Hawkins - Two Shakes of a Lambs Tail: The Diary of a Country Vet

To Jarrod

Sometimes I wonder how you put up with me,
and then I remember that I put up with you.

A year or so ago, I was trying to write a book combining the grandeur and originality of Northern Lights with the delicate charm of Pride and Prejudice, and it wasnt going all that well, when I got an email from my publisher suggesting I might like to try my hand at writing something true for a change: a book about rural life.

It sounded like fun, and a good excuse to put that frustrating, not-working novel to one side. So I started a diary, thinking that would give a nice overview of a typical farming year. The fact that 2020 ended up having a global pandemic in the middle of it made the year less typical than I was expecting, but such is life.

We my husband, two children and I live on a sheep farm halfway down the North Island. We farm 1200 ewes and 400 cattle, on 460 hectares of rolling hill country. Around three-quarters of the farm is in grass, the rest is native bush, and I think its the nicest place in the world, although I know Im biased.

I work part-time as a large-animal vet, help on the farm and write in my spare time. Because the spare time is fairly limited, the writing tends to be accompanied by guilt at not doing something more useful, like filling bait stations or spraying gorse.

This diary isnt entirely true, because I decided that faithfully reproducing my friends and relatives in print probably wasnt the best idea, but its as accurate a record as I could write without hurting anyones feelings or being accused of defamation of character.

Despite my low-level guilt at cutting into bait-station-filling time, Ive had a lovely time writing this book. I hope you like it.

Danielle Hawkins

Maternal fashion at the school bus stop reached a new low this morning. I was wearing fluffy slippers, polar fleece trackpants (very unflattering) and a khaki-coloured polar fleece jumper. Amy, who lives just down the road, was in a grubby dressinggown and gumboots, and Jaide from up the road was in shiny camo-patterned tights and an egg-stained hoodie. None of us had brushed our hair.

I am so grateful not to live in a smart suburb where the other mothers have expensive highlights and wear Lululemon.

The pet pigs are deeply unimpressed by the weather. It has rained without stopping for the last 30 hours, with one mini tornado by way of variation. We got home tonight to find them both camped in the carport, having found their way through two fences. They were soothed by half a pot of leftover soup (pea and ham, but what they dont know wont hurt them) and four Anzac biscuits.

It rained all night. I woke at intervals to worry about newborn lambs and fantails and other small, cute things that were out in it, and then fell deeply asleep at 6 a.m. only to be woken at 6.10 by the lady who monitors the vet clinic phones after hours calling me to a prolapse. While I got dressed, James made me two cups of coffee, bless him one to drink on the way and the other in a thermos-cup for afterwards.

It was an enormous prolapse, and both it and the cow (who was down) were covered in mud. The paddock looked like the Somme. It was raining and only just light, but the couple who own the farm and their nice Filipino worker had never seen a prolapsed uterus before, and they were so excited that all three of them came to help.

It was marvellous. Normally with prolapses you cradle a great lump of swollen, red, inside-out uterus on your lap, trying to lift it and get it back in with the help of one assistant, who is usually small and feeble and wants to be somewhere else. But this time I had two cheerful, strapping men to lift the uterus, and a third assistant to keep it clean and covered in lube as I pushed and shoved and folded and massaged it back inside the cow where it belonged. That well-known stage of prolapse replacement, where youre exhausted and wondering why you ever thought that anyone would ever be able to thread a lump of tissue the size of a fat Labrador through a hole the size of a grapefruit, was bypassed entirely.

Today I was supposed to spend the morning at home it feels at the moment as if Im never there, certainly not for long enough to do anything useful like housework or gardening but no. James appeared back at the door ten minutes after hed left, saying that Dream, the heading dog, had just eaten the remains of a mouldy bag of possum bait off the rubbish fire pile at the woolshed. (My fault, as he explained at some length, for throwing mouldy possum bait into the bin when I got home from checking bait stations last week.) So I took Dream and Taz, in case hed eaten it too to the clinic and gave them apomorphine to make them vomit. Dream, horrible little grub that she is, had apparently washed down her snack of mouldy bait with sheep poo. That dog has no class.

Back at home I paid the bills, reconciled last months accounts and wrestled with the PAYE. I have not yet mastered Payday Filing, mostly due to not caring enough to learn how to do it properly, so am anticipating a nasty letter from Inland Revenue any time now. While looking at my credit card statement (always depressing) I saw a strange transaction. Supposedly I had spent $50 at Toolking somewhere in Massachusetts, USA. Oh, shit, I thought, and rang the bank hotline.

Bad mistake.

First, I got my name wrong when they asked for it (my credit card is still in my maiden name; I never got around to changing it). Then I failed the security questions. What was your work phone number when you opened this account? It was about twenty years ago! How the hell would I know? What was your most recent credit card purchase? No idea. Groceries? Ellies new sneakers?

I had a long and dispiriting conversation with a girl who was evidently wondering whether I was a criminal or just a moron, which ended when I remembered that I had bought a pair of fancy secateurs from a tiny stall at the Fieldays last month.

The feeling of being a complete twerp was not alleviated by reading an article about myself in Newsroom. The nice young journalist who came for lunch a few weeks ago has quoted me at length, verbatim, and I sound like Lyn of Tawa after a hard night on the piss. Judging by my familys hysterical laughter at the picture topping the article, I look like it too.

I was cheered up over dinner, though, when Blake asked: What colour was Dads hair when it was still alive?

Ive done a terrible thing. I assumed the woman I was standing next to at the edge of the netball courts this afternoon was pregnant, and shes not. We were talking about calving she and her husband work on a dairy farm and I looked meaningfully at her stomach and said, Youll be busy this spring! There was a puzzled sort of silence before she said quietly, No, Im not pregnant, Im just fat. Awful. Just awful. I bet she went home and cried. And I know the rules. You never, ever ask a woman when the baby is due unless you can actually see a baby coming out of her. In which case the question is unnecessary.

Ive just been sent an email outlining some potential questions for an upcoming author panel. (Not quite sure why I thought going to an evening event on a work night in the middle of calving was a good idea, but never mind.) The events chair, a professor of literature, writes that we authors have wonderfully diverse voices, and our divergences and juxtapositions will give the evening a lot of its energy and interest. We all write about the forces that imprison, frustrate and seek to control humanity, but our characters seek to find purpose, meaning, escape and transcendence in vastly different ways. So shes going to direct the conversation along those lines.