Today we visited “Coast Papamoa”. Having driven past kilometres of “tuscan villas”, we were expecting the worst, but found plantings already in the ground, a local boy made good “putting something back into the community,” and BULL ALLEN to show us around the model homes.
CEP was particularly excited – Bull Allen was a teenage hero of hers, as a vegetarian sportsperson. “Yes,” he said, “not 100% vegetarian, but given the choice between meat and something else, I'd take the something else”.
****
Arriving back at the farm about 5ish, we decided to accompany Karl and Alfa (the dog) on a walk around the stock. It's calving time – a busy time for Karl, as he works part time as a vet as well as keeping an eye on the farm. The night we arrived he'd been out on several calls, extracting twins and chopping the head off a dead calf to haul him out of a heifer.*
The sun was just lowering as we set out, the sky starting to colour up. Down in the calving paddock, Karl pointed out a heifer just in the process of dropping – one thin knobbly calf leg sticking out of her vagina. He started to look at bit concerned - hmm, just one leg, that's not so good.
After a closer look he decided she needed some assistance. CEP and I drafted her out and herded her up the track to a race**. He rolled his sleeves up and plunged his arm in to have a good feel around. CEP and I both stood and watched, our childhood reading of James Herriot floating around in our heads. The calf was a backwards presentation. Karl disappeared up the road for his truck, and came back with a large metal traction frame, that sat on the cow's back and attached to the calf's hooves; and a big pump bottle of vicious pink fluid, which CEP pumped into the cow to give a bit more moisture in the uterus.***
Eventually the calf came slithering out - “probably dead”, said Karl – but he wasn't – the tail flickered a little, Karl thumped the wee body, then, seeing he wasn't breathing properly, flung him out of the narrow race and into the paddock. In a running blur Karl vaulted the fence after him, grabbed his back hooves and, spinning, swung the small slimy body round his head (think Valerie Vili winding up for a world-beating throw).
After a few seconds he put the calf down, checked its mouth with his fingers, gave him a consolatory pat, then slung him back over the fence to his mother.
CEP and I stood, silent with admiration. The mother cow ambled over and started to lick the calf. Karl gave her an injection to get the membranes and placenta moving. Alfa rubbed up against my leg. The sun had disappeared entirely, and a thin orange moon hung over the black hills.
* Last night CEP was talking about our brother, saying she thinks he's sometimes less than totally thrilled by his day job. “Oh yes,” said Karl (we were eating dinner), “it's like that for everyone. When there's a cow with a dead calf, and you've got your arm up her, and its all gaseous, that's not so great.”
** A fenced area too narrow for a cow to turn in easily, designed to contain an animal on just such occasions as this.
***In the middle of this my work phone went – “can't talk now” I said, “I'm assisting at a calving”. “What?” said the voice at the other end. “A calving,” I said. “A what?” said the voice. “A COW IS GIVING BIRTH AND I AM HELPING,” I shouted, and hung up.
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Monday, 12 July 2010
What's in the bag?
After concluding the business of the day, CEP and I lunched in Te Puke, stared disconsolately through the window of the Op Shop (closed on Mondays), and drove around photographing new developments in what Pickle-paw assures me is known in property development circles as “the sleeping giant of Te Puke”.
It looks a grim fate, to push a pram along the raw and deserted cul-de-sacs[1], pukeko in the scrubby paddocks, coppices of “for sale” notices and a few stationary diggers on the bare sections the only other horizontal creatures on what had been flat, river bottom dairying land. The beige houses look temporary – but they'll be there a good while, affordable, dry places to raise a family.
**
Further along State Highway 33 towards Whakatane, there's a turn to go down to Maketu, home of Maketu Pies[2], a friendly kitler (see not very good photo), and a stack of what we both thought, for a surreal moment, were penguins (see other not very good photo).
Also, there was a man WITH A PET POSSUM. He was sitting on the fence near where we parked the car. I smiled at him, and he motioned me over, opening his black drawstring bag.
“Have you ever seen one of these before?”, he asked me. I looked at the bag – a little dark, pointed face, round black eyes and a fleshy pink noise.
“I have,” I said, “but never pettable like this one.” He coaxed her out of the bag and laid her across his arm.
“I've always kept them as pets,” he said. “I've had this girl about ten months, since I lost my last one in a bus fire.”
In Which Captain Slinky and Chief Engineer Pickle-Paw Travel a Long Way
11 July
“Imagine,” C.E.P said to me last night, lying in the single bed by the door[1] in the studio unit of the Tokaanu Oasis Motor Inn, “if our father had been a travelling salesman, and we had taken after him, and we spent all our time travelling around the North Island and sleeping in rooms like this.”
We lay there contemplating this thought for a while.
“What would we sell?” she asked.
“Ointment!” I shouted. “The red and the blue.”
“Yes,” she said, “ointment. The red and the blue. We would confer behind our folder, silently, then announce our unanimous verdict – in this particular case, we certainly recommend the red.”
“Goodnight, Mr Lomas,” I said.
“Goodnight,” she said, and put in her earplugs.
***
I drove the small blue car all the way from Island Bay Desert Road
At Tokaanu, the maintenance man directed us towards unit 14. Small, cold, an electric blanket on one bed (snaffled by CEP). The sign above the bench said “Please do not cook fish or other odious foodstuffs in our rooms”.
The Oasis Motel has a mineral hot pool – a concrete rectangle with a sloping roof. It was just the right depth for me to sit comfortably with the hot water coming all the way up to my neck. Chief Engineer Pickle-Paw (status restored), rolled her towel into a bundle and drowned it to sit on and save herself.
[1] The lock taped open after an incident in which Pickle-Paw had placed a plaintive call to the maintenance man, saying, “we're locked in...”
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