Just read the terms of the challenge and realised this isn't from my childhood. Doh!!
A Winter’s Tail
Shrill phone pierces the small hours
Wrenched from my warm pit, duty calls
Heifer calving- making nothing of it
An out the side job
The night is deathly still, not a soul is stirring
All around the suffocating white blanket lies thick
A freezing haar hangs suspended, eerie
Scared to touch this alien landscape
The Lochside road’s a Cresta run
Ploughs piled snow drifts above my head
Descend the chute through the amber glowed street
And back into the black void
Steading lights, a siren on the hill
The persistent moth, my trusty Subaru
Bulldozes snow over the bonnet
Must keep moving
Old Sandy waits, knarled and lined
Just watering eyes betray his fear
Like the wide eyes of my patient
Steam rising from her fusing with breath in the cold air
Her thick blood warms my hands
A scarlet pool in the white ground
A glistening calf lands with a slippery wet flop
It’s spartan crib of straw and snow
The dark silence heightens the suspense
Only blue-grey instinctive guttural lowing, urging, pleading
Before a blink, a head shake
New life enters this dead of night
My son's partner is in her final year of Veterinary School in Edinburgh. I shall get her to read this, I'm sure she will appreciate it as much as I do. Well written, thank you.
I love it. Straight from James Herriot. (Except for the bits that aren't) The challenge is there to inspire ideas. Not a set of rules to comply with. Thank you for this
Some great word-painting of images and sounds beyond my experience... most of which are unchanged since the childhood of older readers anyway...