July 3, 2001 ~ Sunday night
was rough. Dr. Tom had said not to fret about the calf, to let nature take its course. Let the mama take care of it, he said, and hope for the best. The thing was, though, that not long after Dr. Tom drove away, the mama stopped caring for the calf. Stopped licking her, stopped trying to make her get up, never encouraged her to eat. In retrospect, I wonder if Emma knew something we didn't? Still, we tried not to worry. Right. If you know me, you know that I am an EXPERT worrier. I have it down to an art.
I woke up when my son came in, and got up to talk to him. Then, since I was up, I thought I'd just go out there and check on the calf. Bad move. The calf was still wet, six hours after birth. In other words, Emma hadn't licked the baby dry... she had abandoned the calf. Baby calves need to be licked by their mother's sandpapery tongues... it stimulates the circulation, dries them off, warms them up, and encourages them to stand up.
It was a long night. We dried the calf with towels, rubbed her good and hard, and tried to get her to take a bottle. She was so weak, so frail. After two hours, we'd only managed to get a third of the colostrum down her. She was shivering, and I don't know, I guess it's the mother in me... I kind of lay down beside her, covering her with my arms, trying to keep her warm. Intelligent people do not lay down with dying calves; I'm pretty sure of this.
We realized we had to let her go, that it was a lost cause. We headed for the house, and I started to tell Larry to wake me up when he left for work, so I could go check on the baby... when I realized that it was ALREADY time for him to get ready for work. So, covered with filth and so tired I was shaking, I lay down on the bed, just for a minute, but woke up about an hour and a half later. I think I got a grand total of two or maybe three hours of sleep, and I have to point this out, that is NOT enough rest.
I went outside, expecting to see a dead calf, but she was still barely hanging on. So I called the vet, expecting him to say, "No, Carol, there's nothing else you can do... that calf was just too weak, right from the start." But of course he didn't; he told me I needed to tube-feed the calf. Not something I looked forward to doing, but there you go. A couple of neighbors got wind of it and came over to help me, and between the three of us, it only took a little while to get the tube down the calf's throat and feed her the colostrum. She handled it well, mooed a big moo afterwards, and looked MUCH better. I was so encouraged. Went to the feed store to buy milk replacer, and told Larry we would need to feed the baby when I came home from my meeting.
When I was driving down the road, I thought to myself, "Where am I going?" And it wasn't a metaphysical question; for a minute, I couldn't remember where I was supposed to be going. To Jimmy's? To the vet's? (Note to self -- you have GOT to get more sleep. And you have no business driving when you're so tired.)
When I came home from the meeting, I hopped out of the truck and walked straight to the pen, looking for that tiny baby, hoping against hope that she had perked up enough to stand up on her own. But there was no calf, only an empty space, and I could see where Larry had dragged her across the dirt, could hear the tractor in the distance, and I knew... that she was gone, that he had carried her off to the back pasture, that it was all over.
Emma was still in the pen, standing there looking a little lost. I don't know what happened, really. Maybe all the commotion and difficulty surrounding the birth had made the baby seem foreign to her, or maybe she instinctively knew that the calf wasn't going to make it. But now that the calf was gone, Emma had that look in her eyes, that faraway look.
I just stood there, still in my girly dress-up clothes, with Emma, until Larry came back. He said the calf was already gone when he got home.
I slept last night... but woke up thinking about that calf. Poor baby.
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