by Jon Katz
He ran off the eastern fence, then down alongside it. The sheep, recognizing the old adversary they usually fled from, raised their heads and watched for a few moments. Then they began gathering into a knot. When Orson cantered below them, they turned and, as any shepherd would want them to do, began walking slowly up the hill toward me, Orson behind them.
He looked especially handsome on that September day, his lean, muscular frame racing along without any visible exertion, his glossy black and white fur shimmering. Another dog, one of the Labs, would have been panting by now, slowing after running hard in the warm sun. But Orson hardly seemed to be straining.
In a few minutes, the sheep were close to the top of the hill, grazing near me, watching him. Orson ran up alongside them to me. I dropped to my knees and shouted praise and hallelujahs.
What a breakthrough, I thought. How I wish Carolyn or Paula—or somebody—could have seen it. How much hard work had gone into this simple run, how many training sessions in the cold and heat and mud, how many bug bites and frozen toes. It was a remarkable triumph of commitment and training.
And we’d have great moments like this, I knew, on our farm, with our sheep in our pastures and hills. Wasn’t this why we were here, why we had come?
I didn’t suspect for a moment that he’d never do an outrun like that again. I’d never understand why.
Rose
CHAPTER THREE
The Rise of Rose
When I first saw Rose, she was clinging to her breeder’s shoulder in the passenger terminal at Denver’s vast international airport. A tiny black-and-white pup fresh from a quiet farm, she was trembling with fear at all the noise and commotion around her.
And her day was only going to get worse. She was soon stuffed into a fabric animal holder, electronically wanded and groped by airport security, then jammed into a small carry-on crate pushed beneath my airplane seat, headed for New Jersey. The crate, airline personnel repeatedly warned me, could not be opened during the flight.
I could only imagine what four or five hours of roaring jet engines were doing to so sensitive a dog. When nobody was looking, I leaned down, unfastened the container, and stroked her quivering head.
When we arrived in Newark, the din of suburban New Jersey—sirens, traffic, power mowers, people—unnerved her further. The first time I took her out into the backyard, she burrowed into an opening under the fence and wouldn’t budge. I had to pull her out.
For days she cowered, rushing outside to hide among the garden greenery and peer out, then darting back inside to take refuge in her crate. She didn’t eliminate for a good twenty-four hours. She was all nerves, hypersensitive to sound and movement around her, so anxious that I worried she might suffer permanent trauma of some kind. After a few days, she settled a bit and began paying a little attention to me and the other dogs. She seemed to feel safer. Still, I wondered whether a dog as anxious as this could ever herd sheep.
Rose spent her first months in New Jersey, from which base we made frequent treks out to the sheep in Pennsylvania. Then came time for the big move. I took three border collies to the farm—Rose, Homer, and Orson.
Homer was sweet-tempered and affectionate, but struggling with Orson’s intensity and dominance, as well as my own impatience and inexperience with training. I’d hoped that introducing a new puppy would bolster his confidence, his position in the pack; it wasn’t working out that way.
In New Jersey he had grown attached to Max, my neighbors’ ten-year-old. The rest of the family adored him as well. In that household, he had plenty of attention and no trouble from competitors. While Homer’s visits there had been brief, I suspected even then that one day he would stay. A lovelier setting upstate couldn’t resolve his problems.
But the new puppy was instantly transformed. On the farm, Rose had come home.
She was more peaceful and at ease than I’d ever seen her, especially after the sheep arrived. It was as if she’d been born here. In New Jersey, she was a dog out of her element; on the farm, she’d found her place.
It was intriguing to see how the dogs took to this new environment, or didn’t. Orson, thorny as ever, had varied responses. He loved walking with me, running through the woods and meadows, chasing chipmunks and digging into groundhog holes. But he seemed most at ease alone with me, inside the farmhouse.
Homer rarely seemed comfortable on the farm. The running and herding seemed to tire him; he often ended the day limping and sore. He was shorter than Orson and his frame heavier than Rose’s, so running took more of a toll on him.
He still gave a wide berth to Orson, who rarely let him near me. Having absorbed this lesson, Homer became the only dog I’d ever owned who didn’t usually want to be in the same room with me.
Curiously, Rose was completely unafraid of Orson; she deferred to him but was unrattled. In fact, at night, when all the dogs were settled, Rose tiptoed around the house collecting everybody’s bones, toys, and rawhide remnants, ferrying them, piece by piece, to her own crate. She rarely chewed them, but she liked to collect them, one last round of work before sleep. She was the only dog who could take anything of Orson’s and escape a drubbing.
When it came to Homer, she was as dominant as Orson. Soon, the poor guy had two dogs pushing him around, stealing his bones and toys.
My dog life had been fluid lately, to say the least. Homer had come to fill the ache after Julius and Stanley died, to be part of my growing interest in herding. Rose, descended from a strong herding line, had come to help with the farm I was about to acquire and to be a good-natured companion for Homer to feel superior to. Little of this was unfolding as planned.
In the fall, despite pangs of loss and guilt, I gave Homer to Max and his family, where he still lives happily. And little Rose practically took over.
Rose was the opposite of a mellow Lab. Aware of every sound and movement, almost incapable of relaxing, she never stopped working—moving things around, darting back and forth along the pasture fence, keeping track of me—even when she wasn’t on duty. She was interested in people only as they related to work. If you walked into the pasture with her and let her steer the sheep, even once, then you were her friend. Otherwise, she had no use for you. She had scant interest in being scratched, cuddled, or hugged. Food mattered little. Apart from those that involved chasing, like balls and Frisbees, neither did toys.
If she never was quite at rest, she seemed cheerful and content. And why not? How many border collies had a score of sheep just outside the kitchen window?
My plan was to work rigorously with Orson every day—rain, snow, heat, or cold—and to raise Rose as a working farm dog, which I suspected I would soon need.
I’d bought Bedlam Farm for many reasons, some having little to do with dogs. But one factor important to me was the chance to live and work with dogs in the right environment, without suburban restrictions and distractions, with meadows and pastures and sheep.
Orson had been somehow damaged in his early years; I hoped that working together, he and I could repair much of that damage, if not all of it. That was the goal, perhaps the fantasy.
I would keep working with him until the world made sense; he would love and trust me and, in the process, heal. He wouldn’t suffer the fate of so many troubled creatures—to be abandoned. Somebody would be there. Somebody would care. We wouldn’t give up on each other.
Training with Orson had to be consistent, not something we did when I had time but something we did every single day, something built into our lives together. It would take a lot of work. We would keep at it until we had gone as far as we could go.
The most serious training occurred first thing in the morning. I left the other dogs inside the house or in the backyard fence, while Orson and I made for the pasture gate. He understood early on that this meant we’d be working together; it had become a part of the day that he looked forward to with excitement. When I unlatched the gate, he exploded, rushing around in circles, barking and scarfing up sheep poop,
spooking the donkeys and sending the sheep to the farthest corner of the pasture. To overcome even one of these unwanted reactions—the circling, the noise, the unpleasant snacking, which had even more unpleasant consequences later in the day—would be a triumph.
Our work didn’t proceed steadily and predictably, not ever. One morning in the late fall, the sheep were gathered near the feeder, waiting. It was growing bitter, and the animals needed corn and grain for energy. So I went into the barn with Orson and poured grain into two black rubber buckets.
Delivering it wasn’t as simple a procedure as it might seem. Normally placid ruminants, sheep turn wild when they see or smell food. They’ll plow into one another—and anything else in the way, including people—to get to grain. I had one bad leg, and worsening troubles with the other, and more than once I’d been banged into, knocked over, nearly trampled by charging sheep. On a few occasions it had been seriously frightening; it was often painful. The better approach was to keep the animals back until you could place their food in a feeder, then step away.
Orson, I thought, would be good at this. The sheep were afraid of him, understandably, and would stay away. He didn’t need to execute any moves; he could simply stay near me. I opened the pasture gate and he came in, excited, expectant.
A good rule to follow with sheep and border collies, I’ve learned, is that a dog too excited to hear you, or obey simple commands like “Lie down,” is probably too excited to work.
My training practice is to remove an overwrought dog until he calms down, then bring him back once he’s settled. That way, the dog learns that he’ll get to sheep when he’s calm, not frenzied. I had been working on this with Orson for more than two years, and this morning I made him lie down outside the gate, and then lie down again once we came inside.
The sheep were bleating, edging closer to me and the buckets. I told Orson to lie down, and then to stay. He had rushed up looking for sheep poop, but after I’d called him two or three times, he came back and lay down.
Then I trudged uphill to the feeder with the two heavy buckets. It had been frigid for days, alternately snowing and then, when the temperature warmed up, sleeting. Now the icy ground was treacherous, even for people with two good legs.
This was a case where training blends with need. I wanted Orson to be calm. I needed him to be calm. In the back of my mind lurked the human tendency to believe that because something was important to me, Orson would—as in a Disney movie—figure it out and help me. He’d think something like this: I love Jon. Jon is about to get trampled by some sheep. I have to protect him because he has bad legs and he needs me.
Which was a good example of the way I sometimes put him in an impossible position, asking more than he could possibly give, then blaming him for failing. Dogs, like people, are often prisoners, not masters, of their instincts. Orson did love me, did want to please me, but there were other forces at work.
As I headed up the slope, Orson bolted and headed for the sheep. But corn overcomes fear in most cases where sheep are concerned. Once he moved, they moved in. With the ram, Nesbitt, leading the way, the flock slid and ran down the slope, plowing right into me. My feet went out from under me, my head banged onto frozen ground, and corn and grain went flying, sending the animals into further frenzy.
I cursed and yelled and began swinging the now-empty buckets at the sheep to push them away. My head throbbed. Orson, frantic, grabbed one of the ewes by her wool and began pulling her up the hill, puffs of fleece trailing behind. This was not a rescue effort but a freestyle freakout that had little to do with me.
I threw one of the buckets in his direction, and he was startled as it banged on the ground. “No, no, no!” I yelled. “Get out of here. Get out!” I was furious. His behavior had injured and endangered me, and had almost harmed an animal. Now some of the sheep were scarfing up the fallen corn, and some were running from him.
I calmed down, called him to me, took him into the house and, tossing in a biscuit, put him in his crate. He seemed eager to go in, nervous and confused. After such episodes, Orson often had an air of anxious bewilderment, as if he wasn’t sure what had happened. It was almost as if he’d come to, after a seizure. Perhaps he had.
I let Rose out the door, and she raced to the pasture gate and waited for me. She circled until the sheep were in a tight group, then walked them back up the hill. Limping and muttering, I refilled the buckets. I gave Rose no commands, and she wasn’t looking for any. Patrolling back and forth, she simply held the sheep in place—all of them eyeing the refilled buckets—until I dumped the corn into the feeder. Then I backed away and released her, and the sheep came down the hill and ate.
“Okay, Rose, thanks and out,” I said softly—almost all my commands were homegrown, not official trial jargon. She darted to the gate and we went back to the house.
I changed tactics. We took to entering the pasture with the sheep in the training pen (courtesy of Rose) and Orson on a leash. I’d release him and remain absolutely still and quiet while he ran in circles, gobbled up donkey droppings, and ran from the barn to the feeder. Sometimes it took five minutes, sometimes ten, but he would eventually look up to see where I was.
Then we walked to the pen where the sheep were, and I said, “Orson, go around.” He stopped, spun, barked, and then, after a few moments, he would circle the pen in beautiful, loping runs, then turn and come back to me. I would erupt with joy, give him treats, hug and praise him effusively.
It became our daily training ritual, the thing he could do, the work he could be successful at—and, as it turned out, the outer limits of his capabilities as a herding dog.
Sometimes he got the notion of “come bye”—running around the sheep to the right while they were in the pen. Once in a while, he’d even grasp “away to me,” and would break off to the left, circling the pen. But usually he’d get too excited, spinning and barking, heading off in random directions. So I just let him run around the pen without any commands, in whatever direction he wanted to go.
Every few weeks, I opened the gate and tried to get him to walk calmly behind the sheep, driving them out into the pasture. It rarely worked.
Working with Orson, in a formal sense, was endlessly frustrating. His arousal often overtook his comprehension of even the most elemental commands. For five or six days in a row, he might reliably lie down and stay. Then suddenly he’d lose it and tear around the pasture as if he’d never heard a phrase like “lie down.”
After a few months, I gave up on the idea that Orson could ever work directly with sheep, unless there was a fence between them. I called this our minimalist training: stop doing too much, asking too much, expecting too much. Less is more. Simple is better. Patience is critical, praise, essential. Sometimes good enough is good enough. Sometimes—when is a fine and debatable point—you just have to accept and love the dog you have, even if he’s not necessarily the dog you want him to be. Herding sheep isn’t the only way for a border collie to be happy.
The contrast was striking, and over time, sad. Rose had the innate ability to understand the task at hand and get it done.
Like any young border collie, she needed to be taught how to stay calm and move slowly; she couldn’t be allowed to run amok. But she’d arrived with most of the instinct she needed; all I had to do was give her time and reinforcement. Orson, on the other hand, had suffered the misfortune of so many dogs: He had gotten involved with humans.
Rose’s behavior with the sheep was measured and authoritative. She never used her mouth to control them; she used her body and intense “eye,” the stare border collies employ to move sheep and intimidate other animals, and the sheep moved as she directed.
After the first few weeks, I could simply say, “Go get the sheep,” and Rose would rocket up the hill, give the herd the eye, square off for a few moments with the ram, and get behind the herd. Then—there was never any doubt of the outcome—she and the flock would come trotting down the hill and into the pen.
&nbs
p; She was all business, undistractable, energetic and fearless. As my father often said during his fruitless efforts to turn me into a baseball player, “You’ve got to keep your eye on the ball.” Rose did.
This was the difference, I thought, between a dog who had been given the opportunity to learn and grow safely and properly, and a dog who hadn’t. It was wonderful to work with Rose, sad to see the excitable wreck that Orson, in some ways, had become.
I had thought Rose would learn some things from Orson, from the herding dog I was sure he could become, once sheep were living out the back door. But after the first few weeks, the truth seemed increasingly evident: We were all learning from Rose; none of us had much to teach her.
With little training at all, she was evolving into a cracker-jack farm dog—eager, bright, savvy, and profoundly useful.
“Where’s Rose?” the large-animal vet would say when she pulled up in her pickup. Lots of her clients brought their dogs out to work when she arrived, she told me, but only Rose actually helped, keeping sick sheep still, rounding up runaways trying to avoid their shots. I nearly burst with pride.
Rose was one of those working dogs completely at ease on the job, though never completely relaxed otherwise. She was as comfortable backing up a big, bullying ram as she was out of place in New Jersey. It was hard to reconcile this businesslike, energetic creature with the trembling puppy I had toted from Denver.
Our training evolved. I decided against hiring a herding instructor or taking her to a class. I decided to let her gifts develop naturally and see what happened.
I did a lot of things the herding instructors recommended—initially brought her near sheep on a leash, for instance, to discourage running around. But I also did a lot of things they didn’t recommend, like letting her into the pasture alone. I watched from the gate as she approached the sheep, her eye and her instincts sharpening almost daily. She wasn’t a dog to race around willy-nilly; she always seemed to have a purpose.
