The Deadly Breakup

D. E. Larsen, DVM

“The sheriff is on the phone for you,” Sandy said as she leaned against the surgery room doorway. “I don’t know what he wants, but you don’t want to get in the middle of a mess.”

“Good morning,” I said into the phone, not sure who I was going to be on the other end of the line. “This is Dr. Larsen. How can I help you?”

“Doc, this is Jerry, I’m a Deputy Sheriff,” Jerry said. “I have a case that needs your expertise.”

“I’m not looking to become an expert witness in a long trial,” I said. “I can’t afford that kind of time away from this practice.”

“Nothing like that, we have a situation out on Berlin road where a couple had a breakup, and the guy caused a lot of problems.”

“That doesn’t sound like something I have any expertise to provide.”

“During the breakup, the guy shot her horse,” Jerry said.

“Is the horse dead?”

“Oh, yes,” Jerry said. “The horse is dead, but we need the bullet.”

“You want me to find a single bullet somewhere inside of a big horse?’

“That’s right! If it can be done.” 

“And who is going to pay this expertise?” I asked.

“I’ll have the girl’s mother give you a call and take care of that part,” Jerry said.

“Okay, I can give it a try, but if I am going out to a place where things are getting shot, I’ll ask to have a Deputy with me.”

“That’s no problem,” Jerry said. “As soon as you get the payment taken care of and set up time, I can either stop by the office and follow you up there, or you could ride along with me.”

“That sounds like a mess,” Sandy said as I hung up the phone.

“Jerry didn’t provide any names, but when a lady calls for me to look at a dead horse, you get her credit card information and tell her there is no way to know how much this is going to cost. Once we get the payment details worked out, we can schedule a time. I don’t want this horse laid out there in the sun for a few days before I have to go digging for a bullet.”

We had no more than finished the conversation when the mother called. Apparently, when the kids broke up, the guy went berserk. He tore up the little house they lived in and shot the horse.

“That poor horse,” Sandy said. “He had nothing to do with the situation, and he gets shot. Why would the guy do that?”

“Just his way of causing the most amount of hurt he can,” I said. “She’s probably lucky that it was the horse and not her.”

With the appointment set up for right after lunch, Jerry was waiting at the clinic when we returned from lunch.

“Why don’t I follow you,” I said as I headed out the door to my truck.

It was a short drive out to the small house on Berlin road. The landlord was there cleaning up the mess when we arrived. 

“Look at this house,” Bud said, waving at the inside of the small house. “He slashed the water bed, and the whole place is flooded. He tore the doors off the cabinets and broke the bathroom door. I don’t know how much this is going to cost to fix.”

“The story goes that he stood here on the porch with a 30-30 and shot the horse out in the pasture,” Jerry said.

“That is a pretty good shot,” I said. “That horse is over a hundred yards out in the field. Let’s go get a look at him.”

The horse was lying on his left side. The ground was undisturbed, giving evidence of no death struggle.

“This horse was dead when he hit the ground,” I said as we approached the horse. 

There was a single bullet wound. In the perfect spot, just right between the eyes and a little higher.

“I would hate to have this guy shooting at me,” I said. “This is an amazing shot for a 30-30 with open sights, from over 100 yards.”

“Do you think you can get the bullet,” Jerry asked?

“We will know pretty soon,” I said as I swiped my necropsy knife on the wet stone.

I pulled the horse’s head back and slit the throat, dissecting rapidly to its attachment to the first vertebra. A couple of knife strokes then, and the head was severed.

I set the head on the horse’s shoulder to explore the wound. 

It was easy to trace the bullet’s path through the head. The bottom of the brain case was blown off.

“Look at that,” I said, showing Jerry the exit hole from the brain case. “If there is anything good about this whole affair, it’s that this horse didn’t feel a thing.”

Returning to the horse’s neck, I got a little lucky. The bullet’s path went into the left side of the neck, went through a couple of feet of muscle, and came to rest just under the skin. 

I sliced the skin over the bullet and picked it up.

“Here you go,” I said, holding the bullet up for Jerry to see.

I dropped the bullet in Jerry’s little evidence bag and pulled off my gloves.

“That was a whole lot easier than I thought it was going to be,” I said.

Jerry tucked the baggy into his pocket and looked back at the house.

“I hadn’t thought about it before,” he said. “That was one hell of a lucky shot.”

“There is a difference between lucky and good,” I said. “This guy might be an SOB, but I think he is one hell of a shot. I could stand up there and shoot a hundred times with a 30-30 and not hit a target like this.”

Photo by Erik-Jan Leusink on Unsplash

Elk Delivery

D. E. Larsen, DVM

“Doc, I have a cow elk that has been walking around the pasture in labor for the last couple of hours,” Frank said into the phone. “I can see a small sac of fluid and a foot once in a while, but she is not making any progress.”

“If she has been at it a couple of hours, we probably should get a look at her. Don’t dart her until I get up there.”

Frank had quite a variety of exotic animals. Sika deer, Fallow deer, some antelope, and a small herd of elk. The elk herd consisted of a bull and five or six cows. There were no facilities for handling any of these. We were stuck with using a capture dart.

“What drug do you want me to use,” Frank asked as we were loading the dart.

“She is not too high strung, and with this difficult birth, a dose of Rompun will probably do the trick. We want her to recover pretty quickly so she will take care of the calf.”

“She is not too big,” Frank observed. “What kind of a dose should we use?”

I had provided a dosage chart to Frank so he would not have to do any calculations on dosage. The chart was set up to give the volume dose in milliliters for each weight in fifty-pound steps.

“Let’s give her a five-hundred-pound dose,” I said. “She might be a little over that, but not by much. And we want her to recover quickly.”

Rompun was a tranquilizer approved for the horse and small animals. We routinely used it at very low doses on cows. It was useful for short-term procedures that required chemical restraint. Its shortcoming was animals who were flat out could suddenly recover and react defensively.

We stepped through the gate into the elk pasture. The bull and the other cows moved to the far corner. We could usually lure the herd to the feed rack with a bucket of apples, but this problem cow was by herself away from the others. I could see her getting up, turning around, straining, and lying down again.

She did not seem to be bothered by our approach. When we were within twenty yards, she stood up, and Frank fired the dart gun, striking her in the hip with the loaded dart. We moved away to allow the drug to take effect.

Once she was on the ground and her head turned to her side, we approached cautiously. 

“Let’s get a rope on her just in case she jumps up when I start working on her,” I said. “We don’t want to have to give a second dose.”

Jim, Frank’s hired man, placed the lasso over her head and backed away. Holding the rope with gloved hands just in case she came alive.

I removed the dart from her left hind leg and applied some Betadine to the wound. Then I washed her rear end and carefully explored her birth canal. She had no response. 

I could feel one front foot and then the nose. I reached deeper. The second foot was to be found in the birth canal.

“The calf has a front leg back,” I said. “I should be able to get it up into position easily. There is plenty of room in there. He will pop right out once the position is corrected.”

I reached in and ran my hand past the shoulder on the calf and along its side. I grabbed the cannon bone on the retained leg and pulled it forward. Then I flipped the hoof up into the birth canal.

The cow elk raised her head when I corrected the leg position of the calf. I grabbed the front feet and pulled. The calf quickly slipped out onto the ground. I pulled the calf around toward the cow’s head and stood up.

“Go ahead and remove that rope, Jim,” I said.

As soon as the rope was off, I gave the cow a slap on the butt. She instantly jumped to her feet. 

At the same time, she kicked with a hind leg. The kick was directed with deadly accuracy at me. She walked away, going only a few steps up the hill.

I was lucky that I was just far enough from her that it only brushed my shirt. I had a neat imprint of the toes of her hoof on my shirt just above my navel.

“I think that would have hurt a little if I had been an inch or two closer,” I said.

“I would guess so,” Frank said, with an expression of concern on his face.

“Let’s just move away, quietly, down the hill. Hopefully, she will return and take care of this calf,” I said.

I quickly gathered my stuff into my bucket, and we moved down the hill. Looking back, she was watching both us and the calf. By the time we got to the gate, she was back licking the calf.

“Frank, I think we got a little lucky,” I said as we opened the gate and left the pasture. “You want to write that dose down on your chart. That worked perfectly.”

“I’ll try to remember to do that when I get back to the house,” Frank said. “Is there anything I need to do with her now?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “She would have probably been coyote food in the wild. There would have been no way for that calf to come out on its own.”

I watched up the hill as I turned my turn to the gate on the end of the lane. Momma elk was over tending to the calf. Things were going to be okay.

From the Archives, one year ago

Donica Lake Trip

https://docsmemoirs.com/2020/03/04/donica-lake-trip/