Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men: Searching Through Scotland for a Border Collie

by Donald McCaig

  The good dogs glide toward their sheep, ignoring the workers, the pickup trucks and trailers. The sheep drift down the course with the dog on their heels.

  Ralph Pulfer steps up. He’s first to run in Open Class with his four-year-old bitch, Maid.

  My stomach feels like I’ve swallowed a brick.

  When I go back to Pip, he wriggles gladness. I sit beside him to calm him, but he’s calmer than I am. “What’s so different about today, Boss? We go out, get sheep, pop them in the pen, right?”

  Right.

  I walk him to loosen him up and give him a chance to void himself. He has a fine time, sniffing and peeing on every bush where other dogs have passed—quite the model of the stud Border Collie. Right now, I’d rather have a worker than a lover.

  I bring him to the edge of the course to watch another dog’s lift. When the sheep come out of the release pen, I say, “See sheep? See sheep?”

  You bet he does.

  My own big hat came from Houston, Texas, and a cowboy pal of mine gave me the silver concho hatband. I wear it for weddings, funerals, and sheepdog trials.

  As we wait I try to find my own center, but it eludes me. It seems very hot, and Pip scoots under the truck next to me. At the time, I thought he was just seeking shade, but later I realized he was afraid.

  The announcer calls my name, does some sort of introduction about my being a writer and so on. I don’t hear much of it. With Pip at my side I step onto the course. Until the dog brings the sheep to the pen, the handler must stay at the handler’s stake. If he leaves and goes to help his dog, he’ll be disqualified.

  I stand Pip beside my left leg, and though my mouth is dry, I manage to send him out. Pip’s quick, and he flies out in a fine, plain outrun. When he disappears in a dip, I put the whistle to my mouth to redirect him, but no need, he comes out fine, right on target.

  The big hat is awful damn heavy.

  Pip sails up nice behind his sheep but stops thirty yards short. Since you lose fewer points redirecting your dog than letting him persist in his mistake, I shout, “Get back!” and whistle him on. Thank God, he takes my commands, and the sheep come hell-for-leather. The fetch line is supposed to be straight, but no time to worry about that now, worry about Pip pushing them beyond me and off course. I command Pip to “Stand,” but he keeps on coming, full tilt. “Stand,” “Stand there!” “Pip! Lie down!”

  The sheep sail on, heedless, intent (I fear) on racing off course, and for our score: DQ—a fat zero. Too soon I flank him around, just as the sheep are slowing short of the handler’s stake. I look at the sheep, they look at me. They’re half tame, accustomed to men and dogs.

  Pip’s where he should be to start the drive, but he has arrived five seconds early, and the sheep turn below me instead of above. There’ll be points gone for that. The drive isn’t too bad—a little jerky—and the sheep go right through the panel, just like they should but, once more, I flank Pip too early, and he drives them back the way they’d come, undoing all the good he’d done. The sheep start across the course but break into a run, and I go blank. Pip stops and looks at me. “What now, Boss? What’s the plan?”

  When they are three-quarters the way to the final gates, I hook him around and, once again, Pip gets there faster than I had expected and turns the sheep before they have had a chance to go through the gates.

  The three sheep are panting as they come up the hill toward me and the pen. Pip’s tongue is hanging out a yard.

  We must get them penned. No pen, no points. There’s a line attached to the gate, and I wrap it tight around my hand. The sheep come on, Pip lies down, and the sheep are coming straight at me, ignoring the yawning gate of the pen. Now what? Now what?

  Once sheep start circling a pen, you start losing points, and it gets much harder to get them inside. The handler can’t touch the sheep at the pen, but it’s okay if they run into him. I drop into a goalie crouch right in front of the sheep. We are eyeball to eyeball, and I hiss at them like a furious goose.

  “Pip, get back!” Wonder of wonders, Pip does as he’s bid, and with the pressure relieved, the sheep slip into the pen and I bang the gate shut behind them.

  Pip is panting hard, and his eyes are wide. When he flops in the water tub, I slosh water over his back and neck. Already the next handler is at the stake, and his dog is running. I can hear the whistles.

  As the day wears on, the Big Hats post scores in the sixties and seventies. Pip and I have 48 points.

  We do beat Ralph Pulfer and Shep, but we haven’t earned the victory. The Scottish judge has just taught the American expert a lesson in manners.

  When Pip’s feeling better, I park him in the shade. “We fared right common, didn’t we partner?” He gives me a look. He doesn’t need me to know how badly we did.

  There’s a handler’s supper at Sunnybrook after everybody runs, so I return to the motel to clean up. I’m peeved at Pip for the short outrun. En route, I play Bruce Springsteen. Loud as I like.

  The farmhouse at Sunnybrook is a big, rambling sort of place. Most handlers eat outside on the porch. Stan Moore and Lewis Pulfer have had good runs and are pleased and modest. Some who have done poorly blame their dog or the judge. Most of the Big Hats talk about other trials, other runs.

  American handlers are eager to hear about doings in Scotland, and in the dining room, Viv Billingham holds court. Viv describes eminent dogs: Wiston Cap, Wilson’s Cap, McTeir’s Ben, Fingland Loos, Wilson’s Roy, Richardson’s Mirk, and Sweep … and the shepherds who showed these dogs their life’s work and enjoyed a man/dog conversation of subtlety and power. Viv speaks about last year’s International, the most important sheepdog trial in the world, where, on the final day, the dog works so terribly far from his shepherd. She tells us about men we know only because we’ve seen the dogs they’ve exported. We rich Americans are as curious about poor shepherds and their dogs as soap opera fans are about the stars of their favorite shows. We want to know everything. Of her own success, Viv says only, “Over there they say Garry made me. I don’t mind them saying it. I owe Garry more than I can ever pay.”

  She also says, “It takes great courage for a dog to get out there and do his best before strangers. When a handler does a poor job, he makes a fool of his dog. Don’t think the dog doesn’t know it.”

  Later, outside, handlers describe good runs and joke about spectacularly bad ones. Wives chat. Kids play together. A big smiling handler starts to tell how his Missy dog wandered onto the highway, but he can’t finish and turns away so nobody can see his tears.

  Later, they show a videotape of “One Man and His Dog” in the living room. Still later, when most folks have gone off to bed, you can hear a couple of disappointed handlers, drunk, still working their dogs down by the old red barn.

  Back at the motel, when I cut my car lights, Pip’s face is peering through the curtains, waiting.

  The second day of the trials they changed the running order, but it made no difference to me and Pip. When I brought him out on the course, he crouched like a feral creature, a fox caught suddenly in the headlights, and it was trouble the moment I set him off. I lacked confidence in him and he in me. Soon he decided to take matters into his own hands. I wrestled him around the course with shouts and bellows. Twice he tried to nip, but both times I shouted him off. We avoided DQ, by a hair. After the pen, he was so disgusted he didn’t wait for me but took off for the cooling tubs on his own.

  As the final runs were made, clouds were building in the east. Stan Moore slipped in the standings. Lewis Pulfer and Moss turned in an elegant run. Lewis’s whistles were so quiet I wondered Moss could hear them.

  Afterward, the handlers and dogs gathered while Viv Billingham awarded trophies. First: Lewis Pulfer with Moss. Second: Bruce Fogt and Hope. Third: Tom Conn with Rod. Of forty entries, Pip and I were twenty-fifth. Dogs sniffed their sniffs. Handlers made plans for trials farther down the road.

  Before I got in the car, I spoke to the judge. She said, “Yester
day, when that dog of yours seemed to be stopping short on the outrun, he wasn’t short. He was correct. The sheep were facing him, you see, and if you hadn’t shouted him on, they would have lifted off straight and easy.”

  Oh.

  It was raining pretty hard by the time we hit the interstate. Rain drummed on the roof of the car, and Pip lay on the front seat, his head turned to the door.

  “Better luck next time,” I said.

  Pip was so mad he wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t meet my eyes for three days.

  2

  The Only Proper Training for a Sheepdog Is the Hill

  Three of the next four winters were mild. Thanks to my wife’s hard work, our sheep flock flourished. I renovated an old orchard, and that year our firewood was aromatic of apple trees planted before I was born. I replaced the rotting timbers under our barn with new twelve-by-twelves. Pip and I got older. I decided to go to Scotland.

  I was incurious about the place.

  Many Americans boast about their Scottish roots, trace genealogical connections to this savage sept, that barbarous clan. In summer months, crowds of Americans travel hundreds of miles to gather in some hot meadow with like-minded souls for Scottish games: ox-shaped worthies heaving immature telephone poles, folk dancers prancing nervously around claymores (the swords Scots used after more sensible fighters switched to firearms), and amateur bagpipers caterwauling. Some Americans, I am told, don kilts for these festive gatherings.

  The Scots do make good whiskey. In Bobby Burns, they had a great poet, but I’ve never drunk enough whiskey to understand him. They breed and train the best sheepdogs in the world.

  My father’s father was a Scottish Catholic, a granite cutter and IWW radical who was middle aged when he contracted silicosis. As he weakened, he scooted his wife and three kids from kin to kin across the High Line (the United States-Canadian border). He’d park his family with more prosperous relatives while he looked for work. (“Just until spring, Jess. In the spring, you’ll all have to go.”)

  The richer kinfolks lost patience quicker than the poor ones did, and during my grandfather’s last months, the family squatted with his wife’s sister on a hardscrabble waterless homestead carved out of a Montana Indian reservation. To his dying day my father hated potatoes. That winter, potatoes were what they’d had to eat.

  In 1971, when I quit my advertising job in New York City and moved to a rundown Appalachian farm, my father was sick about it. After all, he’d boosted his family into the middle class, given both his kids college educations. I suppose he’d thought us safe, a long way from that dirt-roof soddy and the bitter smell of the other people’s laundry his mother had to wash.

  “Why,” my father asked, “are you throwing it all away?”

  In my father’s papers, after his death, I found a letter he’d written when he was a boy. It was directed to his mother’s mother, who had a small house in Great Falls.

  Millet, Alta.

  Aug. 30, 1915

  Dear Grandma,

  School starts today but Bob and I aren’t going. I will be glad when we leave this place and see papa. We pray for you every night. We are going to have a surprise party on Bob for his birthday. We have went to two children’s parties. I wish you were with us.

  Your loving grandson,

  Donald McCaig

  The boy’s letter was written on the back of a letter his father had written to his wife. Since, inevitably, both letters would be seen by the grandmother, it’s hard to puzzle out the dynamic. Presumably, the boy’s mother wanted the grandmother to know how desperate they were.

  give her no chance to refuse. I wish we could get to Denver this fall then I could work and you keep house. Don’t fret about Alice. [His sister, Alice, had a state job in Denver.] Your going to Denver will never put her in bankruptcy and she writes a good many of those hard luck letters. I think mamma so you won’t expect anything of her. I don’t doubt she has been sick but she can’t get along for ½ year on nothing and you wont cost her any thing and if I don’t get that far there are lots of ways you could help her. and she knows it.

  No biographers puzzle over the strategies that characterized these unsuccessful lives. My family was too poor to be interesting. The McCaigs came to Canada sometime before 1840. I figured: If this hell was what they immigrated to, what hell was Scotland, where they’d emigrated from?

  Our farm was lovely that February. We had extra cords of firewood and the pipes didn’t freeze. Though it stayed fairly cold, we had only light dustings of snow. The farm lies between the Shenandoah and Bull Pasture mountains and they’re steep enough you can’t see their tops unless you’re standing in our frozen hay-fields in the middle of the valley. Our near neighbors are two miles down the valley, and on frosty mornings, I’d hear their coon dogs yelp.

  But sometimes, as I walked through the stick trees of the winter orchard, I’d be discontented. Those footprints in the snow: those were Pip’s; those, the rabbit’s who lived under the brushpile; those, my own, made just yesterday. I’d wave at a neighbor driving by: Red Wright. I remembered when Red bought that blue Chevrolet.

  At eight years old, Pip was getting past it. The dog who’d once been too quick needed cunning to catch young ewes. The dog who’d jumped every fence on the farm now waited patiently for me to open gates for him.

  Me, I’d got older and just wiser enough so it hurt. I’d made stupid, willful mistakes training Pip and my blunders showed every time Pip ran out on the trial field. Because I’d urgently wanted control of a keen young dog, I’d downed him each time I was unsure and destroyed his natural rhythm, created that clappiness that upset the sheep. I’d trained his flanks (“Go right, go left”) in a big field without sheep. Consequently, now, when I asked him to make a “blind” outrun—no sheep in sight—he wouldn’t: He circles my legs, anger and confusion warring in his brown eyes.

  The miracle is that Pip worked at all—that we had any instants of clarity. With a better trainer he would have made one hell of a sheepdog.

  I was like a middle-aged man, looking back at my marriage, knowing I could not undo what I had done, not the least part of it, yearning for the impossible: to start over fresh.

  I thought to make a pilgrimage. Three months in a foreign land, filled with dog trainers whose routine work is completely beyond anything we can do here in the States. Shepherds and farmers who somehow create dogs who are achingly beautiful. I would sit at their feet. I would find a young bitch and bring her back with me. I would begin again.

  I wrote Viv Billingham: How are things?

  I hear you quit the duke of Roxburgh and moved to a new place. Do you like it? How’s husband, Geoff? Geoff, Junior? Are there any good young bitches for sale? I’m coming over in April.

  Viv never answered. I wrote to Barbara Carpenter, president of the British Border Collie Club. She wrote back: Pastor’s Hill House lay between London and Scotland and she’d welcome a visit.

  I should probably add that I’m a terrible traveler: don’t care for airports, airplanes, unfamiliar roads. Away from home I get fretful and discouraged. I hate to be a stranger.

  Friday, April 23, 6:35 P.M. Greenwich time, a travel-goofy, nervous American honked out of Heathrow Airport in a red Ford Fiesta that had its steering wheel and gearshift lever on the wrong side. My luggage rode in the back seat, heaped in the clamshell halves of the dog kennel I hoped my young bitch would use, if and when I found her.

  My prayer: I’d know her when I saw her. I had a thousand pounds to spend and three months to search Scotland before my wife wearied of caring for a 300-acre farm and 150 ewes without my help. That night, on the M3 motorway, my wife seemed close. So did the hospital.

  That Friday was a bank holiday and, in Britain, when banks go on holiday, everybody else goes too. The motorway was bumper to bumper with merry souls. I cowered in the far left lane among the grocers’ lorries and caravans (travel trailers), while bolder motorists jetted by on the right at ninety and a hundred miles an h
our. Britons are an extraordinarily warlike people. Hell, they conquered most of the world. Why did I expect namby-pambies on the motorway? Big, smooth sports cars passed me. Junkers, crammed with drunk kids, passed, too. If my great grandmother hadn’t been dead, no doubt she’d have passed as well.

  From time to time there’d be a police pulloff, but I never once saw a cop. Perhaps the police go on holiday along with everybody else. It was a jolly throng.

  Blurry with jet lag, I anguished over the simplest decisions: Time to stop for gas? Dare I chance a faster lane? American diplomats frequently brag of visiting four countries in as many days while enacting treaties that affect life and death. Henry Kissinger nicknamed his jetlag “Shuttle Diplomacy.”

  It got gray, then dark. The traffic thinned as holidaymakers peeled off for their rural retreats. Across the Severn River Bridge, I exited the motorway into black countryside. Briefly the road was two lanes before it shrank to one lane and shriveled further. Tremendous trees edged closer to the road until they clamped fast with thick overhead branches interlaced against the night sky. Brute stone walls shouldered into the verge. The road adopted a six-inch curb, which I’d smack every time I met oncoming traffic. I’d strike, bounce into the air, and barely regain control. No, I’d told the car-rental girl, I didn’t want the optional collision insurance.

  “But it’s just two pounds, seventy a day, sir.”

  Farmhouses, dark. Villages, dark. I supposed, if I lost the faint thread of Mrs. Carpenter’s directions, I could sleep in the car. I’d hate that.

  The streets in Bream were plenty wide for a horse and rider, even a fat horse and rider. I squiggled between stone buildings, figuring that if my right-hand mirror didn’t get knocked off, my left mirror could take care of itself. I comforted myself that no other car had ever got stuck. If a car had got stuck, it’d still be here.