Night Call

The call came at two-seventeen in the morning. A cow in difficult labour, about an hour out. I've done enough of these to know that "difficult labour" on the phone can mean anything from "she needs a bit of help" to "this has been going on for eight hours and we should have called four hours ago," and there's no way to know which until you arrive.

This one was the second kind. By the time I got there the cow was exhausted and the calf wrongly presented, and I worked for about forty minutes in conditions I'll describe as challenging — three in the morning, temperature dropping, small space, a torch strapped to my head, and a farmer who kept saying helpful things like "she doesn't usually do this."

The calf came out alive. The cow recovered. I drove home at five watching the sun come up over the paddocks thinking: I didn't know I could do that. Not in a heroic way. In the more specific way of: I had not previously tested that exact combination of cold and dark and difficult, and now I know how I perform under those conditions, which is apparently fine. That's useful to know.

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