Apparently the cow didn’t buy it because when Isobel took another step forward, the cow skittered sideways and then past her, dragging her water bag with her as she went. In humans, women’s water just broke. In cows sometimes, like with this cow apparently, it slipped out intact like a giant water balloon hanging out her back end.
Oh the joys of veterinary medicine.
Isobel approached the cow again. She crouched lower and tried to make herself seem as non-threatening as possible. “Nice cow. We?
??re all friends here.”
The cow bolted again. When Isobel jolted to run after her, she slipped in the mud—at least she hoped it was mud—and fell on her ass.
The loud masculine laughter from behind her did nothing to lighten her mood. She set her jaw, ignored the squelching mud that splattered all over her eight-hundred-dollar riding boots, picked up the lariat, and approached the cow again.
She finally got the rope around the heifer’s neck on the sixth try. Which was good because she didn’t think it would be very compassionate of her to start screaming four letter words at a pregnant cow. Hunter on the other hand, now him she’d be happy to give an earful. If she was acknowledging his presence, that was.
Which she wasn’t.
He did not exist.
It was just her and Bessie.
“Sorry,” she said, yanking on the rope to urge the cow back toward the gate, “I’m stereotyping by calling you Bessie, aren’t I? I’m sure you are a very unique cow with your own individual spirit. How about you work with me to get this baby born and we’ll come up with a name that reflects your incredibly complex and personal style, what do you say?”
The cow let out a plaintive mooooo.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“All right. Over here. This way. Atta girl.”
Finally, Isobel managed to get the cow to the fence near the eight-foot long swinging gate door. Before the cow could run away or move again, Isobel dropped the lariat and hurried to the gate to pull it toward them to enclose the heifer. Finally the heifer was secure, nose toward the apex of the V created by the side of the fence and the gate. Bessie wasn’t going anywhere till her calf was born. The whole close-the-cow-in-with-the-paddock-door thing was another trick she’d learned from the dairy farm.
“Maybe Cassandra?” Isobel offered conversationally while she knelt down to open up the surgical box and grab out a long plastic sleeve. She fit the glove on over her left hand and then pulled the sleeve all the way up her arm to her shoulder. “Or something classic, like Helen?”
Here goes nothing. She squeezed some lubricant on her hand. With her right hand she held onto the gate and with her left, she reached right up into the cow’s hoo-ha.
And reached.
And reached.
She was almost shoulder deep before she felt was she was looking for. A little hoof, and further in, a head. She felt around. Nose, jaw, and there it was—the mouth.
She stuck her finger inside and the little mouth started sucking on her finger. A grin cracked her face.
The baby was alive.
You never knew when labor had gone on for an abnormally long time. Another of the tools in Hunter’s truck was a calf-cutter. In the case of dead calves, sometimes you had to cut the calf up in order to pull it out and save the mother’s life.
She liked that Hunter had left the calf-cutter in the truck and hadn’t just automatically brought it out. It indicated a sort of optimism. Or at least a commitment to trying every other option before going to that extreme.
But this baby was alive, and Isobel was going to keep it that way.
She felt around some more. Okay, there was one front hoof and… yep, there was the second one. The calf was in the right position. It must just be oversized. If she remembered her statistics right, oversized calves were the trouble in ninety percent of problematic calving cases.
Which meant she was going to have to put that calf puller and her own muscles to good use.
She withdrew her arm and breathed through her mouth, trying to ignore all the goo that came out with it.
A glamorous job this was not.
She reached down for another glove and then grabbed the chains of the calf puller. They had little cuffs on the end to attach around the baby calf’s front hooves.