A Dog Year

by Jon Katz

  I watched her alert, no-nonsense face. If she didn’t think it would work, there’d be no messing around: we’d be out of there. Herding was intense, she’d warned me over the phone, even mildly dangerous.

  Carolyn nodded. “That’s a good answer,” she said. “But Barbie collies . . .”

  Well, I humphed—nobody was going to dis my dogs—these were Australian dogs, by way of Texas, and I’d been led to believe that their herding instinct was intact.

  “Oh, really?” she said amiably.

  I could only imagine how Deanne would erupt when I reported this. She thought some of the herding partisans were plain fanatics, breeding needlessly hostile, undomesticated dogs.

  But Dave, calm and prepared as a suburban driving instructor confronting yet another terrified teenager, looked ready for a go. He was clearly in favor of our sticking around. I tossed him another biscuit—having an ally couldn’t hurt.

  For the next fifteen minutes, Homer and Devon and I watched while Dave and Carolyn moved some sheep from the barn into a holding pen, then down a long path and into a fenced pasture.

  Carolyn was patient with the sheep, occasionally whipping out her crook and pulling a lamb from the flock. She wanted to separate the babies and select some veterans who wouldn’t be frightened by frenzied new dogs, although she clearly didn’t foresee much of a threat.

  Dave had shifted into herding mode, picking up on her choices and commands, keeping the sheep moving, circling them again and again, doggedly and patiently, while she culled the ranks. It was a seamless operation.

  I looked up the hill and saw several trucks and cars parked up on the ridge, people stopping to watch. Something about this ancient practice was still captivating.

  One dog at a time in the pasture, Carolyn said, when she had everything satisfactorily arranged. For the well-being of the sheep and the safety of all. Safety?

  Furthermore, she cautioned, it was important that I watch the sheep, not the dogs. “If they come for you, turn sideways; usually they’ll part around you,” she said casually. “If you feel them crashing into your legs, go down. Better to break a leg than blow out a knee.” Wait. Who’d said anything about my going in there? I had to interact with sheep?

  Carolyn smiled. Of course, she said. The instinct test wasn’t just for the dogs, and herding wasn’t, either.

  Somehow, I’d pictured Carolyn doing the instructing; I’d be outside the corral, beaming. I didn’t have much experience with livestock, no old instincts to draw on.

  Besides, the pasture was filled with half a dozen twitchy sheep and their plentiful droppings, and if Carolyn was skeptical of us, the sheep looked even more suspicious. They were bigger and meaner looking than you might think. I already had a bad leg, and I had no desire for blown knees or broken bones.

  But there was no way I would walk away from this odyssey now. Confirm every prejudice about Barbie collies and their wimpy owners? Disappoint my now keenly interested guys? Break my word to Devon that, if he didn’t die under the wheels of a school bus, we would someday meet some sheep?

  I should chain Devon to a post a short distance from the pasture, Carolyn advised. The sheep would have enough to deal with, between me, Dave, and Homer. They didn’t need another cranked-up border collie on patrol. And stand away from the gates, she added. They could become “hot spots” if things got rough.

  I suddenly wanted to go home. But something had switched on inside Dev and Homer. They were more keyed up than I had ever seen them, which is saying something. Obsessed with what Dave was doing, their heads had been swiveling like spectators’ at a fast-paced tennis match. They were totally absorbed in the herding, the connection between the dog, the herder, and the sheep; the rest of the world seemed to dematerialize.

  As if this were something they had seen before, and were ready for, they tensed; their eyes widening. Even their physical posture changed. They seemed so alert that I thought they might explode.

  I chained Devon to the post and brought the leashed Homer into the pasture, latching the gate behind us.

  “Remember,” Carolyn called, “watch the sheep, not the dogs.” She ran through the herding commands and terms for me, illustrating with Dave: “fetch” to drive the sheep to her; “gather” for the dog to collect the sheep into a compact group; “go bye” for the dog to circle to the left of the sheep; “way to me,” for the dog to reverse his direction and circle to the right. “Steady” was the command for the dog to slow to a creeping walk. Of course, the celebrated “that’ll do” (as in the movie Babe) released the dog from his work.

  The moment of truth.

  “Unleash him,” she said. Homer took off as if from a launching pad, right for Dave and the sheep bleating nervously fifty yards away. You’d think he’d done this a hundred times. He ran to the opposite side of the herd, across from Dave, and started lunging here, then there, circling the sheep, joining Dave as Carolyn issued a stream of commands.

  Dave clearly had this drill down pat. Calm, efficient, he could move the sheep by eyeing them, moving first in one direction, then in the other, looping back to collect strays, then retreating to a far corner to await instructions. Homer, meanwhile, was no longer recognizable as the cutie who crawled onto Paula’s pillow every morning. He was a fiend, charging, barking, nipping, occasionally emerging from the herd with a mouthful of wool.

  “Wow,” Carolyn said. “He’s a champ.” Homer, she announced, was using every tactic in the border collie repertoire—his body, his teeth, the “eye.” Behind me, I heard Devon barking furiously and pulling at the leash.

  I was mesmerized, until Carolyn yelled in alarm, “Watch the sheep! Watch the sheep!” I looked up as five or six of them—Homer in hot pursuit—whirled around and headed for the gate, which I had foolishly stepped in front of. There was no time to dash out of their path, but I turned sideways and the flock parted magically, like the Red Sea, although a couple of sheep mashed my toes in passing. The dog formerly known as Homer streaked past in a blur.

  “We need to call him back,” Carolyn called to me as he whizzed along, his tongue nearly on the ground. “He’s showing the long tongue. He’s getting exhausted. Can you grab him?”

  He’ll come, I told her. “Homer, come to me, boy,” I yelled. He stopped, looked beseechingly at me, took a step toward the sheep. “Come, now!” I said, more convincingly. He broke off the chase and came to my side.

  “Good,” Carolyn said, impressed again. “You don’t know how important that is. One of the hardest things in herding with new dogs is the recall, to get them to stop herding and come. That’s half the battle right there.” I puffed up a bit. Of course my dogs would come to me. I wondered briefly if she was using positive reinforcement on me.

  But, she cautioned, his “lie-down” was unacceptable. It was essential that the dog drop to the ground instantly, even when his herder was a long distance off. I had a lot of work to do.

  Still, Homer was a natural. He’d passed his instinct test with flying colors. He was welcome any time, Carolyn announced, for whatever level of training and herding I wanted to pursue.

  Then, of course, it was time for Devon, to whom nothing came simply. His fate was to always struggle for his place in the universe.

  If Homer instinctively wanted to herd, Devon seemed excited but unmoored. When I yelled “Go get ’em!” he charged the sheep individually rather than herding them, going for chunks of wool over maneuvering or persuasion.

  Where Homer encircled, Devon lunged. Where Homer barked and cajoled, Devon attacked. He was nervous, constantly looking to me for approval. Even I could see that he was off, out of sync. The contrast between the two performances was obvious; I felt for him.

  Homer had the eye, Carolyn assessed, but Devon didn’t yet. (This startled me—he sure had it for school buses.) That didn’t mean he couldn’t develop one, however. She watched him closely for another ten minutes, as he frantically raced from one end of the pasture to the other. He seemed rattled, as if
he understood that this was something he ought to know how to do but couldn’t master.

  His look said: Am I screwing it up? Is this right? Are you okay? Every now and then, he’d leave the sheep and run over to rest his nose against my leg. He was still keeping watch, not over the flock but over me. He was also wheezing, nearly gasping for breath. I wasn’t sure he liked this destiny stuff, now that he’d settled into a happy routine with me and Paula.

  Still, it was exciting to see the dogs loping along, in their supposed element, as close as Jersey dogs would ever get to the moors and the flocks.

  “Carolyn,” I murmured as we left the pen, “can I say it? Just once?”

  She looked briefly puzzled, then got it, laughed, and said sure.

  I patted both dogs and gave them each a hug.

  “That’ll do, boys,” I said.

  We closed up the pasture, got the sheep back into the barn, and Devon and Homer joined Dave in the shade, where there was a pile of hay and a bucket of water. Herding was more exhausting than I could imagine, Carolyn said, and dogs needed to rest after each round.

  I could see that my two liked being with the guys, joining the lunch-pail crowd, taking a break, talking sheep. Dave was more welcoming now, wagging his tail in “attaboys.” I reached into my pocket and, when I saw Carolyn busy with the sheep, slipped Dave another liver treat. He rolled blissfully over on his back again, eyeing my car.

  Both my dogs had passed the herding instinct test, Carolyn told me. They could and should herd. She had to admit that she hadn’t expected such strong instincts in Barbie collies. I could be proud of the recall. Their response to me was rare, she said, testament to the affection between us and the work we’d done together. I was proud of it, actually.

  While Homer was a star, she continued, and could probably go into herding competition if I had any desire for that, Devon needed herding perhaps even more. This surprised me; I thought he might have flunked.

  But Carolyn was reputedly one of those people who could tune in to a dog’s spirit, read him through the work his instincts led him to. She worked to train aggressive dogs as well as herding breeds. She could quote studies on rats and wolves; she’d obviously spent years researching animal behavior.

  “Homer is solid, grounded,” she said. “But Devon can’t quite make sense of the world.”

  He really only made sense of me. I was what he knew, what he trusted and relied upon, she explained; the rest of the universe remained a tangle, a jumble. Devon really didn’t know how things operated, even his ancestral work, and was terrified of failing again.

  Herding could possibly change that. It could settle him down, give him some peace of mind, Carolyn thought. She’d noticed signs of stress in him—his squinting and panting, his lowered ears—except when he was near me. Orders and commands unnerved him, triggering either anxiety or defiance.

  Her reading of Devon was a perceptive one. But it saddened me, too. His trek wasn’t over, it seemed; it might never be over.

  So I signed the boys up for some classes. If I owed it to Devon to meet some sheep, I owed him even more the chance to make sense of the world. The herding world would be hearing, I warned Carolyn, from “Team Barbie.”

  Life is deeply peculiar. The last place on the planet I would ever have expected to be, or that anyone who knew me would expect me to be, was in a pen, dodging enraged sheep and signaling frantically to two dogs.

  But little more than a week after our audition, on another gloriously clear spring day, the three of us were back at Raspberry Ridge. Carolyn had set out two chairs and a bench alongside the sheep corral. Sensing perhaps that I didn’t have Homer or Devon’s quickness, she had worked up a show-and-tell for me.

  Summoned by Dave, Carolyn came out of the barn carrying a worn tin box. My dogs had wandered up the hill, and she reached for the shepherd’s whistle she wore around her neck and gave a short blast.

  The sound was sharp but not piercing. Homer and Devon were at her side in an instant.

  The three of us sat politely and attentively as she opened the tin container and pulled out four sections of two-inch-high plastic fencing, along with three small plastic sheep, a tiny herder, and two black dogs that closely resembled border collies.

  Painstakingly, she closed the lid and began assembling the fence on the top of the container. Then she placed the plastic man—me, the herder—across from the two plastic dogs. In between she arranged several toy sheep, while discoursing on dog care and common training mistakes. (She didn’t really agree with the throw-chain I carried and jangled to get the dogs’ attention, for instance; a whistle was a lot more effective. The more she talked, the more I understood how little I really knew about dogs or their training. But, then, she hadn’t lived with Devon for a year.)

  This was her philosophy-of-herding lecture.

  Homer and Devon sat on either side of me, transfixed, like teenaged hackers watching Star Wars for the first time, as Carolyn moved the little figures around to show the positions we would all shortly take.

  We were going to work on balance, she lectured, the line between predatory instincts and working. Border collies are closely descended from wolves, and the sheep, dumb as they are, know they’re not on the same team. It might get rough out there, she said, gesturing toward the paddock.

  I was to enter a small pen that held about a dozen jumpy sheep while first one dog, then the other, raced around the perimeter. When the dog was across from me, with the flock between us, Carolyn would click a clicker and I would praise him extravagantly at that precise moment. The idea was to train the dog to position himself on the opposite side of the herd.

  Carolyn demonstrated for me with her tiny characters. It was unnerving to grasp how much work was involved merely to maneuver the dogs into the right position, the one where they’d earn my praise. It wouldn’t be easy, Carolyn cautioned, accurately. Devon and I exchanged glances, like warriors about to go into battle. Homer was already giving the sheep the eye, long-distance—a good sign.

  I chained Devon a few yards away, then went into the pen, trying to look confident. Homer began tearing around in mad circles, never pausing for long, sometimes trying to jump the fence and sometimes trying to tunnel underneath it to reach the sheep. Once or twice he stopped across from me—the approved position—and Carolyn clicked and I shouted my appreciation. But he was obsessed with the sheep, paying only scant attention to me.

  No problem, Carolyn said; he was quite young. He’d get it down. Once he figured out I was the gateway to sheep, he’d focus on me quite intensely. By the time Homer began to grasp the idea, however, he was spent—a virtually unprecedented condition. He staggered to the water bucket and collapsed. I chained him to the fence and released Devon.

  I’d noticed, as Homer circled the pen, that Devon wore what I called his “raptor” look (as in Jurassic Park), silently scrutinizing Carolyn, me, Homer, and the sheep.

  Of Devon’s many odd traits, none impressed me more than his curiosity and determination to figure out how things work—how the refrigerator opens, what actions precede going outside for a walk, where I store the dog biscuits in the kitchen.

  He’d been taking in this spectacle in almost every detail, and when it was his turn, he amazed both Carolyn and me. He circled widely around the pen—“squaring off”—coming opposite the herder, just as Carolyn had wanted.

  Carolyn clicked, I clapped and cheered, and Devon did it again. I simply backed up behind the sheep, turned into position, gestured with one hand, and yelled “Go around!” and Dev rushed to the spot opposite me. Further vindication for the Barbie team. But after two or three rounds, Devon seemed to balk. Having shown that he could do it, he appeared less in the grip of herding fever, more afraid to mess up.

  “Last week I wasn’t sure, but he could be very good at this,” Carolyn mused as we left the paddock. “I’m just not sure yet that he really wants to. But let’s give him a chance. . . . It’s striking how he concentrates and scopes all this
out. He was really paying attention.”

  Homer, on the other hand, had no such ambivalence. Carolyn said he had a “spectacular” instinct for herding, one of the strongest she had seen in so young a dog.

  Like the previous visit, it had been a strangely exhilarating afternoon for me, for the dogs, mostly for the three of us together.

  The relationship had altered a bit already. Homer was less the deferential little waif; he was a working dog, his instincts rising in a powerful display. He had more respect for himself, and Devon treated him accordingly. For his part, Devon soon stopped trying to herd other dogs and lost much of his interest in trucks and cars. Once you’ve had a taste of the real thing, Carolyn explained, substitutes seem inadequate.

  It inspires a bit of awe to see working dogs really do their jobs, to see thousands of years of history, instinct, and breeding well up and become manifest in a sunny pasture. It transforms the way an owner sees a dog, and the way the dog sees himself. This, perhaps, is the bond people talk about between working dogs and their masters. Working together in that paddock, I was aware of how much trust and communication it takes for a dog in full pursuit of prey to drop in a second at the wave of a human’s hand, to move back and forth in response to his slightest body movement. And there were other, to me more meaningful, rewards.

  I felt I’d kept my promise to Devon, that a debt had been paid and that the gesture was much appreciated.

  What might Old Hemp make of all this? Hemp, I’d read, had flashed like a meteor across the universe of sheepdogs. His confidence and demeanor were so pronounced, it was said, that sheep merely looked at him and instantly complied with his every request.

  We were not in that league. Homer and Devon had ticked off the sulky sheep, who remained fully aware, I’m sure, that it had really been Dave who’d moved them around, not me and my game amateurs.