How Now, Brown Cow?

By William R.Doerner

ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL by JAMES HERRIOT 442 pages. St. Martin's Press. $7.95.

What the world needs now, and does every so often, is a warm, Grated, downhome, unadrenalized prize of a book that sneaks onto the bestseller lists for no apparent reason other than a certain floppy-eared puppy appeal.

However, it is only partly because warm puppies--along with cows, horses, pigs, cats and the rest of the animal kingdom--figure as his main characters that James Herriot's memoirs qualify admirably. Dr. Herriot is a country veterinarian who has practiced in the Yorkshire dales of northern England for more than three decades, and he clearly and fondly knows the two-footed creatures on his rounds as well as the fourfooted. The result is a collection of word pictures of rural Britain in the 1930s, when the author was starting his career. Like Norman Rockwell sickroom paintings, All Creatures owes some of its charm to the certainty that a lot more antibiotics are used now than four decades ago.

Young Dr. Herriot is forever stripping to the waist in some drafty Darrowby barn and soaping up his arm to plunge it into one troubled animal orifice or another. For Herriot, and the reader, the rewards of such expeditions range from delivery of little nibbling creatures who sometimes get stuck in the process of being born, to the periodic relief administered to Tricki Woo, a pampered little Pekingese constantly overfed by her mistress. To be fair, though, as Herriot invariably is, the struggling assistant vet is every bit as susceptible to .the sherry and smoked oysters supplied him by Tricki's dowager owner as the dog is to her indulgences.

By and large. Dr. Herriot's world is not one of pampering but of windswept, hardscrabble farms run by families who need their animals for transport, income or food. Thus the worried calls reporting "summat amiss" frequently mark the unspoken fear that the caller's family may face a winter with no milk money for clothing or no home-cured ham for the table.

The author naturally dwells longer on his successes than his missteps, but even the latter provide moments of fine humor. Having refused to accept Herriot's expert diagnosis that his cow had a broken pelvis, one stubborn dalesman proceeded to apply an ancient cure used by his father ("A very clever man with stock was me dad"). The cow turned out to be suffering only from loose pelvic ligaments, which happened to cure themselves almost at the moment the useless home remedy was applied. For years thereafter--which the author would be well advised to cover in a sequel--the animal was triumphantly introduced far and wide by its owner as "the cow Mr. Herriot said would never get up n'more." -William R. Doerner

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