Nop's Hope

by Donald McCaig

  The very next day, Lewis got the motor home started and pulled it to the dooryard gate so Beverly could put the inside in order. He’d wash the exterior as soon as the day warmed enough so his hoses didn’t freeze. He walked Nop out into the pasture where Penny had trained.

  For the first minutes of his outrun, Nop felt wonderful, like he was a puppy again. But when he came up behind the woolies, his tongue was out a mile. Woolies eyed the dog nervously and one ewe stamped her foot, daring him to come on, but it was just a bluff, and the wise old dog slid toward them.

  Though Nop took each of Lewis’s flanking commands, Lewis saw how winded he was and called him off.

  That afternoon, in forty-degree weather, Lewis put on his oldest coveralls and with a bucket of warm water and ammonia, he cleaned off the exterior of the motor home, scraping bird droppings off the windshield while Beverly’s vacuum hummed inside.

  Next morning, soon as Lewis finished feeding, he trained Nop for fifteen minutes and then another long walk. Later, he drove into Strasburg and talked to a young fellow who’d worked for him before, asked him to come out and feed the cows and sheep “and put out a little kibble for the barn cats.”

  That evening, Lewis and Nop walked so long they came home by starlight. Beverly said, “I believe you’re losing a little weight Lewis.”

  He said, “Pass me more of that stew.”

  Beverly had to go into Winchester to get her hair done and ask someone to take her Sunday school class. She asked Preacher Shumway to look in on her mother.

  “Of course,” the preacher said. “But Beverly, will Penny …?

  Beverly said, “Don’t you tell me it isn’t going to work. I don’t have a single expectation. Lewis and me are just going out west to a sheepdog trial, that’s all. That’s why we bought that motor home in the first place.”

  “I’ll pray for you. All of you.”

  And Beverly answered, with some of her old asperity, that if he wanted to pray, wasn’t anybody going to stop him, but the Burkeholders had got on alright in the world so far without his prayers and she didn’t reckon they’d need any now.

  That night, over supper, she told Lewis what she had said and giggled about it. “Of course, I’ll have to call and apologize.”

  Nop was on his blanket behind the stove. The fire crackled in the wood stove. That night, for the first time since their granddaughter died, Lewis and Beverly Burkeholder were together as man and wife. As always, each wondered afterward why they’d been apart so long.

  THURSDAY MORNING, well before sunrise, Lewis Burkeholder toted Beverly’s brown paper bags from the house to the motor home’s kitchenette. “Beverly,” he said, “there’ll probably be some supermarkets in Arizona. I think they got supermarkets in the west now.”

  Nop traveled underneath Beverly’s feet with his snout on the transmission hump. The road rumbled by under his body and gears whirled in their fluids and tractor trailers boomed past and sometimes Lewis would turn on the radio to check the weather. Younger, Nop had traveled thousands of miles to sheepdog trials and he rather enjoyed traveling, meeting new scents, new dogs, new sheep, and he enjoyed the trial too, the risk and adventure.

  The motor home buzzed down I-81 at fifty-five miles per hour. It handled like Lewis’s heavy farm truck only the steering and brakes were better.

  “We’ll pick up US40 outside of Knoxville and I figure we’ll find a place to stop somewhere between Nashville and Memphis.”

  Beverly said, “I hope Penny won’t be upset to see us.”

  “Well, if she is, she is. I’ve got as much right as anybody to enter a sheepdog trial.”

  “Don’t get huffy, dear.”

  At noon, Beverly went in back to make sandwiches. “Would you like toast?”

  Lewis’ mildly nervous about the prospect of someone cooking toast while traveling fifty-five miles an hour down the interstate, said, no thanks, untoasted was fine.

  They pulled into an RV camp at dusk and as soon as Lewis hooked up the power and the plumbing, he put Nop on a leash and strolled down to the muddy creek that bordered the place. “Now don’t you go drinkin’ out of that,” Lewis said. “We’ve got home water in the motor home.”

  That second morning, they set out before dawn, didn’t stop except for gas and fifteen minutes at noon to let Nop stretch his legs, and found a campground west of Amarillo, Texas. Beverly stretched while Nop sniffed the ornamental bushes planted between the parking spots. The sky was enormous over the plains and a thin line of sunset lay orange along the horizon. “My,” Beverly said. “Oh my.”

  Nop was used to more exercise, and that night he prowled his sleeping shelf until Lewis told him to cut it out. Nop lay awake late, listening to the howl of the coyotes, so far away and faint no human could have known what they were. Nop knew.

  Big dog trials are all the same. Motor homes and campers in a line behind the course and the awnings are out and kids are running through the guy wires and the dogs are chained underneath or in crates out back, and in the dusk a few people are walking their dogs, as they sniff their sniffs, trump the previous dog’s ace.

  No big trial is the same. Though the rules are standardized and judges, for the most part, consistent, sheep vary tremendously. In Arizona they were wild range merinos, and if a man came near them, they’d trample one another in a panic to flee.

  And each course is different. Some face a steep hill, some are flat, some like sagebrushy Saila, are rumpled and irregular, so the man can always see the sheep, but the dog cannot. This evening, a few handlers were out on the sagebrush plains stooping to dog height, trying to guess what their dogs will see and sense tomorrow under the Arizona sun.

  “Look, Lewis. There’s Penny’s truck.”

  “She’s been on some muddy roads. I don’t see Penny.”

  Parked between an Ohio camper and a motor home with Mississippi plates, Lewis leveled his vehicle while Nop wandered around renewing old acquaintances. There were dogs here Nop had run against when they were just “started”—two-year-old youngsters—with no more idea of a trial course than the dog in the moon. Now gray-snouted dogs looked up as Nop walked by and thumped their tails.

  “Lewis, hello. Damn it’s good to see you. Is that Beverly in there?”

  “Uh-huh. Couldn’t keep her away. How are you, Miz Harwood?” Lewis touched the brim of his Texas hat.

  “Oh, Lewis, don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud.” And Ethel Harwood gave him a good squeeze. She touched Nop’s head. “And how are you, Mr. Nop? I swear he hasn’t aged a bit.”

  “He’s slowed down some, but so have I. Have you seen Penny?”

  “She was here earlier but she and some others went out to work dogs. She and that Hope dog make a good team, but they didn’t have much luck out the first go-round. Does she know you’re here?”

  Lewis blew between his lips. “Don’t reckon she does.”

  The trial’s host said he was real pleased Lewis could get out here this year and urged Beverly to get into the chow line for some “real Arizona chili.” “ ’Course there’s burgers if you’d prefer,” he added.

  Lewis talked dogs, gravely accepted a few belated condolences. “I meant to write, Lewis, but I never got around to it.”

  The host asked Lewis, was the food okay. And Lewis said sure, sure it was. Driving all day had ruined his appetite.

  Handlers and dogs packed the back of Ransome Barlow’s pickup. Penny sat on the far side of the cab, pale faced in the dashlights. When Hope jumped out he lifted his snout and beelined right to where Lewis and Beverly were standing.

  “Hullo Hope, Hey Penny! Over here, Penny!”

  Penny came directly to her mother and father and asked, “What are you doing here?”

  Lewis swallowed the first thing he thought to say; second thing too. As he got older, he had got a firmer grip on his temper. “Well,” he said slowly, “Beverly and I thought we’d come out and I’d run Nop, see how much he’s still got in him. We haven’t been off the farm—
”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Penny said. “I was just so surprised to see you. Wait’ll you see Hope run. He’s tremendous. I had him out tonight on Navaho sheep and they got up in the rocks and those rank sheep ran another dog off but they took one look at Hope and filed out as meek as lambs.”

  Beverly’s face was wet when she embraced her daughter. “Honey, honey. Old place sure hasn’t been the same without you.”

  Penny inspected the motor home, like she really cared, like she actually did think her mother’s cheerful curtains were “terrific,” like she’d never been inside the motor home before in her life. She said, “This is exactly like a sailboat,” and then, “Of course I’ve never been inside a sailboat but I’ll bet this is how they are.” Beverly poured ice tea, but Penny wouldn’t sit, said, “No, no,” she could only stay a minute, and told about lambing sheep in Texas. And when that subject was exhausted, she made a lateral move into the subject of mohair goats, how they had to be housed after they were shorn or they’d catch pneumonia.

  Beverly said, “But, honey, how have you been? Are you doin’ okay? Are you in good spirits?”

  “Yeah, Mom, fine.” And Penny kissed her mother on the cheek and said she had to go, and Lewis thought to ask her where, in the night, she had to go but again held his tongue. Instead he said, “We’ll have plenty of time to talk tomorrow.”

  Once she’d gone, silence rushed into that motor home like a flood tide. On his shelf, Nop raised his head, and maybe he was just responding to some distant coyote when he got a hot look in his eyes, and howled.

  “Hush up now,” Lewis said. “Don’t you get started.”

  Nop was abashed and scuffed his bedding, pretending some other dog, not he, had raised the hackles of every other dog in the handlers’ encampment. One or two other dogs had taken up Nop’s howl, and shouts—“Roy, Hush,” “Kep, you quit that racket”—echoed until it fell quiet again.

  As the Burkeholders readied for bed, the moon came up, gleaming on silver dog trailers and silent motor homes. Lewis lay next to his wife as western moonlight flooded through the window over the tiny kitchen table.

  “So this is Arizona,” Beverly said.

  THE NEXT MORNING, the first dogs ran as soon as there was light to see. Lewis was scheduled to run at noon, Penny in the late afternoon. After breakfast, Lewis went outside with a cup of coffee. It was cool yet and the merinos were flying whenever a dog put too much pressure on them.

  Ethel Harwood found Penny beside Ransome Barlow, critiquing each run.

  “I’d hit him a couple points for that,” Barlow was saying as a young dog swerved too tight at the post.

  “Excuse me, Penny. Could I have a word with you?”

  “It’ll have to wait Miz Harwood. After this run I promised to go out back and put out sheep.”

  “Tonight,” Ethel said, “we’re all having dinner in town.”

  And she didn’t budge, kept the pressure on until Penny said, “Sure. I just hope we have something to celebrate.” Penny added, “Hope. Or Nop.”

  Left to their own devices, sheep graze in the cool of the early morning and when it heats up, around ten o’clock, they bed down in the shade. These trial sheep had been penned all morning with no chance to graze and now it was hot and they were pushed onto the course, hungry and cranky.

  One of Nop’s sheep had lost an eye to pinkeye as a lamb, and though the trial organizers looked over the sheep pretty well, since nobody was expecting a half-blind sheep, nobody saw her.

  When Nop’s bunch was released at the top end, three sheep started to graze, but the one-eyed sheep took off down the fence line, followed by a young ewe who admired decisiveness.

  It was hard going from the get-go—that one-eyed sheep was polarized between fight and flight. Sometimes, losing sight of the dog behind her, she’d bolt, and when Nop headed her, she’d defy him. Time and time again, Nop regrouped his sheep, but he couldn’t get far.

  “Time,” the scorekeeper called. Nop came off the course and clambered stiffly into the big water tub and lay there, his fur wafting in the water.

  Lewis whooshed water over Nop’s back. The fellow watching wasn’t saying anything, had his arms folded, so Lewis didn’t say anything either, just cooled Nop down. The fellow had dark black hair and a sallow complexion and his cowboy shirt was going on its third day.

  When Nop stepped out of the tub he was so whipped he didn’t shake himself dry. “I’m Ransome Barlow,” the fellow said. “We never met. I got that Bute dog that’s tearin’ up the circuit this year. Dog had three other owners this side of the ocean. Wasn’t nobody could do anything with him.”

  “I’ll be watching for him,” Lewis said. Nop gave a feeble shake, another one.

  “I heard a lot about this Nop dog. I wished I could have seen him in his prime.”

  “Where you from, Mr. Barlow?”

  “No need to call me Mister. I come from Johnson City, Iowa. That Hope dog of Penny’s, he out of Nop?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t have to call me sir, neither. I vote Democrat.”

  “You’ll excuse me, Mr. Barlow. I got to put my dog up.”

  The gent didn’t budge. “When that spotty-faced ewe broke off like that, why didn’t you call the dog on, show her who was runnin’ the show?”

  Lewis said, “She was part blind. Nop was handling her best he could.”

  “I fancy a bit more control on a dog.”

  Back in the motor home, Lewis toweled Nop dry and tied him in the shade.

  Beverly gave him a pat and Nop rolled on his back for a scratch. She said, “I thought Nop did real good.”

  “Just the luck of the draw.”

  By four o’clock, Roger Schroeder and Don were holding down first place with 92 points (they’d lost points on the lift and pen), and Bruce Fogt and Molly were scant points behind.

  Ransome Barlow strutted to the post, hips pushed out in front of him like a teenager on a Saturday night. At his side, his dog Bute was pure tension, like he might do something dangerous.

  Some people said Ransome Barlow’s Bute was “mechanical”—certainly Ransome commanded him every step of the way, whistles tumbling over each other like a mountain stream. And the black brute took the commands too, every one, step to the left, half step to the right, and Ransome steered that dog through the course, but Bute was so keen Ransome kept the brakes on, whistling his “Take Time” and his “Steady” and his “Stand.”

  Lewis turned to a Texas handler. “Man can handle a dog,” he said.

  “You betcha,” the Texan replied.

  As soon as he finished, Ransome left the course. He ignored the cooling-off tub, chained Bute up, and returned as they posted his score: 95½. His only remark was, “Where’d he get that half point from?”

  And that’s how the long afternoon went. People ran dogs, talked dogs, watched dogs. Those who’d run well were modestly proud, those who ran badly found excuses.

  When Penny came on the course with Hope, the light was falling, and out in the sagebrush those dim brownish gray shapes were sheep. She spoke to the dog at her side for a long time, whispering.

  Of the dogs that ran that day, Hope was the youngest, but you wouldn’t know it by the way he went out, strong and quick. He started coming in tight on his outrun but Penny whistled him out.

  In the horse trailer, the judge murmured, “That’ll be a point,” and the secretary deducted one point from Penny’s 100.

  Penny whistled Hope down, right at twelve o’clock, which looked neat, but the sheep were heavy to the left and they drifted that way.

  “Two off the lift,” the judge said.

  Penny asked Hope to come around and the dog brought the sheep very nicely down the course, except for a hesitation at the fetch gates. (“Two points,” the judge noted.) At the turn, Hope came around on his sheep nicely, balanced so perfectly the judge turned to his secretary and asked, “Do you know his breeding?” and the secretary said, “He’s not an Ariz
ona dog.”

  Hope had one of his ears forward, the other cocked back for Penny’s command. The sheep hit the drive gate dead center and Hope knew Penny’s whistle was too urgent, but took it against his better judgment.

  “Two points off,” the judge remarked. “No, make that a point, she’s got control again.”

  Hope settled his sheep, and, nicely, they crossed the course, bang through the crossdrive gate, and this time, the command was timed perfectly. Penny waited until the sheep were near (horned ewe in the lead) before she swung the pen gate wide and stepped behind it. Hope pushed on and Penny told Hope, “lie down,” which he did, relieving pressure, and the horned ewe had a moment to think just when she shouldn’t have been given one.

  “The dog was right,” the judge said. “I’ll have a half point for that.”

  Hope saw that the world was getting away from him, that things were going to break bad, and stood without command and simply leaned forward and the horned ewe thought, Oh, dear, Oh dear, and went into the pen and her mates followed.

  Penny dragged the gate shut: one minute remaining.

  When the sheep came into the shedding ring Penny would try to take off the last sheep in line.

  Crook in hand, Penny stood on one side of the sheep and Hope slipped around to the other.

  The sheep got strung out single file, and Hope cocked himself to come through, but Penny feared the sheep were getting away and stopped the lead sheep from escaping. So they bunched up again.

  “How much time has she?” the judge asked.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “What a shame.”

  The sheep were a solid lump of wooley sheepflesh, swirling, and though Penny tried to separate them, they were like commuters jammed in a subway car, nothing could break them apart. Penny jabbed at the sheep with her stick, pushed her knee at them but unlike the Dead Sea, they did not part and when finally, in desperation, she called Hope in, the dog charged and the sheep broke, but Hope cut off two sheep instead of one, and before Penny could decide what to do, the judge called, “Time.”