Who said that?

The directions I held in my hand were leading me to a residential district in Lubbock, Texas. That would not have been a big deal, were it not for the fact that I was on my way to visit a horse. I knew that people in a city residential area were likely to know as much about horses as I knew about submarines, but I could be wrong.

I was supposed to call this new client and tell him when I would arrive so he could meet me there, and we could palpate his horse to see if she were pregnant. But it turned out he had an appointment and could not be there, which left me alone to catch and palpate a perfect stranger's horse. I didn't like it.

I came to a brick home with a large back yard. The horses were in the lot next to the house, and the two areas were separated by a row of 8-foot-tall sheds. The instructions called for me to pull into the alley and come in through the back gate.

I was told there were stocks where I could put the mare to palpate her, and that there would be a halter tied to the fence. Of course, I could not locate the stocks and the only thing tied to the fence was a lead rope. To make matters worse, there was a round pen in the middle of the square lot next to the house and four horses. Have you ever tried to catch one of four horses that are running around a circular object? It's pretty much impossible; they stayed on the other side of that round pen no matter what I did.

I went about building a barrier that would stop them. It took about 15 minutes of Aggie ingenuity, but I managed it. I finally got them cornered and picked out the only mare in the bunch. She was a wild thing. I got the lead rope around her neck, only to find that she didn't like it at all. She reared and pitched a fit.

I was trying to calm her down, when a voice from the adjoining back yard came rising through the air:

Hello?

The voice was a welcome melody at a trying moment. I began to talk back in a fervent tone.

"Yes, I'm Dr. Brock and I'm here to palpate this mare. Could you please tell me where a halter might be?"

Respecting one's elders

I was speaking in a tone somewhere between yelling and civil conversation, meant to be polite yet convey a sense of aggravation over the unorganized state in which I found myself.

Hello? was all I got in response.

I started analyzing the voice to see if I could get an idea of who might be beckoning me.

The tone sounded a bit like an older woman who could be staying at the house and wondering who was in the yard chasing the horses.

I changed my tone a bit to accommodate an older woman, which meant adding a bit more volume, along with more respect.

"Yes, I'm Dr. Brock, and I have come to see if this mare is pregnant. I was told there were some stocks around here that I could use to restrain her. Do you know where the rest of this halter is?"

My words were met with several minutes of silence. The pause led me to wonder just how old this lady might be. I pictured in my mind a gray-haired lady inching across the yard with a walker, trying to adjust her hearing aid to pick up the tones and wondering who was kicking up all this dust. I decided to raise my volume a little more, and add more respect.

"YES, I'M DR. BROCK AND I WAS NEEDING..." Before I could get any more words out, she interrupted with a remark that made me wonder if she might be getting a bit senile.

Well, my stars!

What did that mean? It seemed like a poor conversational placement for those words. I decided to tie the horse to the fence and talk to this lady face-to-face in the back yard.

But there was no one in the yard. No footprints in the dirt, no evidence of anyone with a walker. The back door was locked tight, and no one was visible through the back windows. Maybe I was dreaming. Was I losing my mind? Hearing things? Maybe someone was deliberately messing with me, but that would be a bad joke to play on a vet you'd never met before.

Just as I was about to make it to the end of the row of sheds and return to the lot full of horses, I heard the voice again:

Hello?

Then I realized it was coming from a thicket of trees in the opposite corner. I made my way over and parted the vegetation.

There she was — a large, blue Macaw parrot.

I'd just carried on a 20-minute conversation with a bird. To make matters worse, it looked like the bird was laughing at me.

My next step was what any noble veterinarian would have done. I scanned the area to make sure no one had just seen me make an idiot of myself.

I finally found the stocks and managed to get the mare into them. She was pregnant.

Having done my job, I promptly got out of there before someone showed up and that bird told them how dumb the new veterinarian was.

Dr. Brock owns the Brock Veterinary Clinic in Lamesa, Texas.