Dancing Dogs

by Jon Katz

  It was beginning to get late, and one by one, the women got up, said good-bye, collected their dogs, and left. Patricia was a bit startled to find herself still there. When everybody was gone, Fran brought her a cup of coffee. She leaned back, shoved some of her paperwork aside, and sipped from her mug. She looked tired, Patricia thought. It was time to go. She started rise.

  “About your dog,” said Fran.

  Patricia eased back down into the chair. In the farmhouse, she could hear the groans, sighs, and stirrings of the dogs in crates.

  “How many dogs do you have?” she asked Fran, who thought about it for a minute.

  “I think twelve,” she said, then leaned forward. “So what’s the story?” she asked. “Everybody who comes here has a story. A reason to be here. Husband issues?”

  Patricia flushed, then smiled.

  “I’ve been divorced twice,” Fran said. “Both nice guys. But I mean, come on, who could be married to me and live with twelve dogs? Sorry for asking, but a lot of the women here—well, you don’t see many husbands, and that’s because there aren’t that many. I don’t know if there’s a connection or not.” She laughed and Patricia laughed too. Paul certainly wouldn’t want to live with twelve dogs. He could do without any, really.

  “No, it’s the dog that got me out here. The dog was driving us crazy. Driving Paul crazy.”

  Fran nodded. “They were meant to work, and without work, they don’t really know how to live. They get crazy and they make people crazy. Out here, they get sane. They find themselves.”

  Patricia had an odd feeling, as if she were at some gate and about to pass through it. She liked these women, these people. They were different. But they were real, down to earth, passionate. She had the sense that loyalty was a big thing here, and there was something loving about them too, something dependable.

  “Let’s take your dog out to herd some sheep,” Fran said. She reached up into the closet and grabbed a flask of brandy, then put on her safari hat and cape. “You have a couple of hours?”

  Fran tossed her a long leather leash that wrapped around a person’s shoulder. “A shepherd’s leash,” she said. “You can have the dog on it, and keep your hands free.”

  Patricia clipped it on over her shoulders and around her waist, a seven-foot leather leash that hung from the side. Fran opened one of the crates and Sam, one of her older border collies, zoomed out. Then she handed Patricia a can of bug spray and a flashlight.

  They walked out of the farmhouse together and over to the pasture gate, Patricia stopping along the way to get Dave from the car and attach the leash to his collar.

  The sheep—there were more than a hundred—saw the dogs and began to gather in a block and move away. Fran opened the gate. She told Sam to stay, and he did, ears up, waiting. She looked over at Dave.

  “Let him go,” Fran said. “Sam is here for backup. He knows the drill. Trust him. You know, at the heart of it, the dog and the sheep know what to do. Sometimes we just have to remind the dogs we’re part of it.”

  Fran turned to Sam, and said, “Get out there,” and he tore off and ran wide and to the left of the sheep.

  Patricia leaned over and patted Dave. “Be good,” she said, and she unclipped the leather lead. Dave looked up at her, as if he could hardly believe it, and then took off. At first, the sheep started to run, but Dave ran wide of them and got behind them. Fran yelled at Sam to come bye, and he came over to the right of the sheep, so they had nowhere to go but toward Fran and Patricia. They came rushing through the gate, Dave on one side, Sam on the other.

  Fran said, “We’re bracing them. They can’t really go anywhere but straight ahead.”

  The sheep, flanked by the two border collies, picked up steam and ran out behind the farmhouse and down a path through some woods—the two women walking rapidly behind—and then into a vast, open unfenced pasture on the far side of the house.

  Fran whistled and Sam dropped down, almost vanishing into the grass.

  She looked at Patricia. The sun was setting, the hills and pasture shrouded in mist. There was a rich smell of manure and fresh grass.

  “Our ancestors did it,” Fran said. “There’s nobody in human history that didn’t herd sheep with dogs at one point or another. Except maybe the Eskimos.”

  The wind rustled the grass, and there was a chill in the air. Dave walked steadily along the flank of the flock, watching the sheep closely. Patricia was struck by how calm he was.

  “It isn’t him who’s calmed down, it’s you,” Fran offered. “The dog is just a mirror. He reads you. You’ve trained him and so you’ve set him free from all the craziness we put into their lives. People don’t get that. It isn’t them; it’s us.”

  Then she looked out at the sheep. “They’re trying to settle,” Fran said. “When the sheep settle, the dog calms down if they’re any good. It’s where the dog and sheep both want to be. That’s their natural position. The sheep grazing, the dog keeping an eye on things.” Sam lay still, watching, as if he were teaching Dave, who was moving, but slowly, with authority.

  “Tell him to lie down.”

  Patricia looked up and shouted, a bit louder than she had meant: “Dave. Down!” Dave slowed, turned and looked at her, as if he didn’t quite believe it.

  “Easy,” said Fran softly. “Convince him you know what you’re doing. Pretend.”

  Patricia raised her hand, and then dropped it. “Down,” she said, so quietly she couldn’t imagine that he’d heard it.

  But although he was at least a hundred yards away, Dave dropped to the ground. The sheep slowed, and then lowered their heads. They spread out and began grazing. It seemed as if they had been waiting for this to happen all along. The reddish sun dropped below the hills behind the sheep, and Patricia almost wanted to cry; it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

  She called out to Dave, and to her surprise, he came running over to her, touched his nose against her knee, then turned and ran back behind the sheep.

  She looked over to Fran, who was watching the sheep, nodding.

  How wonderful and strange, Patricia thought to herself. Almost beyond understanding.

  That this is my world. And I have found it.

  Old Dogs

  JAMES AND KIPPER ROUNDED THE HILL AT THE TOP OF THE pasture—it was little used now, and overgrown with weeds and scrub—to make their daily check on the farm’s boundaries and fences. The two of them would have made a lovely pastoral painting, the still-handsome, blue-eyed, tall, and craggy old farmer with his white shock of windswept hair, and the intense and purposeful low-to-the-ground black-and-white border collie, moving rapidly but off kilter on his three legs.

  James and Kipper had been patrolling the farm and its sheep and cows for many years now, twice a day, rain or shine. There was little to patrol these days, just a dozen sheep, mostly older ones James couldn’t bear to send off to market.

  Kipper knew every inch of the farm, and if there was so much as a new piece of paper blown by the wind, he would go to it, sniff it, mark it. The industrious dog was better than any land surveyor, thought James.

  It was Kipper who alerted him now that something was wrong. His ears went back on his head, which he lowered almost level to the ground, dropping into a quiet crouch. He let out a low growl, and the fur on his back stood straight up.

  James scanned the trees and bushes in front of him. His eyes were not what they used to be. He reached into his pocket and put his spectacles on. He saw nothing.

  He turned and looked at Kipper, following the old dog’s nose straight toward a tangle of old fence posts and barbed wire. Then he saw it.

  “Hold it, Kipper,” he said. “Steady there. Be careful.” He took a step forward, a small one.

  THERE WAS A TIME when James could stalk right up the hill without taking a deep breath, but now it took more determination. He paused two or three times on the way up, and Kipper paused with him, sitting or lying down when he stopped. He didn’t know if this wa
s a courtesy, or if Kipper was tired too. After all, he was twelve now.

  “Old dogs,” James liked to whisper, “two old dogs.”

  The walks were still magic. The smell of the barns, the hay, the flowers, and air, the manure, flitting shadows, the soil, the grip of the wind, the powerful formations of clouds steaming by, the spectacle of the sun fighting through and streaming across the valley.

  He could have gone to Florida, like the other farmers, or moved into town, into one of those little ugly split-levels that were built, unlike farms, to be maintenance free. Or he could’ve gone to North Carolina, or into one of those assisted-care places where you gave them all your money and you took a bus to the market and doctor’s appointments.

  But he would truly rather be dead than to be in an ugly little house, or dependent on so many other people. And what would he do in retirement? There seemed to him nothing to do in that situation but die. How many stories had he heard of the old farmers who sold off their land, went off to trailers and condos, and were dead within weeks and months? A man had to have a purpose, had to have something meaningful to do.

  And there was Kipper to think of.

  He and Kipper were like extensions of each other; each reacted to the other’s thoughts, read the other’s mind, worked together in a seamless ballet.

  Still, James had always expected that he and Helen would be facing old age together, and it had never crossed his mind that she would leave him like that, so quickly, so completely. Helen had been a farmwife, just as he was a farmer. She took care of the house, he took care of everything else, and the two of them had worked hard decade after decade, side by side.

  So now it was just him and Kipper, and if Kipper left, then maybe it would be time to sell the farm and go live somewhere else. He would think about that when the time came.

  In the mornings, when he and Kipper took to the fences, he heard a thousand ghosts from the past, and he wondered if the dog did too. Cows, steers, dairy and beef, goats, five hundred sheep. Potatoes and corn, alfalfa and grain. Once, he had two helpers, and it took the three of them a full day just to get the animals moved, watered, tended, and fed, to keep water troughs up, to move the manure, run the tractor, fix the fences, patch the barn. There was never enough time.

  Now, it took him and Kipper but a half hour to walk the pasture, and then they were done for the day. And the only sounds were the lonely cries of the sheep, the wind, and the distant sounds of trucks whining along faraway highways.

  ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE YARDS AHEAD of him, he saw what Kipper had seen, and he froze. It was a beautiful, awful thing—a huge coyote caught in the barbed wire and woodpile that James had dumped there. This coyote was different than some of the scrawny ones he had seen over the years. He was enormous, his ruff thick. His eyes were large, intense, almost fluorescent. Those piercing gray eyes stared coolly right into his.

  James saw the animal had struggled—he was bloody all over. But he was no longer fighting now. He was either resigned to his fate or else completely exhausted. He showed no fear, no desire to run. He didn’t bare his teeth or growl.

  As he looked closer, James saw a trickle of blood coming from one of his nostrils. He had been in the wire a long time. This, James thought, might be the one picking off his sheep. He had seen those tracks, and they were large.

  James could tell the coyote was old. He could see it in his eyes and in his white muzzle. He had a quiet dignity about him—James had seen so many animals panic, but this one seemed poised, ready for whatever might come.

  James couldn’t leave this creature to die like that in the wire. He couldn’t let him walk away or escape, either, to kill his sheep, or the animals of some other farmer. The rules were clear.

  “Let’s go back, Kipper. We have to get the rifle.”

  Kipper would be no match for this coyote if things went wrong and the animal got loose. Border collies were workers, not fighters. The fact that Kip had only three legs didn’t seem to slow him down at all. He had worked every day of his life, including the day when he mistook Peter Elmer’s tractor coming down the hill for a sheep and tried to herd it into the pasture, where he thought it belonged. It was his first failure as a working dog, and it cost him a leg, chewed up in the mower blades. After that, there had been some awkward moments with the sheep, when Kipper couldn’t quite pivot and turn like he used to, but he quickly recovered, and he was still smarter and faster than any of the dozen or so Tunis sheep that James still kept on the farm. But James had seen Kipper nearly get killed countless times—kicked by donkeys and cows, tangled in barbed wire, chasing after trucks and tractors, butted by rams and sheep. He had no doubt the dog would throw himself into the coyote’s jaws if it went after James or threatened the farm or the sheep.

  James called sharply to the dog and began to head back to the farmhouse. Kipper kept turning around, then moving reluctantly down the hill, keeping himself between the coyote and James at all times.

  BEFORE THE FARM WOUND DOWN, James had lost a lot of sheep to coyotes, and he was always trying to figure out what to do about it. He never quite had.

  He could electrify the fence, which was expensive. But James was no longer making any money from the farm. The old farmhouse was in urgent need of repairs to the roof and the plumbing, and the big barn was about to fall over into the road.

  James hated coming out of the farmhouse in the morning and finding eviscerated carcasses scattered by the barn. In the old days, he would have sat out with a rifle and a big electric torch and picked off a couple of the coyotes. Or Kipper would have heard them coming and run them off. But Kipper, like James, didn’t hear as well anymore and didn’t move as fast. Nor did James want to put him at risk. The last carcass he wanted to find out on the hillside one morning was Kipper’s.

  James wanted to tell Helen about the coyote trapped up in the wire. She had been dead nearly three years, but he still expected to find her standing in the kitchen somehow, his coffee and toast hot and ready, after his morning walk with Kipper.

  He knew Helen would feel sympathy for the coyote—she didn’t take to hunters much—and say, “He’s just doing his work like you’re doing yours.” He knew she wouldn’t like the idea of his going up there to shoot him. She was nervous around guns.

  But he was a farmer, and if something was threatening the farm, the farm came first.

  James walked into the kitchen, Kipper alongside, and looked at Helen’s apron, still hanging on its hook. He couldn’t bear to take it down. Kipper jumped up onto the sofa and looked out the window, up into the pasture, where the coyote lay.

  James touched Helen’s apron, remembering her last days, her last words, as she gripped his arm. “Oh, Luke,” she said, calling out to their lost son, his life given for his country in a war James didn’t understand. “Oh, Luke.”

  James always imagined that Helen had never quite forgiven him for Luke. James and the boy had never really connected. Luke grew up angry, resenting the farm, as if it had taken something from him. He never wanted a farming life, wanted to get away as soon as possible. Helen always said James was more patient with the animals than with his own son.

  Luke had had a rough time as a teenager—drinking, fights, trouble in school. When he was arrested for shoplifting at a local department store, James told him he needed to go into the Army, because he thought it would be good for him. In James’s time, the Army was thought to build character. Somehow he missed that the world had changed. He didn’t see it until it was too late. Luke was killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam, and Helen was never really the same. When she talked about the old men who sent the young ones off to die, he always felt she was talking about him.

  James had never mentioned Luke after the funeral, not to Helen, not to anybody. Once a year, they went to the cemetery together, and he held her hand while she cried.

  Then they found those lumps in her chest, and she was dead six months later.

  Kipper was his only consolation, the only creature i
n the world, he thought, that he had never disappointed, and who always—always—would rather be with him than with anyone else.

  JAMES SHOOK OFF HIS MELANCHOLY. He had a job to do. He went into the back closet and took out his old .30-06, his deer gun. One quick round in the head ought to do it. Then the old bastard would not bother anybody’s sheep anymore. Though he was a beautiful animal, he had to admit that. He told Kipper to stay in the house—the dog was whining and rushing at the door, but he pulled it shut.

  James checked the cartridges, slid one in, pulled the breech, checked the safety. He would get as close as he could, try to put one between the eyes, as he had done for rabid raccoons, wounded deer hit by cars, even a sick stray dog or two. Up here on the farm, this is what you did.

  James’s legs throbbed, and he was sweating through his chamois shirt. The morning had started out cool, but the sun was strong now. Kipper, outraged to be left behind, was barking and protesting loudly from the house.

  James opened the pasture gate and made his way up the hill, about a thousand yards on a gentle slope. He held the rifle safely, pointed down to the ground, but he had the safety off. He needed to be ready to shoot. He hoped he could shoot straight. It had been a few years since he had used the rifle, and his hands were not so steady.

  At the top, behind a stand of pine trees, was the pile of wire and posts where the coyote had gotten himself snagged. James turned the corner and was startled to see that the coyote was closer to him than he expected, maybe five feet. Somehow, he’d thought he was farther back in the woods.

  The coyote turned to him, looked calmly in his eyes, then looked down the hill. God, thought James, he was a sight, a regal thing. Especially up close. He had the most powerful eyes.

  He knew what the coyote was looking at even before he heard the barking. Kipper was tearing up the hill, head down, ears back. James hadn’t checked the front windows, he’d probably left one open. For that matter, he wouldn’t be surprised if the damned dog had gotten hold of some tools and unscrewed the hinges on the back door.