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

by Donald McCaig

  Most Scottish farm lands are owned by great estates: ducal, royal, or commercial syndicates. They lease the hill farms and arable (crop) farms to tenant farmers who have quite a few rights under the law. As long as they aren’t harming the property and pay their rents, the tenants cannot be evicted. Their shepherds are lower on the economic scale. Typically, a shepherd gets a salary, a cottage, and some kennel space in an old byre (barn) for his dogs. Sometimes he is allowed to run a few sheep or cows with the farm’s own livestock. When a shepherd loses his job, he also loses his home. “We could have gone on the dole,” Geoff says sadly, “I suppose we could have moved into council [public] housing. But what would we have done with the dogs?”

  There was Holly and Glen, Cap, Garry, and Lucy, Laddie and the puppies: What to do with them all? And giving up the living dogs would be abandoning the others too: Garry’s brother Tweed, who was only two years old when he died in Geoff’s arms. In the dead of winter, they’d wrapped Tweed in his blue blanket and buried him in the lee of a stone wall. “I think of Tweed now,” Viv has written. “Lying in the shadows, his bright eyes like pools of amber light, soul searching, watching the ewes on the hill. …”

  The Border Collie and Shepherding Centre was Viv’s dream. They’d put on sheepdog demonstrations for coachloads of tourists, explain the shepherd’s art, sell Border Collie books and postcards and shepherd’s crooks and—this was the good bit—they could keep sheep of their own, breed and train sheepdogs. Viv would have more time to write, and Geoff could do the stick dressing (carving and shaping fancy crooks) he enjoyed.

  Above the Tweed was a green schoolhouse they’d refurbish as a shepherding museum and souvenir shop, and across the river—so tiny here it held only salmon fingerlings—was the Billinghams’ cottage, a whitewashed stable and an ancient stone structure once a drover’s inn. The stable would kennel the dogs, and the drover’s inn would become a Bed and Breakfast upstairs and, downstairs, a bothy (shepherd’s quarters). Viv joked that when Geoff was past it, they’d just sit him in the bothy with a sign round his neck: “SHEPHERD.”

  Viv obtained a grant from the Scottish Tourist Board and a loan from a temporary bank manager. (When the permanent manager was installed, he told Viv he never would have approved the loan.)

  That first winter, their water pump froze, and they had to haul water in buckets to the cottage to wash up and cook and flush the WC. That spring, broke, they rented out their own bedroom to travelers and slept on the livingroom floor.

  Tourist coaches stopped that summer to see Viv work her marvelous dogs and maybe buy a book or a couple of postcards. One coach—full of Dutch farmers—ordered lunch in advance, and Viv and Geoff and Geoff, Junior, made a hundred ham sandwiches and had gallons of hot water ready for tea. When the coach arrived, the tourists expected something more, a real sit-down restaurant; so no, they didn’t want lunch after all, they’d eat in Moffat. And they wouldn’t stop talking while Viv was demonstrating Garry.

  “I suppose they were grain farmers,” Geoff said. “Not keen on the dogs. It took us weeks to eat those bloody ham sandwiches.”

  There is nothing snugger than a country pub’s fire on a bitter evening, nothing more deceptive.

  Viv chattered about Holly, how clever she was, how she’d mother anything: lambs, kittens, ducklings, anything. “God gave me Holly,” she said. After a moment Viv grinned like a little girl.

  A pair of shepherds at the bar chatted up the barmaid. The fireback was tall and shallow and the heat rolled over us. I hadn’t realized how chilled I’d been.

  Geoff spoke about Jan, the bitch they’d nicknamed the Bionic Bitch because she could do anything. She could turn on a dime, Jan could, and once won three trials in a single glorious weekend. Dead on the operating table. “That bloody vet,” Geoff said. He looked away, stood, asked if I wanted another.

  Viv talked about dog honesty, how Garry would never cheat her when he was out of sight, though he might when he was near—just for a joke.

  Geoff coughed, set the drinks on the table. “Donald, I’m very much afraid you’d be uncomfortable. We’re in a mess. But, if you’d like, you could stay with us.”

  And Viv added, “That’d be lovely,” and I thought so, too. For a second time, in this foreign land, I’d found a home.

  That night I slept cramped on the sitting-room couch. The next night I pulled the cushions onto the floor. When the sitting-room fire died after midnight, I drew my coat over the blanket Viv had provided. I had no complaints—this was the warmest room, the only fire in the house. Come morning we’d all gather in the kitchen: sweaters, down vests, for morning tea.

  Holly, Laddie, and Garry slept in the kitchen, and, spotting me for a soft touch, they’d all come over for a pat. I missed my Pip. Holly seemed just the sort of bitch I’d come here for. A smooth-coated two year old, quick but sensible. Strong enough to handle the heavy, bored tups Viv uses for her sheepdog demonstrations, and clever with the stroppy Scottish Blackface ewes who can be very tough protecting their new lambs. When the ewe stamps and threatens, Holly holds her ground, but turns her head, modestly, thus reducing pressure on the ewe. As soon as the ewe relaxes and backs, Holly snaps to and comes on again. It’s the same pressure a constable uses on a belligerent drunk. “Would you please get in the car, sir? Yes, sir, in the back.”

  I can’t make an offer for Holly. How can I buy a gift from God? Viv prattles on about fine bitches, splendid bitches: Viv’s got fifteen hundred pounds in hand from an American who wants a bitch just like Doug Lamb’s Suzy. Viv’s gossip is like praising married women to a lonesome bachelor.

  The Scottish Borders are the same latitude as Newfoundland, and when we went out I was glad of my long Johns and gloves. Geoff wore a torn tweed jacket over his insulated coveralls. Tweedhope is on the brow of a bluff above grazing fields, outlined in broken drystane dykes, cut by the meanderings of the sparkling burns that are here making up the Tweed. I’d follow Geoff on his shepherding rounds. In our green rubber wellies we’d splash through the burns, checking each newborn lamb. Geoff’d pick it up to pat its full belly, “That’s all right, old girl, I’ll not harm him,” and when mother and lamb had got separated (some of the burns were too deep for the lambs to swim), he’d join them back together. Brilliant mosses swirled in the streambeds, oyster catchers and curlews called from the banks. The mists hung above us like theater scrims and the light shimmered. Geoff’s young dog, Cap, swirled in and out of the fog. The decision to become a shepherd is an aesthetic decision.

  When we went back into the cottage for morning tea, we’d sit across from each other and take our blood-pressure pills, grimacing like kids.

  Although Geoff is noted as a dog trainer, in a nation of superb dog men, nothing I see him do, day in and day out, remotely resembles what Americans call “dog training.” Training is where you get the dog to do what you want him to, right? When he does wrong you scold him, when he does right you give him a pat or a treat, right? A well-trained dog obeys every command despite his own inclinations, otherwise what’s the point?

  A couple years ago, a dairyman in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley had a fine young Border Collie, keen as blazes. Since the young dog was often underfoot, the dairyman trained the dog to a “Stay!” so he could go about his chores unhampered. Twice a day he’d send the dog for his cows and after the cows were in the milking parlor he’d point at a patch of cool shade: “Lie down. Stay! You STAY!” One hot August afternoon, the dairyman was working his Holsteins, routine worming, through his cattle chutes. When he shooed his cows out of the pens they came out fast and hard, right over the dog, who never budged from where he’d been told to STAY. The dog was killed, the dairyman was overcome with remorse. He’d never, he vowed, train a dog so well again.

  The Scots would say he hadn’t trained the dog at all. “The only proper training for a sheepdog is the Hill.”

  The earliest account of sheepdog training is James Hogg’s. His dog Sirrah “was scarcely then a year old, an
d knew so little of herding, that he had never turned sheep in his life; but as soon as he discovered that it was his duty to do so, and that it obliged me, I can never forget with what anxiety and eagerness he learned his different evolutions. He would try every way deliberately, till he found out what I wanted him to do; and once I made him understand a direction, he never forgot or mistook it again. Well as I knew him, he very often astonished me, for when hard pressed in accomplishing his task, he had expedients of the moment that bespoke a great share of the reasoning faculty.”

  It is the job of the dog trainer to summon the dog’s genetics, not to impose man’s will over dog’s. It may be worth noting that many Scottish hill dogs never know the weight of a collar round their neck.

  Sometimes when Geoff goes shepherding, he brings a novice dog along with Cap. The young dog rushes about, trying to understand his life’s work and Geoff, without interrupting his tasks, shows it to him. If the dog goes wrong, Geoff tells him. He doesn’t pat him or give him treats. “Training unrelated to a sensible way of working sheep makes dogs hot,” Geoff says.

  Here’s a story about Jimmy Wilson and his grand bitch Peg. Peg is getting on now in years, she’s nine, but has been on the Scottish team many times. Jimmy shepherds a great hill in the Borders and days go by where he sees more of Peg than his wife. Jimmy is a gentle man but nobody has ever seen him give Peg a pat. Other handlers will pat a dog when they come off the trial field, it’s almost custom, but Jimmy never pats Peg. One afternoon, in the beer tent, some of the other Scots were ragging Jimmy about this: and the mild man looked up with a quiet smile, “Why, do you think Peg doesn’t know what I think of her?” he asked.

  Many Americans confuse training with taking commands. They ask: “How many commands will a Border Collie learn?”

  Probably as many as the space shuttle. As many as the United States Marine Corps Drill Team.

  When I show Pip off for farm visitors, what they applaud are his turns and stops. That’s because they compare dogs to cars and fear loss of control.

  Our American method of pet dog training is designed to be context free: The dog should heel though the skies are bright with Armageddon; the dog should recall though the owner means to have him put down the moment he gets his hands on him. The presumption of this training is that dogs are willful and stupid and, no doubt, some are.

  One woman I know, seeing the Border Collie Mike doing stunts in the movie “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” told me, “I could train my dog to do those tricks in two weeks.”

  Just so. But not on a movie set.

  The trainer Tony Illey has said, “The most difficult thing I ever saw a dog do was bring a ewe who’d just lost her lamb through a field full of lambing ewes.”

  Let me offer a gloss: Ewes with new lambs are extremely protective of their lambs and often charge a dog. When they lose sight of their lamb, they assume the dog has killed it, and despite his teeth will try determinedly to trample him. A ewe who’s lost her lamb will rush back and forth seeking it, bleating to other newborn lambs trying to collect one. The other mothers are confused by this, and when the dog gets near them they, too, go on the attack.

  Unlike Tony Illey, I don’t think what this dog did was difficult. It was impossible. Knowing that the dog can read sheep better than any man and can react much quicker than any man, what commands would you give him?

  Correct answer: his name.

  The third evening at Tweedhope, out in the fields with Geoff, Cap came over and jumped up for a head scratch. In case I didn’t get it (Cap thinks I’m a bit dim), forty minutes later he repeated his greeting. I am quite sure he’ll not jump up again, now that he’s recognized me as part of his world.

  The Billinghams’ life had no need for another pair of hands. I cooked a little, washed up, helped Geoff drag lath and broken plaster out of the drover’s inn, and when Viv took Holly to London, for an appearance on the BBC’s animal program “Caterpillar Trail,” I drove them into Edinburgh for the train. Viv was dressed in her TV outfit, quite excited. Holly roamed about Waverly station. When she trotted up to a young couple to say hello, they snubbed her. Brutes.

  That evening, after Geoff, Junior, was off to bed, his father and I sat by the fire, talked about men, dogs, landscape, more dogs. Geoff told about a big trial he was winning, last year, until thirteen dogs from the last, a handler keeled over and died. “What had been a very good day became a very bad day,” Geoff said. After a moment, he added, “I was very sorry to see him go.” After another moment, he said, “He might have waited thirteen more dogs.”

  I guess I missed my own dogs. I spoke of Pip, all the mistakes I’d made training him. If he hadn’t been a better dog than I was a man, I wouldn’t be here today. Because of me, he’d never be truly beautiful. I regretted that.

  Geoff looked into the fire. Took a sip of whiskey.

  “You can’t be a dog trainer until you’ve had regrets. Sometimes I think most of it is regrets.” I had to strain to hear Geoff’s soft voice. “Jan and that bloody stupid vet. If I hadn’t left her with him. I told him what was wrong, you see, and I trusted him. And Tweed, working him so long in the snow. We hadn’t been able to get him his vaccination. It was blizzarding, you see, and we couldn’t get out.” Geoff Billingham sat with his hands in his lap, a gangling aristocrat in a straightback chair, seeing Tweed’s amber eyes, the relentless drifting snow. “I sometimes think … when I’m on my deathbed … they’ll come back. All the dogs I’ve trained will come filing by.”

  3

  The Greatest Sheepdog Handler Since J. M. Wilson

  It was one of those rare days when you think you just might get away with it. Spring in the Scottish Lowlands. Along the roadsides, a few brave daffodils were showing their colors and the sun was bright but not warm. In the Highlands, to the north of us, shepherds were still lambing, but that work was finished here, and foolish fat lambs bounced through the fields, baaing after their moms.

  The Neilston Sheepdog Trial is the first of the season.

  Geoff Billingham was driving. Viv leaned over the front seat, and I sat beside Geoff as navigator. We were lost.

  “We should have kept to the motorway,” Viv said.

  “Donald will guide us,” Geoff said, showing a confidence in me thus far unjustified. Geoff Billingham is one of nature’s gentlemen.

  I said we should turn around. We should have turned at Strathaven. When Geoff stopped the car, the dogs thumped around in the boot, rearranging themselves. “There’s no hurry, Geoff,” Viv said. “I’m not running Laddie.”

  Laddie is Garry’s son, with the power but not the raw force of his father, and Viv had high hopes for Laddie on the trial field. Laddie did well, too, until he contracted demodectic mange in his feet, and last year, when the poor beast came off the course at the Scottish National, his feet were bloody.

  Viv thought he’d heal over the winter and had entered him in the spring trials, but Laddie’s feet never got right. Every time tender-footed Laddie needed to cross the gravel path outside the Billinghams’ cottage, Viv picked him up and carried him across. Viv is a slight woman. Laddie weighs forty-five pounds.

  Once we were back on the proper road, Geoff and Viv speculated happily about friends they might see at this trial, shepherds they hadn’t talked to since the International last fall. I asked Geoff if Jock Richardson was likely to be there.

  “Well, he does live near,” Geoff said. “He’s in council housing in Hamilton. But Jock can’t drive, you know. They took his license.”

  All the great sheepdog men, like Jock Richardson, were shepherds or farmers, like John Templeton, who have learned and practiced the shepherd’s art.

  Sheep rearing in Scotland depends on the habits of sheep. Since this is the reverse of the dominant pattern in American agribusiness, which strains to accommodate animals to the requirements of marketing and machines, this point bears repeating: in Scotland, men adapt themselves to the sheep.

  Unless she is physically preven
ted from doing so, a ewe will return to the same spot where she was lambed in order to have her own lamb. Since ewes and lambs are left together to graze the high barren hill, they form small groups called hirsels. Think of them as subflocks. A hill may support a thousand ewes, but they’ll stay in five or six hirsels, which remain in distinct geographic areas. When gathered into the greater flock for shearing or dipping, the sheep, when released, will sort themselves back into their original hirsels. Think of this as a sheep homing instinct.

  So important is this instinct (it has no value in American agribusiness) that Scottish sheep are legally “bound” to the land. If you wish to buy a farm, you must buy the livestock already on it. If you bought a farm and stocked it with strange sheep, your new sheep would drift hither and thither, across the boundary lines, onto the next farm, where they’d mingle with a neighbor’s flock and cause no end of difficulties.

  More sheep habits: Sheep graze uphill in the evening and downhill in the morning. When startled, they flock together rather than fighting or fleeing individually. They are quite able to distinguish predators and decide which are harmful and which are less so. They rate men and skilled sheepdogs among the less frightening predators, and some dogs have a settling effect on nervous sheep. (An inexperienced sheepdog or feral dog sends sheep into a blind panic.)

  In the States, sheep are brought into corrals and chutes for work. In Scotland, except for shearing, dipping, and lamb sales, the sheep stay on the Hill. The shepherd goes to the sheep.

  The shepherd strides up the great hill (every morning during lambing) with his crook and his kitbag of necessities (antibiotics and other medicines, perhaps a lamb reviver) dangling from his shoulder. He is accompanied only by his dogs. Among the sheep, indifferent to all but the wildest weather, he must be herdsman, veterinarian, and midwife. On the spot he decides whether a ewe needs help lambing and, if so, performs obstetrics.