Tristan has a serious collision while driving the Rover, turning an urgent veterinary call into the destruction of Siegfried Farnon’s prized car and a test of the brothers’ already charged relationship. The crash is sudden, but its stakes have been set in advance: a milk-fever cow may die without prompt treatment, James Herriot’s car is unavailable, and the only remaining vehicle is one Siegfried has never trusted Tristan to drive.

The urgent call and reluctant permission

Siegfried is confined to bed with a fever when an urgent call arrives from Armitage of Sorton. A cow has milk fever, and Siegfried fears it could be dead within an hour. He orders Tristan to take James out immediately. The practical obstacle is that James’s car is in Hammond’s garage for a repair to its light, and the garage has no spare car to lend them. Tristan quietly points out the remaining possibility: the Rover.

The suggestion changes the crisis. Siegfried’s body stiffens beneath the blankets, and fear shows in his eyes; he struggles onto his side to address his brother. He agrees to the drive, but his permission comes with a threat: if Tristan scratches the car, he will kill him with his own hands. The warning makes the Rover more than transport. Its immaculate condition matters enough to Siegfried that he would rather threaten Tristan than conceal how little he trusts him with it.

Tristan withdraws in offended silence, but outside the room his mood reverses. He tells James that driving the Rover is a chance he never expected to get, and takes the opportunity as a stroke of luck. The contrast is immediate: Siegfried has surrendered the car only under pressure, while Tristan greets the same decision with delight. The veterinary emergency has put the brothers’ opposing attitudes toward the vehicle on a collision course before they have even left the yard.

The collision on the Sorton road

Five minutes later, Tristan backs carefully into the lane. Once on the Sorton road, however, he begins to enjoy the drive. For two miles the road ahead is straight and clear except for an approaching milk lorry. Settled into the Rover’s leather upholstery, he presses the accelerator; James realizes they are travelling at eighty miles an hour.

An old, high-built car begins overtaking the lorry. James expects it to pull back in, but it continues alongside; the lorry, which seems to be treating the manoeuvre as a race, also keeps moving forward. The two vehicles are soon abreast, bearing down on the Rover with no room to pass on either side. Tristan brakes. James hopes the lorry will brake too, leaving the other car space to dodge between them, but the approaching vehicles do not make way. With a head-on collision seeming unavoidable, James closes his eyes.

At the last moment he glimpses the alarmed face of the other driver. Something strikes the Rover’s left side with a rending crash. When James opens his eyes, the Rover has stopped; the road ahead is empty and quiet, and the milk lorry is already disappearing around a distant bend. Tristan’s face is green. The shock gives way to the material evidence of what happened: James feels a draught from the left, finds one door lying in the road and the other hanging from a broken hinge, and watches the hanging door fall onto the tarmac. The old car had swerved for the verge at the last second and ploughed into the Rover, leaving its left side twisted and its doors torn away.

The cow still needs treatment

Tristan first sits on the grass with a blank expression. The scale of the damage seems to numb him rather than provoke the panic that a mere scratch might have caused. Then he begins blinking, narrows his eyes, and reaches for his Woodbines. James reads the return of his quick, calculating attention in the gesture: Tristan is now considering what to do about the wrecked car and Siegfried’s threat. James mentally weighs three possibilities for him—leave Darrowby, take a train to Brawton and stay with his mother, or go back to Skeldale House and tell Siegfried what has happened.

The other driver offers the simple explanation that the sun got in his eyes. It is noon, and he has been driving due north, but James sees no point in arguing. The practical work takes precedence over blame. The two men lift the shattered doors from the road, put them inside the Rover, drive to Sorton, treat the cow with milk fever, and return to Darrowby. Even after a crash severe enough to destroy much of the vehicle’s left side, the call is completed: the emergency that prompted Siegfried’s order is not abandoned.

Siegfried’s reaction and the episode’s reversal

By the time Tristan returns, Siegfried is worse. His face is red with fever and his eyes burn in their sockets. He asks how the call went, then asks about the damage. Tristan reports that the front and rear wings are badly mangled and both doors on the left side have been torn off. The news produces a grotesque burst of energy: Siegfried bolts upright, the Thermogene coils coming loose and trailing around his head, and opens his mouth in a soundless scream. He then shouts that Tristan is sacked before collapsing back onto the pillow. The others wait for his breathing to resume, then leave quietly.

Outside the room, Tristan draws another Woodbine and describes the predicament as tricky, but returns to his habitual optimism: “Things usually turn out better than you expect.” The line follows a wrecked car and an immediate dismissal, so its confidence is comic rather than proof that the damage has disappeared. The sequence brings together the episode’s competing pressures: Siegfried’s urgent concern for a dying cow, his fierce attachment to the Rover, Tristan’s pleasure at being allowed to drive it, and the consequences of a dangerous encounter on the road. The crash does not stop the veterinary work, but it leaves Tristan to face the very response Siegfried’s threat had promised.