Old-fashioned Elsie

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1051, 16 October 1959, Page 18

Old-fashioned Elsie

by

SUNDOWNER

SEPTEMBER 17

INCE I have never told Elsie about Dr Read she is still old-fashioned about labour and birth. She has now had eleven calves and ten have been born behind: my back. The eleventh was in fact her smartest performance and the most secretive. I could see that something was going to happen and

decided to watch, but she saw me watching and

changed her ground. So I changed mine. I sat down on a bank behind an elm tree where I could see without being see. When I had to return to the house Ng. took over my watch, but a visitor arrived, and Elsie was left to her own devices for about half an hour. It was sufficient. When I went back to my tree the calf, still wet and staggering but on its feet, was taking its first drink. Elsie of course does not know that this dates her. She has never heard that the father of the calf should have been there with her to welcome it into this cold world, and she has in fact forgotten who the father is. I am afraid I can’t change her now. But she may have heard, as I have, that Dr Read himself now dates. * x *

SEPTEMBER 18

NDY, who will be eighty in a week or two, forgets his years when he looks at my garden. When he first came to stay with us he had to endure the sight: he had been ill, and was still too weak to use a spade. But my crooked rows and rough edges. brought some euperannuated ones. and I came back

from a morning up the hill to find him straightening an

edge with a knotted line and a blunt spade. Now I have. given up trying to restrain him. He has reduced lumps to crumbs and crumbs to powder; levelled surfaces that have never been levelled before; put plants in lines that a guardsman could not improve; and done things to my edges that make me wonder whose garden I am looking at when I get out in the mornings. --

Jim, troubled no doubt by my rough grass, said to me years ago that the lawn makes the garden. Andy has decided that edges make it. Both are right. But my heart sinks when I consider where. they are driving me. * * *

SEPTEMBER 20

E have known for three years that Crumpet has only one working teat and that if she presents us with twins We must take one away. In the past, with one exception, she has kept herself (and us) out of trouble. But this year she has shown no caution at all. I saw that the worst (as I thought it then) had happened when I went hastily through the flock yesterday morning,

but as I had to go to the city I decided to leave her

alone for the day and remove the weaker lamb when I returned in the evening. Then there were three-all lying apart from her and from one another, all washed, but only two fed. Now we have what we were hoping to avoid-an addition of two to our absurd collection of pets. And it will be luck if that is the end of the story. We are getting: as many twins as singles, though our ewes were never flushed, and there is not one of the sixty-nine whose production of milk can be more than a few ounces daily. When I see the bulging udders on Jim’s side of the road I wonder how my lambs survive; but so far only two have died. F suppose%the milk of half-breds grazed on dry hills is more concentrated than the milk of IRomneys running on lush grass, which must contain much water. Jim’s lambs are bigger to begin with, grow faster, and play sooner than. mine, whose play, when it begins, makes me think of the games played by underfed children in a slum. The surprise of courte is that they play at all. * * | HAD an unpleasant experience today, which, if this is to remain an honest calendar, must not be concealed. (continued on next page)

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SEPTEMBER 22

Yesterday morning I cage-trapped and shot an opossum, and as I wanted the carcase for my dog I hung it up in a lucerne tree. Today, twenty-seven hours later, when I went to skin the dead

animal i was horrifled to see a bare arm waving

weakly from the pouch like the limb of a fiddler crab. I had not noticed yesterday that the opossum was a female, and if I had noticed its sex it would not have occurred to me to examine the pouch. But there today was this still living young thing, three or four inches long, hairless and squirming, more than twenty-four hours after a bullet had shattered the brain of the mother.

What had ‘kept it alive all that time I don’t know. Perhaps stored up nourishment in its tiny but completely formed body. Perhaps a _ sufficient supply of secreted milk’ to sustain it after its mother had died. Doctors have now and again saved the life of a human baby taken from a dead mother. Veterinary surgeons must occasionally have saved valuable young animals by Caesarean section of a dead mare or cow. I have myself tried, unsuccessfuly, to save a lamb from a just dead ewe. But the young of marsupials have a special dependence on _ their mothers until they grow

hair and leave the pouch, which they enter as prematurely expelled embryos perhaps an inch long. This little creature was still holding, but not sealed to, the teat, and dropped off when I examined it. It is both interesting and sickening that it held on for twenty-seven hours and was still alive and active when I found it. I thought it the reverse of a situation so often met among animals (and humans) when life ends, in a perfectly formed body, before life, as we know it, begins. God moves in a mysterious way to bring about His tragedies as well as to perform His wonders. Man moves in a blind way when he kills and spares for his own ends. (To be continued)