Westcliffe
It was just after 2 a.m. when the country veterinarian with the tired eyes swung open the heavy door and saw the dog in the corner of the small room. He was a big mutt, a tough and weathered mountain dog, but now he whimpered softly and pawed at the porcupine quills that covered his face.
There was no electricity in the shack and the vet moved slowly, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the near-darkness. Dim, yellow light from a pair of candles flickered and danced along the thick log walls of the old cabin.
A scene out of the late 1800s in this rugged Colorado land at the base of the forbidding Sangre de Cristo mountain range?
Try 2004.
Veterinarian Karl Musgrave knelt on the uneven wooden planks of the cabin in the middle of nowhere at the end of a 30-mile dirt-road drive from his home that October night – summoned by the woman whose cellphone somehow caught a signal.
The cabin was brighter now. Musgrave had fired up the generator in his modern mobile veterinary lab and flooded the cabin with bright electric light. He sedated the dog and began removing the 20 or so porcupine quills from the snout of the animal.
Back at his home, tucked away in a drawer and seemingly about as useless as a hat on a donkey, was Musgrave’s framed master’s degree in public health. From Harvard.
“It wasn’t supposed to work out like that, with me going out in the middle of the night whenever anyone called,” said Musgrave, who looks younger than his 47 years despite having worked a relentless schedule of animal care in sprawling Custer County for nearly three years.
“I just wanted to have a regular vet practice, maybe working four 10-hour days with three days off.”
No chance. Once the townsfolk in this village of 700 caught wind that a vet with a mobile clinic had landed, well, they just about tripped over their dogs, cats, horses, cows and goats to get to the phone.
When the woman in the remote cabin called to report her dog looked like a dart board, Musgrave determined the quills weren’t life-threatening.
“I told her I’d be over first thing in the morning,” he said a few days ago, standing beneath a 125-foot-high cottonwood tree near the home he shares with his wife, Kathy, at the base of 14,064-foot Humboldt Peak.
“But the woman said her dog was in pain and that I had to come right then, at 1 in the morning.” He did. And he could never turn back.
“I’ve been on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, since that night,” he said. “I stopped trying to talk people out of it.”
Today, the one-man animal-care festival is over. On March 1, Musgrave’s mobile vet clinic, a 1992 Ford truck stocked with vaccines, medicine and even an X-ray machine, caught fire. He was driving. He escaped the flames. The truck and everything in it did not.
And Musgrave’s Three Creeks Veterinary Service is no more.
“Now I’m done.”
Born 200 miles to the northeast in Elizabeth, Musgrave earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado in 1981 and a veterinary degree from Colorado State in 1988. He got his Harvard master’s in 1989 and worked in the human health field – with the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and then in other positions in Europe.
There was a brief stop in Wyoming, and then in 2004 he and Kathy, a schoolteacher, got adventurous. They bought a 72-acre ranch some 10 miles south of Westcliffe. They got a horse named Skywalker and a goat. And a dog and chickens. What they didn’t get was any free time.
Joy Lewis, who runs the Pawsitive Reaction animal rescue in town, knows it. So does the unrelated Margaret Lewis, who lives 10 miles north of town. Both women – along with anyone, it seemed, who owned a critter – got to know Doc Musgrave well.
“He would just always, always come to take care of my dogs,” said Joy Lewis. “And I mean always.”
Margaret, who has a herd of horses, five dogs, 11 cats and eight goats – three kids were born Monday night – said she, too, called Musgrave. A lot.
“Everybody did,” she said. “And he never said no.”
But the fire, which gutted his mobile clinic during an afternoon blizzard, ended it all.
“When you’re doing something, it’s easy to keep doing it,” he said. “But when it stops and you have to think about starting all over again … well, I’ve just had enough.”
Musgrave dusted off his Harvard degree and has applied for public health administration jobs in Colorado Springs and Denver. He and Kathy will keep the ranch. Weekends, they said.
And there is something he will miss.
“Coming home from a call,” he said, his voice quiet as he looked across a patch of spring grass at the burned-out shell of his mobile clinic.
“I’d treat an animal, maybe even save its life from a rattlesnake bite or an illness, and then there’d be this quiet time as I drove home and realized that I had accomplished something. I liked that feeling. Coming home. That was nice.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
