Creatures of the Rock

A James Herriot for the 21st century recounts his adventures as a newcomer to Newfoundland.

When Andrew Peacock made the move from Ontario to Newfoundland, he thought he was kicking off his career as a newly qualified vetenarian with an adventure in a temporary location. It was certainly an adventure, but there was nothing temporary about it. He practiced in Newfoundland for nearly 30 years and is still living there. In fact, he has lived there so long, the locals are starting to think of him as one of them.

Creatures of the Rock chronicles a career spent working with and getting to know a rich variety of animals and their owners, on farms, in homes and zoos, and in the wild. Andrew was the only vet for miles around. A day of practice could include anything from a Caesarian section on a cow in a blizzard to freeing a humpback whale from a trap designed for cod to capturing a polar bear after its surprise visit to a bingo parlor. And, on the human side, anything from trying to impress a surpringly large audience of farmers with your first boar castration, to taking care of a family just as well as its stricken cat, to discouraging farm hands from helping themselves to hypodermic needles. All this against the background of a domestic scene in which Andrews wife Ingrid—also freshly qualified, as a doctor—shares the adventure of making new life, and in due course of starting a family.

Told in a series of brief, endlessly engaging stories, Creatures of the Rock is a funny, thrilling, unflinching but ultimately heartwarming narrative about the connections between people and animals, and people with each other.