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

by Donald McCaig

  Perry MacKenzie is a ruddy-faced man with a double chin and a proprietor’s manner. His handshake is brusque. “What sort of dogs de ye prefer?” he asks, right off.

  I mutter something about dogs that think for themselves. I have no use, I say, for dogs that need commanding all the time.

  Perry MacKenzie’s nod means I’m over the first hurdle. “Won’t ye come in? The wife has fixed tea.”

  We stand, rather awkwardly, in Mrs. MacKenzie’s tidy parlor while she sets the dining-room table. Perry MacKenzie needs no prompting to launch into an account of Don’s greatest trials. Though Perry doesn’t really have words to describe those moments, clearly he sees them himself: “Steady Don,” Perry says, crouched beside the settee, his hand guiding his envisioned dog around the handler’s post, “Steady, Lad. …” Then, at the shedding ring there’s this one ewe, frightened, she pushes herself in amongst the others, buries herself and she’s the one they must have. Perry MacKenzie takes a step past the end table, points, “This yin!” And, damned if I don’t see it too, as Don flashes in, a blur of black and tan, and singles the ewe.

  We have cold gammon and a salad, which contains bananas, tomatoes, raisins, and lettuce. So far north, I cannot think where they’ve found this produce. The salad is in my honor. Scots don’t care for them.

  When John Angus MacLeod first saw MacKenzie’s Don, he told Perry Don would have a fair shot at the International, but it’d be hellish to get him qualified. Don had worked the great empty hills behind Old Shore; smaller trial courses would be difficult for such a wide-running dog.

  After tea, a genial Perry MacKenzie takes Don out. His ewes are on the Hill (six thousand acres of tundra), but he’s got tups near. Don flashes out over the paddocks and fetches them into a small fenced lot.

  The bright blue sky, the pale northern sun: It’s cold here in the early afternoon. Don and his son, Vick, push the sheep from one side, Gael presses them from the other. Perry compresses his tups like a man compressing a spring. “Get up Lassie, get up.” And the wee bitch steps near, nearer, and the tups are head down, pawing, ready to charge. Gael is well inside the line where they’ll fight her.

  “Don’t you think that’s good enough?” I ask.

  “Get up, Lass. Nothing to worry about. No MacKenzie’s Don bitch ever gripped a sheep.”

  I don’t give a damn for the sheep. Those huge tups could flatten the wee bitch into a welcome mat. Gael takes MacKenzie’s commands gladly. She’s ready for stronger direction than I can give her.

  And that’s how grown men and fine dogs spend a few hours, shifting reluctant sheep here and there under the subarctic sun. When I say I must be going, Perry MacKenzie says I could leave the wee bitch if I wished to and laughs and says what a great pleasure it has been.

  That night, I stopped in the fishing village of Helmsdale. Helmsdale was quiet. Narrow cobbled streets, fishing docks. Down by the docks, I let Gael off lead so she could run around and sniff.

  The elderly woman who owned the B & B took to Gael right away. “Oh, she thinks weel o’ herself.”

  “She does.”

  Perhaps my bedroom had been her daughter’s, perhaps her own before her husband died. There was no surface in the room without a souvenir plate or doily or knickknack. Gael jumped right onto the bed and plumped herself down.

  The restaurant I found was unprepossessing but good. The seafood was fresh, cooked simply, and I had a glass of wine with my meal. It was in celebration. I hoped my wife would like Gael. Tomorrow, I’d turn my car south for London and the long flight to America.

  My farm is in an Appalachian county that, like Scotland, has fewer citizens than it once had. In 1900, the county’s population was 5,400. There are fewer than 2,600 souls today. Those who left come home for the church homecomings and family reunions and the county fair and hunting season. “I’m kin to old Joe Lockridge, remember Joe?” “I grew up on the Hiner place, down on Muddy Run.” Those who stayed in the county were the fortunate, the slightly prosperous, the stubborn, the less visionary, the eldest sons.

  My ancestors left Scottish shores how many generations ago? Perhaps they stood with Charlie at Culloden. Perhaps they resisted Charlie’s call but were sold out by their own chieftains during the Clearances.

  The McCaigs left the Highlands not because they wanted to, but because they were starving. And when they went to Glasgow or Edinburgh, they starved there, too. Their sins were being born poor, being unlucky.

  Immigration is sadness on both sides of the ocean.

  Gael was the immigrant now. I hoped she’d like her new home, new purposes, new climate.

  I walked slowly back through Helmsdale’s quiet streets.

  When I opened the door to my room, the wee bitch was plopped on the middle of the bed with a toy sheep in her mouth. Just a scrap of wool, the toy had buttons for eyes. I put the red ribbon back around its damp neck and returned it to the dresser, where Gael had deftly extracted it from among the porcelain knicknacks.

  When I pulled back the coverlet, the bonny wee bitch marched toward me and I flipped the coverlet at her and she batted it down. Again I flipped it, again she batted it. She was grinning. She pranced. When I got into bed, she dropped beside me and flipped onto her back and wriggled and said, “Arrrrr.” I scratched her sweet pink belly. I wished I was a dog.

  7

  Pip’s Welcome Home

  It was getting dark when we clattered down the lane to our farmhouse. My wife, Anne, was driving. Gael lay quietly at my feet where she’d been since we left Dulles Airport.

  As we unpacked the car, Pip came out to see what was going on but he didn’t jump up or carry on or anything. He eyed me strangely and I think he was trying to figure out how long I’d been gone. He barked, once. He went over to make his acquaintance with the wee bitch.

  The next morning, early, I took both dogs to the orchard for a walk. Except for a narrow path, the grass was quite tall and, suddenly, Pip shot off and vanished, ignoring my whistles and calls. Some dog handler, eh?

  Annoyed, I continued along for ten minutes or so until I heard a low rumble, a drumming noise, and over the rise came our sheep, all 120 of them and behind came Pip, balancing nicely. I don’t know how he found them, the grass was taller than his head.

  I laid Gael down and told Pip, that’ll do, here, and he came readily to my feet. His tongue was lolling out and he was grinning.

  “You already got a good dog, Boss. What do we need another dog for?”

  8

  John Angus and the Buffalo

  In September I returned to Scotland for the International. There was nobody waiting for me at Crainlarach. As the night sleeper from London pulled out, I was left alone on the platform, scrubbed dark by last night’s rain. In Scotland, the distinction between public and private is not absolute, and someone had planted red and orange flowers in a wooden tub beside the Scotrail underpass. The roofs of Crainlarach village lay across the tracks, below.

  Crainlarach is a popular terminus for hill walkers, but mid-September, when the heather is rust and lavender on the hills, is late for their vigorous enthusiasms.

  A workman backed a repair engine onto a siding. An old man—he was lean enough to be a hill shepherd—trundled his bicycle into the underpass. He carried an oversized bindle (homeless?) perched across the handlebars.

  Highland hills can be aloof and forbidding, but the slopes above the village were mild, almost feminine. The specks way up near the top—those were sheep.

  The old man bumped his bicycle onto the platform and went back into the underpass for his bindle. “Good morning,” I said. He kept his own counsel.

  The station tearoom had a sign: No Rucksacks, Please! Inside, the walls were tongue and groove, and all the tables lined up side by side like a dining car. The poster of the huffing steam locomotive over the serving counter was for sale: two pounds. No, the scones weren’t ready yet. Yes, I could have a cup of white coffee. The menu offered the breakfast special: sausage, eggs,
bacon, toast, juice, and coffee, just one pound, ninety. Scotland has one of the higher heart disease rates in Europe.

  I sat on my suitcase outside. A stocky young man hurried up the stairs and examined me with his working eye—the other was fish-belly white. “What time is it?”

  I said. His clothes were fresh, but his skin was day-old.

  “Eight in the morning or eight at night?”

  “Morning.”

  “Oh, thank Jesus! Tell me, have you seen a bunch of navvies about? Workmen?”

  I told him about the repair engine, but he didn’t seem interested. He asked what day it was.

  “Christ,” he said. “The bastards gone off without me.” He noted, “It was the drink,” and disappeared down the stairs pursuing his job.

  It was not so much longer before John Angus MacLeod arrived, shook my hand, and said, “Hello, Donald. Good to see you again.” He complained that they’d moved the car park since last he’d come here and he’d returned home last night from the Grampian Sheepdog Trials (the television trials) and raced to Blair Atholl to walk the big course, which was hellish. “Donald, the bloody thing is flat as a pancake.”

  The one-eyed man came up and said to me, “If I knew you were waiting for him, I’d have stayed talking to you longer.”

  John Angus’s car is a Renault DS, a touring sedan, which passes the MOT (vehicle inspection) with luck. The car has electric windows and door locks and a five-speed transmission, and the elaborate tachometer is centered on the dash. Under feed sacks and tatty rain gear, the upholstery may be genuine broadcloth. The rear package shelf has been backwards hinged, in a manner its designers never anticipated, by dogs traveling in the boot (trunk), who, from time to time, push their heads up to get a look where they’re going. The car smells, not unpleasantly, of pipe tobacco.

  John Angus is uncomfortable with machines and drives poorly, lugging the big sedan up the grades, ignoring the tachometer.

  Thirty-five years ago, the London Daily Mail sponsored a sheepdog trial in Hyde Park and invited John Angus and his pal, Raymond MacPherson, to compete. It’s a forty-mile trek on a single-track road from Lochialort to Fort William, and slow around the flanks of Ben Nevis, past Glencoe and Loch Lomond into Glasgow. London lies south. In 1953, when the boys made their journey, the roads were worse. Since neither had a driver’s license, they borrowed Raymond’s father’s.

  John Angus MacLeod is a gaunt, long-armed, long-legged man in his mid-fifties. He has the highlander’s great humped nose. His teeth are gapped on either side of his mouth, which is a convenience for his pipe. He’s run at the International Sheepdog Trial thirteen or fourteen times, he can’t remember. When I ask if any other Scot has run so many times, he doesn’t remember that either, “Oh there’s Johnny (John Templeton) and Raymond (Raymond MacPherson), I suppose.” John Angus came third at the Loughborough International with Glen, seventh with Ben at Armathwaite. Thus far this trial season, John Angus has taken four firsts, seven seconds, five thirds, two dozen fourths, fifths, and sixths. It’s not been a season where any dog and handler have dominated the competition, and John Angus has done as well as anyone.

  In June, when I was last in Scotland, sheepdog men would say to me, “Aye, ye’ll have to meet John Angus.” They’d always say this with a smile that was both deprecatory and admiring—a Scottish sly smile. Everyone had a story about John Angus—how he’d stopped an International to claim one of his sheep was blind. At another trial when he failed to pen his sheep, he’d explained, “There was a bee in the pen. That’s why yin hellish ewe wouldn’t go in.” After one particularly poor showing, John Angus had gone to a drystane wall and banged his forehead against the stones until he bled.

  With the dogs, he is dangerous.

  Our road ran along the River Dochart, which was foaming brown. Scotland had had a rainy summer. I asked how he’d done in the Grampian Television Trials. “Aye, Taff won it,” John Angus replied, shortly.

  Taff—a five-year-old male—is John Angus’s top trial dog. A burly, black-and-white, long-coated dog with a snout striped like a polecat’s, Taff ran at the International with the English team in 1986, and last month John Angus qualified him to run in 1988 with the Scots. Taff goes back to Gilchrist Spot, who was an extraordinarily clever dog, but hardheaded. Ray Edwards, Taff’s breeder and trainer, had hoped to come to Scotland for this International, but on account of the fall lamb sales, hadn’t been able.

  “How’s Flint?” I asked, fearing I’d hear John Angus had sold him. When I last saw Flint, he and John Angus had had a falling out.

  “The bugger’s gone blind on me,” John Angus said.

  An International-caliber sheepdog handler needs two first-rate dogs. The trial season runs from late April until September, and a keen handler might run four or six trials in a week (Bobby Daiziel and Dryden Joe once won fifty trials in a single season). Such trialing puts tremendous pressure on a dog, and when a man has only one dog, the pressure is doubled. A canny handler runs his weaker dog when he judges the sheep will be most difficult (usually in the afternoon) and tries his best dog against the sheep that promise the most points.

  If a handler has two experienced dogs and another, younger one gaining experience in the Nursery trials or farmed out to a hill shepherd for good hard daily work, that handler is a rich man. In the late 1970s, when John Angus ran his Cap and Ben, he was hard to beat. John Angus still dreams about those dogs.

  Flint’s right eye, John Angus said, had gone opaque and sore. “The poor bugger keeps pawing at it and making it worse.”

  The greatest difficulty handlers of John Angus’s ability have is finding a proper dog to work with. Such dogs are scarce and quite expensive—a dog like Taff would take five months of a hill shepherd’s wages. In the balmy past, hill shepherds had to sell their best dogs to wealthier farmers and trial men. They simply couldn’t afford to keep them.

  John Angus’s farm, Kiltyrie, lies two miles past Killin in the central Highlands. Like many pretty Scottish villages, Killin depends on the tourist trade, and this early on a weekday morning, tourists scramble over the rocks, photographing the falls of the Dochart.

  Kiltyrie Farm sits on the slopes of Ben Lawers, the second highest mountain in great Britain, a venerable overfold with its head in the mist. Since 1975, it’s been part of the National Trust, and a public road proceeds through John Angus’s land to the Visitor’s Center. “All day they go up the hill and then they come down,” John Angus grumbles. “Up and down.”

  The National Trust won’t allow John Angus to use his tractor where it might scar the vegetation. The public road is unfenced, so the sheep have free passage to the high ground, and occasionally a car kills a lamb and (since ewes huddle on the dark warm road at dusk) tourists sometimes run over a ewe. “There’s bloody nothing up there for the buggers to see,” John Angus says.

  Generally, hill farms have one or two flat fields where they can sow swedes (rutabagas) or silage oats, but Kiltyrie is either uphill or downhill; the only level is the narrow terrace for the house and byre.

  Five years ago, John Angus MacLeod and Helen Smeaton bought the place with insurance money after their hotel, the Altnachealgash, burned down. Kiltyrie’s previous owners had been carried out feet first, and the farm was in terrible shape. The sheep flock was a disaster.

  Most hill farms contain three or four thousand acres of unfenced upland ground. Because grazing is poor, the ewes spread out on the slopes and hilltops. The ewes are inspected frequently (during lambing, twice daily) by the shepherd; when anything is found wrong with them, it must be put right on the spot, whatever the visibility or weather. If a ewe is having lambing difficulties, the shepherd must catch the ewe and deliver her. If a ram has got in with the wrong hirsel, he must be returned to the proper one. When a ewe goes down with ketosis or mastitis, she must be treated from the modest pouch the shepherd slings over his shoulder. The Scottish hills are veined with burns and drains (ditches). Not infrequently, a ewe will tumble in
to a drain onto her back and be unable to regain her feet. The ewe is said to be “cowped.” Her rumen compresses her lungs, and unless she is helped to her feet, she will suffocate. Some sheepdogs are particularly good at locating cowped ewes. A few will actually tug them back onto their feet.

  John Angus and Helen run 2,300 ewes on Kiltyrie, a high stocking rate for ground whose vegetation is principally heather, peat moss, and gorse. They’ve put all their money into improving their flock. They haven’t done much with the farmhouse, nothing at all with the narrow stone byre.

  Kiltyrie farmhouse is a commodious white stone building with a patched slate roof. Several windows have been replaced with painted plywood sheets with faux window frames drawn on.

  The farmhouse is perched above Loch Tay, and Helen jokes that they should put a warning sign on the roadside. “The tourists come over the wee rise and see all that and they brake to take a photo and are smashed from behind, oh there’s been three or four smash-ups there. …”

  Helen Smeaton and John Angus have lived together for eight years, since Helen came to manage his Altnachealgash Hotel. John Angus didn’t mind guiding the hotel’s fishermen, but lacked interest in the day-to-day management. He didn’t care for tourists and enjoyed being an innkeeper only in the off-season, wintertime, when the locals would come in for a wee dram of an evening.

  Helen’s a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who likes good crack or a laugh. Last Saturday, at a rather stuffy wedding reception, Helen was dancing with Pat Mc-Gettigan. Pat’s an old friend, a sheepdog man himself. Though you wouldn’t guess it from his dancing, Pat has a wooden leg. Pat stepped on Helen’s foot. Helen gave the wooden leg a frightful kick and cried, “If you can’t put that bloody thing on straight, I’ll straighten it out for you,” and knelt, there on the dance floor and jerked and twisted at Pat’s leg, the two roaring with laughter while the proper (and very English) guests gaped at the pair of them.