Coconut Continues

I'm back from more-than-full-time sleigh rides and repairs--did ya miss me? (I'm chillin' at the coffee shop with a pair of reading glasses John was so kind as to loan me) That time ten years ago when Solveig and Ashley were out helling around by the sewer ponds at night, there was just enough snow to make it slippery, and one misstep sent horse and rider head over heel.

That night ten ears ago we were there in the barn at Lutsen, Jim, Kari, Me, Solveig, and Coconut with a bashed-in head, we called the vet in Cloquet and he sent us The Bute and Banamine he needed to reduce the pain and inflammation. We had laid some triple-antibiotic eye ointment and bandaged the eye with gauze and tape which had to be changed every day for a month, and pumped a bunch of Penicillin into him for a few days to keep it from getting infected.

It all went pretty well, considering how severe the trauma was, and we saved the eyeball, but he lost the sight in that eye from having that part of his skull caved in. The old piece of cloth taped to the section of his halter that covered the eye was a trick I had learned from our farrier friend Bruce Campbell which had saved a scratched eyeball on Jose', another of the "original Mexicans" who were the blue-collar bedrock of our saddle-string at the time. If you can get them some antibiotics, use some of that opthalmic ointment, and change the dressing every day, you can often save an eye that would otherwise be lost.

You should have seen how that eye was bugged-out and the whole fist-sized section of his skull was caved in, and how Coconut just was so tolerant and never fussed over all that treatment and pain, and how you never really bond with a horse like when you have to help them get better from something like that, and how they never really bond like that with you until they need you to help them, and they know it. It's all pretty hard and scary and rewarding if the outcome is positive. But my old buddy Byron the vet from Bigfork always says to me, she'll either live or she'll die and you can either help her or you can't.

It's hard to find a good old-school large-animal vet in rural Minnesota any more. We had a guy here for a couple of years who was great, just like Byron, there to help you do what you could do, and not charge you more than the horse was worth to do what you couldn't. Carl Wall, I sure miss him at times like this, with the colicky horse. Those folks are a treasure, not just there to skim the cream off of the dog and cat market, never being available even when your dog is poisoned on the weekend. It's rare to find a vet who'll give a "farmer" credit for knowing what he/she knows and being able to do what they can do for themselves. Here on the North Shore there are a lot more horses than you would think there would be, but I'm sure there are not enough for a large-animal vet to live on for sure. And now I still can't finish the shaggy-dog story yet 'cause Ray needs help with a sewer-pipe job...

Trouble in the Woods

Tonight Coconut has left this world, and Ken has three cracked ribs.

There's a big storm coming (so they say). This could be the two-footer again. When it snows, it dumps sometimes. The day before last, that would be Thursday morning at about nine o'clock, Solveig called to say she was having trouble with her little horse, whom she found lying down and cold. With some trouble she got him up, but he wouldn't eat or drink. She took him up to her neighbor Claire's house and Claire brought him right in the kitchen to warm him up.

Solveig called me, and they started to walk him up and down the road like you should with a colicky horse which it looked like he was. I brought "Dog Butt," our animal thermometer, and the box of outdated Banamine, Bute, and Pennicillin with miscellaneous syringes I keep in the fridge. She'd been on the phone with Jennifer, her vet from Ely, getting some instructions on what to do. We rigged up an enema for him twice, the second time deeper than the first, which produced only three small pieces of poop and a string of mucous. Since I have never really tubed a horse, we tried to pour some canola oil down his gullet, of which we could only get him to swallow about a pint. He had a temperature of 101.7, which is very slightly above normal. In between procedures, we offered him water and feed and hay, none of which interested him in the least, and we walked him up and down the road all day long. About dark, we decided to borrow Claire's wonderful two-horse trailer and head for the Twin Ports Equine Clinic, where we had spoken with Dr. Stacy, and she told us it would cost three or four hundred dollars to examine and treat him for colic.

We arrived there about 8:30 and without a word Dr. Stacy began the exam. After listening all over with a stethescope she sedated him and tubed him, pumping most of a three gallon bucket of water down, in stages blowing into the stomach and smelling what was there. Then she put the glove on and palpated inside carefully clear up to her upper bicep, producing one tiny piece of manure. Then she discussed her observations matter-of-factly, asserting that he was severely dehydrated, and should be on I.V. fluids, and that he may be surgical, meaning that there may be a displacement of the intestine, or an obstruction, which could be $2,000-6,000.00 worth of surgery in Anoka or at the University. She offered to try to biopsy stomach fluid, and attempted to do so, producing no fluid at all, which told her that he was so dehydrated that there was no stomach fluid. We asked her if she could set up an I.V. for him, and she did, but the Lactated Ringer's froze in the needle and you could see it freeze up the coiled clear plastic tube toward the five liter bag. She had inserted a catheter into the jugular vein, which had a rubber stopper to receive the needle, but it would have to be flushed with 10cc of saline (I found out later it should have been heparinized) and then the I.V. line needle inserted. Solveig jumped right in to the conversation (as if she hadn't been in the center of it all along) and said, "We can get him into a heated space and do the IV ourselves, right?" "Yeah," said the vet, "You could." So she sent us with the apparatus and the catheter stitched in, and wrapped around his neck with Vetwrap to cover and protect it, and three 5 liter bags of solution. "Good Luck" she said, charged $430-some bucks, which seemed pretty reasonable. It was somewhere between 0 degrees and 10 below, and a little before midnight.

So we loaded him back up on the trailer and headed back for the Shore. That's Jim and Solveig in the pickup and me and Kari in the car. We had some experience, this same exact company, just about ten years ago, in the freezing subzero barn at Lutsen when Solveig and Coconut rolled over, before there was a lot of snow as I recall, caving in a fist-sized section of Coconut's skull around his right eye, not hurting Solveig somehow at all...TO BE CONTINUED...

I'm Blogging Here

I was lucky enough to kill a couple deer in the meantime, and they pretty much flash-froze before I could get them skinned out. So there they hang until I can get them into Betsy's basement and thaw them out one at a time enough to handle them, get them quartered and head on down to Ricky's in Schroeder for the big cuttin' party. That was exciting, especially when I had the second doe in my sights, the fork horn came out and I shot him, but only after I remembered to pull the hammer back, click, then put a shell in the chamber, then shoot the deer, and while he's breathing his last, this bigger buck comes out and does a lap around the stand 35 yards out the whole way around. I was just too amazed to do anything but sit there and watch him. He even stopped on the hill above my stand and looked right at me, then just strolled away. I didn't think about shooting him for Mike or Jim to fill out their tags. Next time for sure.

Thanksgiving tomorrow. To Duluth and back on Friday. Time's running out and I have two more loads of hay to haul before snow comes in a serious way.

Freeze-Up at the Farm

Well, sir, it sure is freezing now. Not even close to zero, except one night when it got down to single digits over a week ago. I almost have my excavations completed for the electric lines underground to the waterer, and the underground fence wire on the other side of Elisa's garden, so I can let the horses in to feed in the garden again. There's still a lot to do before the snow piles up, like move 4-500 little round bales from Bloomquist Ranch, now that the field has set up enough for my bald tires not to get the whole damn deal stuck again. I broke the trailer coupler, dont'cha know, but after looking all over hell for a new cast-iron piece, ol' Farmer Don came along and welded a stainless nut on there where it broke, so after hunting in the morning I'm fixin' to go out to the field and put it back together for some hauling.

Does this Bus go to Duluth?

Trip with Davey to Duluth yesterday. We left the farm at noon. Betsy fed us a great lunch of herring and potatoes and Mike's homemade applesauce, we got the hay out to the horse-asses, and we blasted off in the Stealth Schnaab for shopping for garbage cans and dog food and light bubs and such, where I had hoped to spend a dollar less on each purchase, and maybe save enough to buy gas. I'm a fool, I know. I should have hauled hay instead, because it's raining today. I wanted to burn the burn-piles at the farm today.

Anyhow it was fun bumming around with Dr. Grin. I got a mouse for my laptop. We ate at Arby's in Cloquet near the Farm Store, couldn't find even one wool shirt (that's dumb), tried out some orifice chairs at OfficeMax, and then went into Home Depot twice, because I forgot stuff right there on my list, and then Menard's once for the caulk I forgot on both trips into HD. They even have the Miller Hill Menard's closed for expansion, so we had to go 'way back down to West Duluth. The price of gas was 2.09 in Two Harbors on the way down, 2.07 in Cloquet, 2.29 all over Duluth in the evening, which I paid to fill up, then 2.19 on the way home in Two Harbors.
What the hell?

Dare I divulge David's constant agitation to go to Best Buy (whom I have pledged myself to boycott, onnacounta the bad service Marce got on this puter here) where we finally went anyway, which resulted in him buying a teeny little laptop that has amnesia, but is supposed to work on the internet. I told him not to do it.

We finally made it to Beijing for my favorite General Tso's Chicken with Chinese Vegetables. Washed it all down with a quart of Root Beer from the TH gas station. What a day. We got home after midnight. Now it's raining. It hasn't rained a lot this fall. It never warms up enough, and the days are not long enough to dry out when it does. This is pretty much of a soaker.

Movie Night at Betsy's

We watched a movie on the big screen arranged by Davey with his puter. Bobby brought the DVD to share with a few of us. The movie was called "Why We Fight" and it reviewed the development of the military industrial complex since the Bomb fell on Hiroshima, in spite of Eisenhower's admonishments. It was a very graphic review of the carnage caused by Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Ashcroft and Wolfowitz's demonization of their former puppet Saddam Hussein. I got rid of the TV in the cabin shortly after 911, so I had never seen a lot of that video. It made me sick. It made me cry. The military made it happen, because they have to do something, just like Homeland Security, even if it is wrong. And most of it is.

Hey! Rides!

Yesterday Bessie and Julie took some little kids and their folks for a big ol' wagon ride down the Cardinal Road west through some muddy tracks (it was quite bouncy) and came out the North-South road by Surbaugh's driveway, and back on the Pike Lake road. The horses, who have not done much work yet this season, needed about a fifteen minute breather at the top of the hill on the undeveloped part of the Cardinal Road. It was a bit of an adventure. Thanks to Ray for his help all afternoon starting to frame up the wagon benches, and to the lovely Surbaugh family for booking a wagon ride, giving me a deadline to get that up and running for Will's birthday party on Saturday, the day before. Thanks to Don Noyce for the trailer we turned into a wagon, as well as the forecart he framed up for me this spring/early summer.