It is difficult to find, except in academic circles, practicing veterinarians who have lost their humility. I think it is because of the company we keep. Animals are not respecters of good looks, intelligence, prestigious honors, or fashion sense.

They remind us regularly of our real place in the food chain.

A COLD CALL

Through rain or sleet or snow or hail, the vet’s on call to . . . pull it or push it or stop it or start it or pump it or bump it, to hose it or nose it, to stay the course till wellness doth prevail.

It was a cold winter in southern Michigan: –3°. Dr. Lynn the veterinarian got the call after supper from a good client. Their four horses had illegally gained entrance to the tack room and eaten 150 pounds of grain.

She drove out to the magnificently refurbished, snow-covered countryside horse farm of the couple, a pair of upscale twenty-something Internet millionaires. The three crunched their way back to the rustic, unimproved forty-year-old barn where the horses were now in various poses of drooling gastric distress.

A quick auscultation showed no intestinal movement and membranes the color of strawberry-grape Popsicle tongue. Lynn began her work under the one lightbulb. There was no door, but at –3°, who cares. The Banamine was as thick as Miracle Whip, her stomach hose was as rigid as PVC pipe, and her hand stuck to the stainless steel pump. It was so cold her shadow cracked when she stepped on it.

She pumped her patients’ stomachs with Epsom salts and mineral oil. One of the horses, however, did not respond. She instructed the couple to walk the horses while she went up to the house to call the surgeon at the vet school. (Even her cell phone had frozen and would only dial odd numbers.)

As she stepped through the back door of the main house, she remembered that the couple had a pair of Akitas named Whiskey and Bear. Surely the dogs aren’t loose in the house, Lynn thought, or they would have said something. She dialed the phone on the kitchen wall. As it was ringing, she heard the click-click-click of toenails on the hardwood floor. Around the corner came a massive beast big as a Ford tractor. His sled dog ruff stood straight up on his neck. The curled tail never moved and the gaze was level. “Good dog, Whiskey, good dog . . . I’m just borrowing the phone here. . . .”

Dogs often remember their vet the way children remember their dentist. Whiskey sniffed Lynn’s leg.

“Good dog . . . oh, yes, I’d like to speak to—YEOW!”

The au pair staying with the young millionaires heard a screaming clatter. She stepped around the door to be met by Whiskey dragging the good doctor down the hallway by a Carhartt leg, her arms flailing, trailing stethoscope, gloves, stocking cap, syringes, and steamed-up glasses like chum from a trawler. They were stopped when the phone cord came tight.

“Let the nice vet go, Whiskey,” the au pair said in a Scandinavian accent. “She’s only trying to help.”