All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot

He became haggard, he seemed to age suddenly. “Oh God,” he moaned, “don’t even talk about it. I’m all in—another session like that would kill me. And on my own! It would be the end of me, I tell you.”
    “Ah well,” I said sadistically, “try not to worry. It may never happen.”
    It was when I saw the phone box about ten miles along the Brawton road that the thought struck me. I slowed down and got out of the car. “I wonder,” I muttered, “I wonder if I could do it just once.”
    Inside the box, inspiration was strong in me. I wrapped my handkerchief over the mouthpiece, dialled the practice number and when I heard Tristan on the line I shouted at the top of my voice. “Are you t’young feller that put our cow’s calf bed back this morning?”
    “Yes, I’m one of them.” Tension sprang into Tristan’s voice. “Why, is there something wrong?”
    “Aye, there is summat wrong,” I bawled. “She’s putten it out again.”
    “Out again? Out again? All of it?” He was almost screaming.
    “Aye, it’s a terrible mess. Pourin’ blood and about twice size it was this morning. You’ll ’ave some job with ’er.”
    There was a long silence and I wondered if he had fainted. Then I heard him again, hoarse but resolute. “Very well, I’ll come straight away.”
    There was another pause then he spoke again almost in a whisper. “Is it out completely?”
    I broke down then. There was a wistful quality about the words which defeated me; a hint of a wild hope that the farmer may have been exaggerating and that there might be only a tiny piece peeping out. I began to laugh. I would have liked to toy with my victim a little longer but it was impossible. I laughed louder and took my handkerchief from the mouthpiece so that Tristan could hear me.
    I listened for a few seconds to the frenzied swearing at the other end then gently replaced the receiver. It would probably never happen again but it was sweet, very sweet.

TEN
    “Y OU WANT M R . H ERRIOT ? Certainly, I’ll get him for you.” Siegfried cupped the phone with his hand. “Come on, James, here’s another one prefers you to me.” I glanced at him quickly, but he was smiling. He was pleased.
    I thought, as I took the phone, of the tales I had heard of the other kind of boss; the man who couldn’t bear to be knocked off his little pedestal. And I thought, too, of the difference a few weeks had made in the farmers’ attitude; they didn’t look past me now, hoping that Mr. Farnon had come with me. They were beginning to accept me, and I liked to think that it wasn’t only their hospitable traditions that made them ask me in for a “bit o’ dinner.”
    This really meant something, because, with the passage of time, an appreciation of the Dales people had grown in me; a sense of the value of their carefully given friendship. The higher up the country, the more I liked them. At the bottom of the valley, where it widened into the plain, the farmers were like farmers everywhere, but the people grew more interesting as the land heightened, and in the scattered hamlets and isolated farms near the bleak tops I found their characteristics most marked; their simplicity and dignity, their rugged independence and their hospitality.
    This Sunday morning it was the Bellerbys and they lived at the top of Halden, a little valley branching off the main Dale. My car bumped and rattled over the last rough mile of an earth road with the tops of boulders sticking up every few yards.
    I got out and from where I stood, high at the head, I could see all of the strangely formed cleft in the hills, its steep sides grooved and furrowed by countless streams feeding the boisterous Halden Beck which tumbled over its rocky bed far below. Down there, were trees and some cultivated fields, but immediately behind me the wild country came crowding in on the bowl where the farmhouse lay. Halsten Pike, Alstang, Birnside—the huge fells with their barbarous names were very