My Gentle Barn by Ellie Laks Page A

fairly small point of attachment to her leg. While Dr. Geissen collected his surgical gear from the truck, depositing it into large metal buckets, I waited with Mary, trying not to picture what he was about to do. For all my bravery in flushing wounds and administering subcutaneous fluids, I was actually quite squeamish. If I was the only one around, the force that drove me to help a hurting animal overrode my queasiness, but when there was a qualified professional present, I was more than happy to check out. I watched as far as the injections of anesthesia at several sites around the tumor, and then we waited about ten minutes for the area to get numb. But what the vet did next I can only guess at because I had my eyes squeezed shut, even as I kept Mary from walking away. By the time Dr. Geissen said, “OK, you can open your eyes now,” there was a clean, white bandage over the area where the tumor had been. I couldn’t go anywhere near the thought of what he had done with the thing once he’d removed it.
    “Are there stitches?” I asked.
    “Yes. I’ll come back in a couple of weeks to take the sutures out. Just make sure the area stays dry.” Dr. Geissen took a step back and cocked his head this way and that as he looked at Mary’s feet. “Of course, you’re going to have to trim those hooves.”
    Well, I didn’t know the first thing about trimming hooves and asked if he could show me how to do it.
    He went back to his truck and brought out some large clippers with a wide jaw. “These are hoof nippers,” he said. “They’re for horsehooves.” And he explained that I wouldn’t even need to get a pair of these if I kept up with trimming. Once he’d cut off the bulk of the overgrowth—a good twelve inches of twisted hoof material—he said, “Do you have wire cutters?”
    Yes, I had wire cutters. He instructed me to retrieve them so he could teach me to do it with my own tools.
    Dr. Geissen trimmed the first hoof. It took a while because even with me trying to hold her still, Mary fought him all the way through it. Since she’d clearly never had her hooves trimmed, she wasn’t used to having her foot lifted and held and didn’t like it one bit.
    “The more you do this, the more she’ll get used to it,” he said. And sure enough, by the second leg, she was already fighting a little bit less. Dr. Geissen pointed out the different parts of Mary’s foot. Goats have cloven hooves, which means the hoof is split into two halves. Looking from the bottom, each half has a teardrop-shaped toe, surrounded by hoof material, which protects the toes, just like human toenails. The toe and the surrounding toenail are both supposed to touch the ground, but Mary’s toe had not touched the ground in a very long time. Her toenails had long ago grown over the toe, obscuring it completely, and then twisted out to the front, making it very difficult for her to walk. After the second hoof was trimmed, the vet let Mary amble around a bit. She tested out her new hooves, lifting one and setting it back down, then another. When we brought her back for the third foot, she was more settled—like she had approved of the test drive and was ready to have all of her feet back in contact with the earth.
    Dr. Geissen handed me the wire cutters. “Your turn,” he said.
    I lifted Mary’s leg while he held her still. Even after I’d watched him trim the first two hooves, I worked slowly, unsure where the toenail ended and the toe began. The last thing I wanted to do was cut this poor goat; she had already been to hell and back and didn’t need any more pain inflicted on her.
    When all four hooves were finally trimmed, Mary looked like adifferent goat. She walked more freely and began to explore the yard, as though the procedure had returned to her a goat’s natural curiosity. But she was malnourished and quite weak, and her legs were still bowed from having walked around on those crazy hooves for so long. She also seemed to have a