Free Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) by Ed McBain Page A

turned tail and splashed into the ditch.
    “The gators’ll sometimes prey on our young calves, we’ll have a sickly one every now and then. But for the most part they’re harmless. Buzzards are the chief predators to worry about. Unless you consider disease a predator. There’s plenty of that,” she said.
    “Is there?” I asked cautiously, remembering her curt reply to my earlier question, and afraid she would tell me that this , too, was “complicated.”
    It was.
    When they were working the cows—I still didn’t know what “working” them meant—in the spring and the fall, they vaccinated for blackleg, pasturella, and malignant edema, the vaccine usually administered in a triple dose subcutaneously. A must vaccination for heifers they hoped to breed was for brucellosis or Bang’s disease—“I don’t know who Bang was,” Mrs. McKinney said. “Probably a vet who couldn’t spell brucellosis.” The disease caused infertility, and since a “cow-calf lady” (as she called herself) was in the business of breeding cattle, Bang’s disease was a dreaded nemesis. Cancer eye was another severe problem, especially in Herefords, who sunburned badly around the eyes because of their white faces. This was treatable with silver nitrate, she explained, but even so, the cow would eventually lose the eye. “Angus don’t suffer from it,” she said. “Black is beautiful.” They vaccinated against leptospirosis, which could cause a cow to abort or prolapse (“That’s when everything hangs out the rear end,” she said, “and you lose the unborn calf”). Leptospirosis was highly infectious, as was scours, a form of diarrhea.
    “And there’s also mastitis,” she said, “which is an udder infection, and colic, which you flush out with mineral oil, administered orally from a garden hose. I know a rancher out West who lost ninety percent of his calf crop because his cows were eating pine needles that caused them to abort. Moldy hay can do it too. We haven’t had any of that yet, thank God; when our cattle are stressed, they go for the palmettos. The ranchers out West also have to worry about poison grasses like larkspur and senecio—pretty little blue and yellow flowers, but deadly. Locoweed too, out there, which isn’t deadly, of course, but which makes the cows go bananas—they’ll run right over you, go through fences, knock down posts, who needs it? It isn’t an easy business, cattle breeding. Do you suppose snapbean farming is less work?”
    Her mind kept circling back to the farm, I noticed, and what I was sure she considered a foolish investment on her son’s part. We passed a pair of deer standing some fifty feet inside the pasture fence on our left. They stared at the Jeep in surprise for a moment, and then turned and went loping off gracefully. I unfastened thechain on another gate, and we drove into yet another pasture on yet another muddy road. We passed a grove of orange trees—“I keep two hundred acres in citrus,” Mrs. McKinney said. “It’s a nuisance more than anything else”—and we passed a huge, black wild hog rooting in a copse of trees she said was called “Happy Hammock,” for reasons she could not fathom. And at last we drove past the small clapboard house where her manager lived, and her hand’s mobile home, and the horse barn—a brown quarter horse was grazing outside now—and the two rusting gas tanks. She parked the Jeep under a huge old oak and we walked together up the porch steps and into the main house. She had set the air conditioning too low. The temperature inside was virtually subarctic.
    “Ah, nice and cool,” she said. “I’ll just call Erik from the office, it won’t take a minute. Would you like a drink? Something a bit stronger than tea?”
    “No, thanks,” I said.
    “Well, make yourself comfortable,” she said, and opened a door beyond which I could see one corner of a cluttered desk. The door closed. From upstairs in the house someplace, I heard