Free A Good Day's Work by John Demont

spends her time cantering around exhibition rings. Nonetheless, when Carl tries to pick up the stitched right front leg, she rears up, smashing her head on the barn roof and making a sound like someone chopping wood. “Whoa,” says Carl. “Whoa,” says Michelle. “Whoa,” says Jessica.
    Injuries are unavoidable for big-animal vets. Horses kick. So do cows. Mostly it’s just bruises and bangs. But André has never quite recovered from being bitten in the face by an ornery mare on what should have been a routine call. Horses will try to stomp you with their hooves, as Styletto aspires to do to Carl at this very moment. If your arm gets wedged in between a wild horse and the sides of the stall—as seems to be on the verge of happening to Jessica, now also inside the stall with Styletto—it could get fractured. Styletto, it is decided, needs a little sedation. Jessica heads for the truck. She returns minutes later carrying a black case with silver latches and hinges that snap open.
    Inside her emergency kit are needles, syringes and IV catheters. Rompun, an injectable sedative, is in a 50 ml bottle, about half the size of the ampoules of Flunazine, a painkiller. The Dormosedan is in a clear bottle with labels on either side. Because Styletto is so jumpy, Jessica puts a little of it together with a little Torbugesic, another sedative. She flicks the syringe a couple of times with her index finger to get the medicine flowing. Then she steps inside the stall.
    The horse isn’t big. Even so, Carl clenches Styletto’s halter for control. Amid beams of light from a flashlight, Jessica, making calming noises, searches for the horse’s jugular vein with her left hand while the syringe stands ready in her right.Inside an eight-foot-square stall a wrestling match ensues. A chorus of “whoas” fills the barn. The vets muscle the horse. Styletto, moving counter-clockwise, muscles back. Somehow Jessica gets the needle in, plunges the sedation into the horse’s circulatory system, then backs off to let it work.
    The drug combo, under normal circumstances, should take the fight out of a horse. Styletto just stands there. “It’s the animal’s temperament that’s the issue,” says Jessica. “Taking out the stitches isn’t that painful. It’s just that nothing we were doing was to her liking. It’s just her personality. She’s very stubborn.” The vets look at Michelle. Michelle looks at them. Carl tries to grab the filly’s right leg and then just gives up. In her mind, Jessica is already mixing Dormosedan and Rompun, a more potent sedative combination, and reaching for another syringe.

    BACK in the office half an hour later Jessica plucks a doughnut from a Tim Hortons box. If she doesn’t eat something now, she might have to go the entire workday with nothing more than a few handfuls of trail mix from the plastic bag in the cab of her truck. She’s had half an hour of downtime. Now a horse is about to foal. Dairy cattle tend to calve all year. Horses tend to foal in the spring. This, for example, will be the first equine birth Jessica has seen this season. Normally when horses foal, a farmer doesn’t reach for the phone to call the vet. But this couple raises show horses.
    Maryanne Gauthier, who also works for the local John Deere dealer, focuses on paints, so called because of theirdistinctive markings. Her husband, Marc, raises Clydesdales, just like in the Budweiser ads. Marc is a farrier, which means he shoes horses for a living. He’s also a bit of a worrier. He’s spent a lot of time and money on a mare named Amelia Earhart. So when the mare’s water broke, Marc hit Jessica’s cell phone number and told her that, if possible, her presence would be appreciated.
    â€œThere’s a good chance it will all be done by the time we get there,” says Jessica, back behind the wheel. A cow can take two