Bauer Smott Designs

We had to locate our path better than these maps permitted because we planned to sample the surface periodically and com­pare its brightness with color variations in space photographs. So I called on the National Aeronautics and Space Adminis­tration for help.

NASA lent us a battery-powered trans­mitter, which we installed in a vehicle. We sent signals up to the Nimbus 6 satellite as it passed over us two or three times a day, and it relayed our message via a station in Alaska to NASA computers in Maryland. They plotted our latitude and longitude. Back in Washington, D. C., I was able to view the satellite markings of our tracks and to co­ordinate our field-sample sites with the sat­ellite photographs.

Somewhere in the totally barren stretch around Bir Kiseiba, our sharp-eyed lead driver Ayed spotted a camel caravan. As we drew closer, I leaned out of the jeep to take pictures with along telephoto lens. I soon re­alized that the lens might look like a gun and quickly retreated.

The caravanners, five lean and tall Bed­ouin, greeted us. They had come from deep within Sudan. There they had loaded their camels with a sodium salt called natron. Natron was used in mummification long ago. I asked the caravanners how their car­go would be used today.

“Do you chew tobacco?”

“No,” I answered.

“Well, if you did, you would find a piece of natron in every pouch packaged in Egypt. A small bite is said to tenderize the tobacco and remove its bitter taste. They tell me it is very good. I don’t chew tobacco either.”

These sturdy men had been traveling 26 days along the Track of the Forty. This route connects Kharga to El Fasher in Su­dan and is so named because camel caravans take forty days to travel it. Forgotten cara­vanners had erected cairns of black rocks along the track, but the mummified bodies and sandblasted bones of camels that had not survived the journey made better mark­ers. If you want to make your own trip, but have no money, then you can apply for a loan from http://citrusnorth.com/

From Bir Tarfawi we drove west toward the Gilf Kebir Plateau and Gebel Uweinat. Vance Haynes and archaeologist Bill McHugh asked us to stop at a site. As a ge­ologist I found these sites nondescript and dull. But as the archaeologists began their work, I changed my mind.

Their nimble fingers first produced stone blades. Pieces of ostrich eggshell turned up, along with black pebbles charred by fire.

Bit by bit a panorama of life unfolded. The blades must have been shaped by hu­man hands. There certainly would have been no ostriches here if the land had not been covered by grass. For the humans to build a fire and cook the eggs, there must have been firewood and, hence, trees. The spot must once have been fertile.

I was shaking when I lifted Rosie into my arms. She could easily have been killed and a jumble of thoughts whirled in my brain. Why had she said “Mamma”? I had never heard her use the word before-she always called Helen “Mummy” or “Mum”. Why had she been apparently unafraid? I didn’t know the answers. All I felt was an overwhelming thankfulness. To this day I feel the same whenever I see that passage.

On our way back, Rosie solemnly opened the three gates, then looked up at me expec­tantly. I knew what it was-she wanted to play one of her games. She loved being quizzed, just as Jimmy loved to quiz me. I took my cue and began. “Give me the names of six blue flowers.” She coloured quickly in satisfaction, because of course she knew. “Field scabious, harebell, forget-me-not,  bluebell, speedwell, meadow cranesbill.” “Very good indeed. Now name me six red flowers.” And so it went on, day after day. with infinite variations. I only half-realised at the time how lucky I was. I had a demanding, round-the-clock job, and yet I had the company of my children at the same time. So many men work so hard to keep the home going that they lose touch with their families.

Both Jimmy and Rosie, until they went to school, spent most of their time with me around the farms. Rosie, always solicitous, became distinctly maternal as her schooldays approached. She really couldn’t see how I was going to get by without her, and by the time she was five she was definitely worried.

“Daddy,” she would say seriously. “How are you going to manage when I’m at school? All those gates to open and hav­ing to get everything out of the trunk by yourself. It’s going to be awful for you.”

I would try to reassure her.

“I know, Rosie, I know. I’ll miss you, but I’ll get along somehow.”

Her response was always the same. A relieved smile and the comforting words : “but never mind, Daddy.           be with you every Saturday and Sunday.”

I suppose it was natural that my children, seeing veterinary practice from early childhood on and witnessing my pleasure in my work, never thought of being anything but veterinary surgeons.

There was no problem with Jimmy. He was a tough little fellow and well able to stand the buffets of the job, but somehow I couldn’t bear the idea of my daughter being kicked and trod­den on and knocked down and covered with muck. Practice was so much rougher in those days, and there were still quite a num­ber of farm horses around that regularly put the vets in hospital with broken legs and ribs. Rosie wanted a country practice, and to me this seemed very much a life for a man. In short I talked her out of it.

This really wasn’t like me, be­cause I have never been a heavy father and have always believed that children should follow their inclinations. But as Rosie entered her teens I dropped a long series of hints and perhaps played unfairly by showing her as many grisly jobs as possible. She finally decided to be a doc­tor of humans.

Now when I see the high per­centage of girls in the veterinary schools and observe the excellent work done by the two young women who are assistants in our own practice, I sometimes won­der if I did the right thing.

But Rosie is a happy and suc­cessful doctor and, anyway, parents are never sure they have done the right thing. They can only do what they think is right.

However, all that was far in the future as I drove home from Mr Binns with my three-year-old daughter by my side. She had started to sing again and was just finishing the first verse of her great favourite : “Careless hands don’t care when dreams slip through.”

BUT it all turned out for the best, because she did my precious acquisition no harm, and when she came with me on my rounds, she sang the things she had played so often, which were word-perfect in her mind. And I really loved that singing. Careless Hands soon became my favourite, too.

There were three gates on the road to this farm, and we came bumping up to the first one now. The singing stopped abruptly. This is one of my daughter’s big moments. When I drew up, she jumped from the car, strutted proudly to the gate and opened it. She took this duty very seriously, and her small face was grave as I drove through. When she returned to take her place by my dog Sam on the passenger seat, I patted her knee. “Thank you, sweetheart,” I said. “You’re such a big help to me.”

She didn’t say anything but blushed and seemed to swell with importance. She knew I meant what I said because opening gates is a chore. We negotiated the other two gates in similar manner and drove into the farm­yard. The farmer, Mr Binns, had shut the cow up in a ramshackle pen with a passage that stretched from a dead end to the outside. Looking into the pen, I saw with some apprehension that the ani­mal was a Galloway—black and shaggy, with a fringe of hair hanging over bad-tempered eyes She lowered her head anc switched her tail as she watchec me.

“Couldn’t you have got he tied up, Mr Binns?” I asked.

The farmer shook his head “Nay, I’m short o’ room any this ‘un spends most of ‘er tiro on the moors.”

I could believe it. There wa nothing domesticated about thi farm animal. I looked down at my daughter. Usually I lifted her into hay racks or onto walls while I worked, but I didn’t want her anywhere near the Galloway.

-It’s no place for you in there. Rosie,” I said. “Go and stand at the end of the passage well out of the way.”

We went into the pen, and the cow danced about and did her best to run up the wall. I was surprised when the farmer managed to drop a halter over her head.

I looked at him doubtfully. “Can you hold her?”

“I think so,” Mr Binns re­plied, breathlessly. “You’ll find the place at the end of her back.” It was a most unusual thing. A big abscess near the root of the tail. And that tail was whip­ping from side to side—a sure sign of ill nature in a bovine. Gently I passed my fingers over the swelling and, like a natural reflex, the hind foot lashed out, catching me a glanc­ing blow on the thigh. I had expected this and I got on with my exploration.

“How long has-she had this?” The farmer dug his heels in and leaned back on the rope. “Oh, ’bout two months. It keeps bustin’ and fillin’ up again. Every time I thought it’d be the last, but it looks like it’s never goin’ to get right. What’s the cause of it?”

“I don’t know, Mr Binns. She must have had a wound there at some time and it’s become infec­ted. There’s a lot of dead tissue that I’ll have to clear away before the thing heals.”

I leaned from the pen. “Rosie, will you bring my scissors, the cotton wool and the peroxide?” The farmer watched wonder­ingly as the tiny figure trotted to the car and came back with the three things. “By gaw, t’little lass knows ‘er way around.” “Oh, yes,” I said, with a smile. “I’m not saying she knows where

everything is in the car, but she’s an expert on the things I use regularly.”

Rosie handed me my require­ments over the door. Then she retreated to her place at the end of the passage.

I began my work on the abscess. Since the tissue was necrotic, the cow couldn’t feel anything as I snipped and swabbed, but that didn’t stop the hind leg from pistoning out.

I finished at last with a nice wide clean area onto which I trickled the hydrogen peroxide. I had a lot of faith in this old remedy as a penetrative antisep­tic and I watched contentedly as it bubbled on the skin surface. The cow, however, did not seem to enjoy the sensation because she made a sudden leap into the air, tore the rope from the farmer’s hand, brushed me to one side and made for the door.

The door was closed, but it was a flimsy thing, and she went straight through it with a splin­tering crash. As the black hairy monster shot into the passage, I desperately willed her to turn left but to my horror she went right, and after wildly scraping her feet on the cobbles she began to thunder down toward the dead end where my little daughter was standing. It was  one of the worst moments of my life. As I dashed toward the broken door, I heard a small voice say, “Mamma”. There was no scream of terror, just that one quiet word. When I left the pen, Rosie was standing with her back against the end wall of the passage, and the cow was stationary, looking at her from a distance of two feet.

The animal turned when she heard my footsteps and then whipped around in a tight circle and galloped past me.

JAMES HERRIOT-A special treat for you—another heart-warming story by the best-selling author. This time, the Yorkshire vet writes of his daughter . . .

LET my heart fall into careless hands.” Little Rosie’s voice piped in my ear as I guided my car over a stretch of rutted road. I was on my way to dress a wound on a cow’s back, and it was nice to hear the sing­ing. But it was dawning on me that something even better was happening. I was starting all over again with another child. When Jimmy went to school I missed his company in the car, but I did not realise that the whole thing was going to begin anew with Rosie.

The intense pleasure of show­ing a child the farm animals, the eager chatter that never palled, the fun and the laughter that lightened my days—it all hap­pened twice to me.

Her singing had begun when I bought a radiogram. Music has always meant a lot to me, and I owned a record-player that gave me a lot of pleasure. Still, I felt I wanted something better, some means of reproducing more faithfully the sound of my fav­ourite music. Hi-fi sets hadn’t been heard of at that time, nor stereo, nor any of the other things that have revolutionised the world of listening. The best a music lover could do was to get a good radiogram.

After much agonising and reading of pamphlets and listen­ing to advice from many quarters, I narrowed my list down to three models and made my choice by having them brought around to the house and playing the opening of the Beet­hoven Violin Concerto on one after the other, again and again. I must have driven the two men from the shop nearly mad, but at the end there was no doubt in my mind.

It had to be the Murphy, a handsome piece of furniture with a louvred front and grace­ful legs, and it bellowed out the full volume of the Philharmonic Orchestra without a trace of muzziness. I was enchanted with it, but there was one snag—it cost over ninety pounds, and that was a lot of money in 1950.

“Helen,” I said, when we had installed it in the sitting room. “We’ve got to look after this thing. The kids can put records on my old player, but we must keep them away from the Murphy.”

Foolish words. The very next day, as I came in the front door, the hall was echoing with Yippee ay O000h, Yippee ay Aaaay, Ghost Riders in the Skyyy! It was Bing Crosby’s back-up choir belting out the other side of the Careless Hands record, and the Murphy was giving it full value. I peeped around the sit­ting room door. Riders in the Sky had come to an end, and with her chubby little hands Rosie removed the record, placed it in its cover and marched to the record cabinet. She selected another disc to play and was halfway across the floor when I waylaid her.

“Which one is that?” I asked. “The Little Gingerbread Man,” she replied.

I looked at the label. It was, too, and how did she know? I had a whole array of these chil­dren’s records, and many of them looked exactly the same. The same colour, the same grouping of words, and Rosie at age three could not read.

She fitted the disc expertly on the turntable and set it going. I listened to The Little Ginger­bread Man right through and watched as she picked out an­other record.

I looked over her shoulder. “What is it going to be this time, Rosie?”

“Tubby the Tuba.”

And indeed it was. I had an hour to spare, and Rosie gave me a recital. We went through Uncle Mac’s Nursery Rhymes, The Happy Prince, Peter and the Wolf, and many of the re­cordings of the immortal Bing to whom I was and am devoted. I was intrigued to find that Rosie’s favourite Crosby record was not Please, or How Deep Is the Ocean, or one of his other classics but”Careless Hands. This one had something special for her. At the end of the session I decided that it was fruitless to try to keep Rosie and the Murphy apart. Whenever she was not out with me on my rounds, she played with the radiogram. It was her toy.