regretted that I did not have the opportunity to have him as a professor, I'm pretty sure I learned nearly as much from Dr. Stace that day as I did in a week of Ambulatory rotations when I went on them myself. Don't get me wrong: I loved my ambulatory rotation and I learned a lot from a good professor - and had a great time with my rotation mates, who teased me (the only woman on the rotation) like brothers. I teased them back, mercilessly, and we all got a lot done and learned a good bit about equine medicine and enjoyed the doing of it. What I learned from Dr. Stace was less about the "what" of medicine and more about the how and why, I think. Why we do this; how we keep doing it and doing it well; what it is that brings us joy in this work, despite its many burdens; how the essential inner heart of who we are is perhaps the most important thing we bring to our patients... more important, sometimes, than our knowledge and our skills, than our intelligence and reasoning, than our meds and sutures and bandages.

I imagine Dr. Stace is either retired now, or considering it; I would hope he's still amongst us on this earth, walking it with his long, ambling stride, his pace all leisure but his eye as keen and quick as a striking hawk. I can be sure of one thing, though: Wherever he is, he walks on the side of the Angels.