by Jon Katz
But his main squeeze is Lucy, the black standard poodle who lives across the street. Sometimes, early in the morning or at dusk, they can be heard barking at each other, sending secret signals.
Between visits, as we walk, Homer noses my pants pocket, where I keep Stanley’s old blue ball, now entering its second generation of service. I toss it whenever we come to an open field. Homer loves to chase, though he isn’t crazy about retrieving. Devon disdains such foolishness, except when Homer’s having too much fun. Then he’ll grab the ball away and bring it to me, his way of letting me know that he could perform this stunt but doesn’t consider it worth his time.
These strolls are complex; we zigzag all over the neighborhood, back and forth across the streets, making a kind of obedience trial of the walk, just to keep the boys interested. I give them the heads up—“Hey, guys, pay attention”—and check the traffic, then point to the spot across the street where I want them to go. “Let’s go, heel” is the command to tear across at high speeds, straight to the other side, to the opposite corner, or on a diagonal. “Heel slowly” means to trot calmly alongside me as I cross.
We walk through shady streets, neighborhood shopping districts, in and around parks and schools. At the invitation of exasperated township officials, we sometimes clear geese out of playgrounds and parks.
I carry leashes in my jacket pocket in case we need to reassure a nervous jogger or show a cop our ability to comply with the letter of the law. But we rarely need them. The gentlemen are good walkers now, happy to take in the sights, stretch their legs, keep me company.
After the morning walk, it’s time for work.
I write every day and many evenings, and my dogs understand their side of the contract. Devon and Homer have come to grasp the meaning of the computer’s booting up. It’s when we go our separate ways.
If it’s a pleasant day, I open the back door and shoo them out. A parental instinct: they should be outside chasing squirrels, not sitting in a basement study with a sedentary man.
But on nasty days, they have a choice. They’re free to bunk down in my study, which is, of course, fully equipped with dog beds and rawhide. I’m surprised at how often they opt to lie on the floor beside me while I write. Homer likes to doze with his head on my shoe.
Sometimes, though, they do leave me to my keyboard and go off elsewhere in the house. Knowing Devon, I figure he’s upstairs studying German or assembling a giant LEGO installation. Or maybe he’s training innocent Homer in the black arts of opening refrigerator doors and removing shoelaces. I don’t really know; I’m working.
In the late afternoon, when I’m ready to stop, we do chores.
I take Homer and Devon almost everyplace. They come with me to the neighborhood copy shop, curling up on the floor and awaiting customers. In my tolerant town, they’ve met my barber, a local car dealer, the florist, and the dry cleaner, and visited the camera store and the picture-framing shop.
It’s odd about these dogs: outside, they have boundless energy, but when I bring them inside, they plop down and cool out. In Britain, my border collie books report, sheepherders often bring their dogs into pubs, where they nap under the tables. Pubs are a custom we ought to import. Instead, Homer and Devon trot into the bookstore, wait patiently while I browse or chat, allow children to hug them.
When I can’t bring them inside, I leave them in the car (warm days excepted) with the windows open a crack. When I return, our reunions are as joyous as if I’d just returned from a few months in Borneo.
The dogs—at least Homer—don’t mind being left alone so much anymore, though; they have each other for company. I sometimes look out my office window into the backyard and see the two of them sitting side by side, waiting for a misguided rodent to take one step onto their turf, like old friends for whom fishing is mostly an excuse to sit on a riverbank together.
Evenings, since we have no access to animal-friendly pubs and I can’t sneak dogs into restaurants or movie theaters, Paula and I often go out.
Sometimes I leave them out of the crate. And every time I do leave Devon and Homer alone and free in the house, I still find innocuous messages when I come back—the video cabinet open, sofa pillows on the floor, CD cases on the bed. We still keep the refrigerator locked.
Days with them are busy and satisfying—play and work, love and exercise. I write a lot, walk a lot. I get licked a lot; I scratch ears a lot. I throw the ball and distribute rawhide and the occasional squeaky toy. I have companions, sidekicks, co-conspirators.
The cabin upstate is even better; it’s border collie heaven. When I start loading up the Trooper, Homer and Devon surround me, circling. Devon has more than once tried to climb into my duffel bag; he knows what it means the second I take it from the closet.
The dogs have the backseat, covered in old quilts and blankets, to themselves. They take in the scenery while I keep the radio tuned to Yankees’ games. It takes four hours to get to our place, and once I’m off the interstates, I roll the back windows down a little. The boys like to sniff the air.
As we drive up the mountain road, Devon starts barking. I open the door when we reach the cabin, and the dogs shoot out into the woods and take a few laps around the meadow.
One of the gifts these two have brought me is a passion for hiking and walking—coinciding, unfortunately, with the advent of a bum ankle. When I had good feet, I disliked hiking. But border collie owners can’t survive very long as couch potatoes.
So the first thing we do when we arrive upstate is set off on a stroll through the woods behind the cabin. If we’ve timed it right, we can catch the sun setting behind the hills.
Julius and Stanley liked to walk, and I remember those walks happily. They were peaceful affairs, but they didn’t last long. Bugs and flies, heat and cold got to the Labs; they were always eager to saunter home again after fifteen minutes or so.
Devon and Homer, however, are perpetual-motion machines. Bugs don’t bother them. Weather has no effect, either. They have astonishing agility, bobbing and weaving, darting under and over and around logs, trees, streams. And they are alert to every wild turkey, field mouse, and monarch butterfly in the vicinity.
Their awareness has heightened my own, and the walks are lovely in a completely different way. These guys have made me more conscious of what’s in these woods, have induced me to pay attention, to share their enthusiasm for whatever they see. Homer and Devon are alive in a visceral way. Their vitality is infectious, perhaps my favorite thing about the breed. They are alive down to the tip of their tails. They’ve turned me—even me—into an outdoorsman of sorts.
On the mountaintop, we get up at five or six a.m. and head out on our first hike. I bring a Thermos of hot coffee, a cell phone in case I fall down once too often, and the usual cache of bis-cuits.
Sometimes we work across the big meadow behind the house; sometimes we muscle through the high snow. Sometimes we just amble along our dirt road, Homer racing after the ball as it careens down the hill.
Since there are few streets and even fewer cars, they are really free when we’re at the cabin, and they know it. Devon’s flight through the woods the first time he came up seems eons ago. He never strays far. I don’t need leashes, scoopers, commands. They just go, keeping me more or less in sight as they fly, and I beam like a dad whose kids are having the time of their lives.
Upstate, Homer’s charms have worked to make Devon more playful, too, though he only reveals this when no one else is around.
Homer takes off through the fields or around the house. At first, Devon had no problem running him down, but Homer is bigger and wilier now. As Devon bears down, Homer vanishes into the trees or the tall meadow grass, reappearing every few minutes to bark tauntingly, then disappear again. His eyes have a demonic gleam. After months of being pushed around, this is his revenge, and it seems sweet.
Devon tears after him wildly. But Homer pops up everywhere, like a figure in a video game. Once in a while Devon connects, grabs
him by the collar, and throws him to the ground. Homer goes limp, waits till Devon eases up, then bolts. They could do this for hours. Over the course of a day, they do. It gives me so much pleasure to watch that I often surprise myself by laughing out loud.
In between, we go back to the cabin so I can write. By nightfall, we are all exhausted. Homer and Devon settle in for an hour or two of serious rawhide chewing while I crank up a fire and settle in with a book. Evenings are peaceful: a blaze in the fireplace, a good book or a baseball game in season, a bottle of scotch on the table, a dog on either side of my chair. They finally quit by ten o’clock, and sometime after that I climb into bed and turn off the bedroom light.
After a few minutes, I’m conscious of a light, feathery presence to the left of my head—that would be the nimble Devon, claiming the other pillow, and then a few moments later, Homer’s quick hop onto the foot of the bed. We all pretend to be following the rules, which are that dogs aren’t supposed to spend the night on the bed.
On howling, bitter winter nights, however, the three of us drop all pretense; we become a pack and climb in and curl up together at the top of the world, the Three Amigos staving off the Furies.
We are in great harmony, though of a different kind. Life with these dogs is never simple, and rarely as relaxed as it was with Julius and Stanley. But we are such a trio now, so easy and calm together, and we have so much fun, that I already have some trouble recollecting those first weeks and months. Even when I’m back in New Jersey, where almost every morning we pass the street-corner battlefield on which Devon and I had our fiercest confrontation, it feels like another lifetime. Is this sleek, proud, quiet dog the same one who shattered windows, charged buses, leaped onto passing minivans? People shock me by praising his calmness. But it’s true, I rarely yell at Devon now; I haven’t needed to.
I’m still learning, though. A well-bred, good-hearted Labrador gives his allegiance freely, without conditions. A border collie needs reason to support his faith. Julius did what I asked of him because, quite simply, his work was to please me. He required no explanations or elaboration.
Devon is different: he wants to know why. You can’t just bark commands and expect him to blindly obey. You have to provide coherence and rationale, persuade this instinctively independent dog that there’s a point. Otherwise he feels demeaned, like a circus performer. And that leads to trouble.
So there are strings attached, conditions set, and it’s this intellectual process, this challenge, that forms a bond or breaks it. Contrary to myth, the connection isn’t automatic. In fact, it’s one of the risks of having a dog like this, perhaps one reason the breed is so often abandoned. Border collies make choices. The relationship can fail, can become tense and laden.
But how lucky I am to have found this again. Once more, I have two wonderful dogs whom I love dearly, who love me back. I can’t shake the sense that I’ve witnessed something both commonplace and important, comings and goings that aren’t just metaphors for life, but life itself.
Sitting near Julius’s upstate spot, I tend to think back on what I’ve lost and gained in the year since Devon arrived. My daughter went back to college, as she should, taking a chunk of my soul with her. My mother died. Some friends drifted away. I lost the full use of my left leg. And I lost Julius and Stanley. Big holes in my heart, all of them.
Yet when I think about that time, I see more gain than loss. I think of a great marriage that absorbs disruption but endures, of a wonderful daughter making her way toward independence, of work that I cherish, and two more magnificent animals to distract me from my woes, give me new ways to nurture, and love me purely and powerfully and without complication.
Thirteen
Barbie Collies
* * *
As a suburban dad driving a Volvo and then a minivan, a proud Boomer parent ferrying my “gifted and talented” daughter from art class to guitar lessons, I’d acquired a local nickname—“The Prince of Rides.”
So it was no great surprise to anybody who knew me that on a crisp day in April 2001, I was cruising to eastern Pennsylvania with Homer and Devon to fulfill their potential.
We were headed for Raspberry Ridge Farm to meet Carolyn Wilki, a Bryn Mawr– and Cornell-educated animal behaviorist and psychologist and onetime corporate executive who is to herding what a kung fu master is to aspiring martial artists. And we were going to encounter some sheep, as I’d promised Devon we would one day.
I had heard a lot about Wilki and her farm. She was a dog mystic, a student of the canine psyche, a specialist in dog training and aggression, whispered about in obedience classes and on Web sites devoted to herding dogs. She was rumored to be a gifted but eccentric trainer, unorthodox, demanding yet successful. She could, it was said, see into a dog’s soul.
Wilki taught dogs by praising them when they did right—a growing training philosophy called positive reinforcement.
She built dogs up, never shouted at them or humiliated them, teaching them by showing what they were doing right, not by scolding, yelling, or throwing chains. She had, it was said, no patience for people who mistreated their dogs, or power-tripped, or overindulged them in Boomer fashion. If you and your dogs passed her qualifying test, the ancient, mythic world of herding was open to you. If you didn’t, you were out, licking your wounds and sulking like a parent whose kid didn’t get into the right college.
My dogs were excited, staring expectantly out the windows, and so was I. Something clearly was up.
“Gentlemen, this is the first day of the rest of your lives,” I had announced in the morning, as Devon trumpeted the first of several enthusiastic roo’s to get us launched on this fascinating day. (For a border collie, every new day is fascinating.) “You’re going to meet your destiny!”
Little Homer was growing up, losing some of his shyness and caution and demonstrating a breathtaking athletic ability, unprecedented for anyone in my family. Still lighter and smaller than Devon, his agility was amazing. He dove into ponds, caught mice on the run, once pulled a hapless sparrow right out of the air, could dodge any foe and run for hours with his pals. He deserved a chance to see what he could do with some livestock, too.
Devon yelped once or twice with excitement as we pulled into Raspberry Ridge, making our way down a winding gravel road toward a stone barn with huge fenced corrals on either side. We could hear sheep baaing somewhere, a sound that caused both dogs’ ears to stand up.
An American border collie—shorthaired, lean, a bit homely, businesslike—popped out of the barn to check us out. It wasn’t a casual inspection. Dave—we were later introduced—was part of the reception team.
He was older, grizzled, not the sort to be bathed in avocado shampoo or otherwise coddled. This, I thought, was probably more or less what the ancient Romans had in mind when they trained dogs to herd sheep. Dave looked at me, cast a glance at my well-groomed lads with their flowing coats and full bellies, gave a very perfunctory wag, and pivoted back toward the barn.
The herding-dog world, I knew, was fiercely divided. The pet breeders believed that border collies could herd but still be great family companions. The herding camp was understandably terrified that the breed was about to be mass-marketed and cosseted out of existence, losing its ancient role and instincts.
Dave was the herding sort. Homer and Devon seemed respectful of him—no playing, sniffing, or herding. Back at the barn, he summoned Carolyn Wilki.
She strode our way, a thin woman in her late thirties, I guessed, wearing a suede slouch hat and a bemused expression, carrying a crook and dressed in an army-fatigue jacket. She seemed to me to have stepped out of Devonshire, perhaps by way of the outback. She was soft-spoken and direct, without much small talk.
“This is Dave,” she said, gesturing to her assistant. He ambled over to my side, sniffing at my backpack, which held a plastic bag filled with biscuits.
“Can I give him one?” I asked Carolyn, after shaking her hand and introducing myself.
“Sure,” she said. “He’ll love you for it.”
I tossed Dave a liver treat, which he stared at incredulously and inhaled. Then he rolled over on his back and licked my shoes.
Carolyn eyed the dogs appraisingly, then eyed me. Her manner was friendly, but skeptical. “Can I ask you something?” she said. “Why are you here?”
I wasn’t sure what she meant.
“We don’t get many Barbie collies,” she replied. It hardly sounded like a compliment.
“Barbie collies?”
“Well, show dogs. We don’t get many. They usually don’t have much herding instinct left; it’s been bred out of them. So I was just wondering why you brought them all the way out here, why you’ve come.”
This seemed familiar. I was picturing the day, a couple of years back, when I paced outside a university admissions building while my daughter had her interview inside. This interrogation generated the same odd feeling in my stomach.
It was a fair question, though. This wasn’t a likely place for me to be. I wasn’t sad to leave behind the years of driving my charges to lessons, and Homer and Devon seemed to be doing just fine without sheep in their lives. But I had made a promise, and I’d very much wanted to come.
I took my time answering. “It’s a question of honor,” I finally said.
Dave, nosing at my backpack for another biscuit, had sat down to listen.
“What do you mean?” Carolyn said, leaning on her crook. It was a gorgeous spring day, the breeze stirring the dogs’ fur.
I explained the promise. “And besides, I owe it to them, I guess,” I said. “These are wonderful dogs. They’re good to me and I really love them and I want, if only for half an hour, to let them come face-to-face with what they have been bred to do for centuries. Just once, they ought to get to do their work. They ought to herd some sheep. Does that sound strange?”
