I have spent enough time around cattle and horses to know as soon as I saw the rack of test tubes and the artificial cow vagina what was expected of me.
“We have to get a semen sample out of him. Orders from on high,” the vet said.
“How do we do that?”
“That’s why I brought you in. Don’t you handle that at the stud farm?”
“With horses, yes. I don’t know anything about stoops.”
“I’m more of an ear mite and broken-bone man myself. They say he’s gentle with women.”
“I’m sure he is, right up until when I grab his kickstand. Then he’ll toss me through the window. It would help to have a female in estrus, don’t you know that?”
“Not to be had with his species. You’ll have to serve.”
“What?”
“I have it on good authority that Grogs aren’t that discriminating. One of the Maynes boys told me about a show in Chicago he saw—”
“I am not about to do a bump and grind for a Grog, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
I felt sorry for her and had sympathy for the vet. Orders had come down. . . .
The vet smeared some kind of clear jelly on his rubber glove and approached me from behind the cart with the loaf-sized artificial vagina. I noticed it had a little tap in it, like a hot-water bottle. I hoped they’d had enough sense to fill it with warm water rather than cold—or worse, hot.
“Don’t worry, sport.”
“Hick-ree,” I said.
“Oh yes, Hickory, that’s what they call you, isn’t it? Don’t worry, Hickory. This won’t hurt a bit.”
It occurred to me that I could wreck the office as soon as they touched me, but that wouldn’t fit in with the helpful and enthusiastic persona I used in my White Palace duties.
“Can’t you just send him into a bathroom with some pictures of a bunch of shaved female Grogs?” the woman said.
“While I wouldn’t doubt such things exist, I have no idea how to obtain them,” the vet said.
I can growl deep in my throat. The sound doesn’t carry very far, but if you are close enough to hear it, I understand it sounds menacing to a human.
The vet looked up at me.
“I told you. A woman is needed.”
She approached me and gave a becoming smile. “We both could use a couple beers to loosen us up, I think.”
I let her touch me, apply the gelatin, and did my best to indicate complacency by yawning.
The woman sighed. “You know, when they said I was needed at the White Palace, I had another kind of day pictured entirely. Maybe something involving a nice lunch?”
At least they had remembered to put warm water in the artificial vagina. She began to work the tube on me in the time-honored fashion.
“You know, he’s supposed to thrust into this. Bounce it around too much and we’ll lose the test tube,” she said. She smiled and blushed a little.
There are women—very few, but they know where to go for it—who enjoy our kind as sexual partners as a kinky thrill. And I have heard of human males copulating with Grog females—I believe it was an initiating rite for the men training to be officers of Grog units at the KZ War College in Jackson. There are men who enjoy seeing women, their own partners, even. It’s odd to be a living fetish totem. This woman didn’t seem the type; perhaps she was noting details for relating the story to friends when she returned to her horse farm.
I did my best to get the procedure over with as quickly as possible. It was a relief in several ways when she removed the apparatus.
“Okay, we got . . . Shit. We should have used a bigger test tube.”