Lewis felt the weight of Nop’s head on his knee. When Lewis scratched behind Nop’s ears, he touched scarred and broken tissue and wondered how many fights Nop had fought he’d never know about.
Nop climbed up on the seat and Lewis let him get away with it. As the VW puttered north, Nop scootched across the VW’s emergency brake: his head—his chest, until Lewis had his dog entirely in his lap. When he looked down, he saw the steady glow of Nop’s eyes.
Walnut Hall, where the Bluegrass Sheep Dog Trials are held, is one of the famous Kentucky horse farms. Years ago, a dispute between heirs divided the property. Half of it was sold to the state and now attracts thousands of tourists as the “Kentucky Horse Farm.” Walnut Hall, still private, raises standardbred trotters and pacers.
There were lights in the stone gatekeeper’s house but nobody came out to stop him. Lewis thought they probably let farm staff use the gatehouse. Probably they didn’t even have a gatekeeper anymore.
The neat black single-lane asphalt road went on and on. To Lewis, whose farm lanes were all dirt, those asphalt lanes were the most impressive feature of Walnut Hall. The lane was bordered by gargantuan black walnuts. Grazing horses were protected from windfallen branches by neat enclosures around each tree.
White board fences. The moonlight lay on the bluegrass pasture, tidy as any putting green. No milkweed or Canada thistles anywhere. The farm office was locked up and quiet. During the day it was hectic with traders and breeders and oil sheiks and Texas men who loved fast horses.
A statue of the trotter Guy Axworthy dominated the horse cemetery. Guy Axworthy had been Walnut Hall’s most famous sire.
Lewis wished Mark’s radio worked. It must be after ten o’clock.
Signs pointed the way to the SHEEP DOG TRIALS down in the yearling pasture where they’d held these trials for the past twenty years.
The Bluegrass is the toughest and oldest stockdog trial in the country. Each year the farm buys eight hundred Texas sheep and brings them north, wild sheep who’ve never even seen a dog. After the trial, the sheep are sold. In ’72 Lewis had taken a truckload home himself and they proved to be pretty good animals.
Handlers and their dogs flew in from Arizona and Texas and Washington state. Most years men came from Canada, but this year the Canadian National conflicted.
Big trees, open pasture. The handlers’ camper park was directly behind the trial ground and while the dogs ran, spectators could drag out lawn chairs and watch in real comfort. On hot days—and June could get hot in Lexington—any shade was welcome.
Lewis recognized many of the rigs from other trials. Some of the campers still had lights inside though most were dark. Somebody was walking dogs in the big pasture where the dogs had run today and would run again tomorrow. The dog walker wore a cowboy hat and walked stiffly and Lewis thought it might be Pope Robertson, who’d won here several years.
He switched off. The smell of hot oil. “Nop,” he said, “you are awful darn heavy. Will you please climb off me?”
Nop bounded out and marked the VW’s tire. He smelled grass, sheep, the starry night, dogs. His tail plumed.
Stink was chained to the back step of the Burkholder camper. Nop circled, sniffing, not quite daring to believe. He whined. He yipped. He yawned and pranced around. He pawed at her shoulder.
“Nop, is it thee? Oh, Nop.” And she was whining too and smelling all his history.
Nop was too excited to say hello. He emitted tiny yaps.
In the square of the doorway, “Lewis? Oh, Lewis, you found Nop. Oh …” And Beverly started to cry.
She hugged Lewis and stared at Nop and cried harder when she saw how filthy he was and how thin. “Every rib shows,” she said.
And Penny gave Lewis a careful hug, because she was pretty big now. “Oh, Daddy.” She said she’d take Nop down to the cattle tank and clean him up. “You just sit and rest. Oh.”
Beverly had gotten used to Penny in the modest camper, but Lewis and she excused each other around the little two-burner hot plate and the refrigerator until she said, “Lewis, you sit at the table and I’ll serve you. I suppose it was Nop that got your good pants so dirty.” With Lewis seated, things went smoother.
Beverly told Lewis that Mark had called. He’d had an uneventful trip home.
Lewis told Beverly what he’d heard about Grady Gumm’s death.
Beverly said she was sorry and, coming from her, it was probably the truth. Beverly tried to be a good Christian.
Lewis warmed his hands with his cup of coffee and told about his search. He didn’t describe Elite Kennels in detail because Beverly got real upset whenever animals suffered.
He took both her hands to tell about stealing the fire truck and breaking into Detweiler Labs. “I don’t know what came over me, Beverly. I couldn’t make them listen. It seemed …”
“You got Nop back, didn’t you?” Her face was stern. Lewis had never known Beverly to break the law and he’d been worried what she might say, but she didn’t think a thing of it. After all these years, Beverly could still surprise him. “Did Penny tell you? She made a real nice run with Stink this morning. Missed both drive panels but with these wild sheep they won’t count that too much against her. Lewis, she may have qualified.”
“Oh yeah?” Lewis laughed. “That’s fine. There aren’t many women who ever qualified here. Ada Karrasch was Reserve Champion a couple years back but Ada’s exceptional. I’m real proud of Penny. How’s she feeling?”
“Pretty good. She’s uncomfortable, of course, carrying all that extra weight around, but she doesn’t get the morning sickness anymore. Two weeks. She’s a little impatient for the baby to come.”
“They got a name picked out?”
“Well, they’re partial to Lisa if it’s a girl. If it’s a boy, Mark will call him Scottie.”
“What’s wrong with ‘Lewis’ for a name?”
Beverly laughed like Lewis had been kidding though he’d been kidding only partly.
“That Whitenaur. He’s here.”
Lewis wasn’t awfully surprised. “He qualify?”
“That little bitch of his, Bit O’ Scot? Lewis, she’s a beauty. They didn’t announce qualifiers yet because they had eighty dogs to run and didn’t get through all of them, but Bit O’ Scot made the best run today. I don’t know how such a nasty man can run such a fine dog.”
“It happens that way sometimes.”
By Bluegrass custom, the trial is open to anyone who will pay the thirty-dollar entry fee. On the first day and, sometimes, the morning of the second day, dogs are qualified. The top twenty dogs run in the finals.
Beverly stirred her coffee. “When I entered Nop and Stink, you said I should pull Nop, that it was a foolish waste of money.”
Penny was just outside. “Don’t you jump up on me, you wet thing. I don’t care how happy you are.”
“What are you telling me, Beverly?”
“There’s eight dogs yet to qualify tomorrow morning. Nop is one of them.”
Lewis shook his head. “He’s not ready, Beverly, and neither am I. I don’t remember when I’ve been so tired as I am. It’s time for me to hit the hay.”
But Lewis didn’t get to sleep right away. Penny had to tell him about Stink’s run. “Stink was so fine, Daddy. Her hips were hurting her real bad. Those are some tough sheep out there. She was worn out when she got them in the pen, but she put them in there.”
And then, once they were in their beds, Nop set up a terrible howling outside, baying just like he was a wild dog and, of course, other dogs picked up on it, barking and carrying on, and Lewis figured they’d get no peace until he brought Nop right into the camper. Nop lay in the aisle all night, satisfied, so long as he could wake from time to time to touch Lewis’s bare arm with the tip of his nose.
Sunday dawned bright and clear, and soon the air in the camper park smelled of bacon and coffee. Handlers exercised their dogs in the pastures. Most of the handlers knew each other. So, too, most of the dogs.
Before Lewis finished his breakfast, Ethel Harwood was banging on the camper door and, naturally, she wanted to know the whole story.
“What about Whitenaur?”
“With Grady dead, it’d be hard to prove anything against him. Of course, he likely doesn’t know Grady’s dead.”
“He shouldn’t be allowed to run dogs. There’s rules in the Sheep Dog Association. Lewis, you should get him banned.”
“He’s not his father’s son.”
She shook her head sadly.
“Thanks, Ethel. If it wasn’t for you seein’ Nop at that rodeo, I wouldn’t have him today. You’re a good friend.”
Ethel blushed, lit a cigarette and smeared it with lipstick. Stubbed it out. She said this year’s sheep were even worse than last year. She said (as she said every year) that the Bluegrass people should work their sheep a couple times before the show. “They’re too wild and wooly,” that’s what she said.
And Lewis said (as he said every year), “It’s just as tough for everybody.”
They talked handlers and they talked dogs. Neither of them wanted to dwell on Lewis’s long search. Running dogs and talking dogs—why else had they come to the Bluegrass?
After, Lewis wandered around the grounds greeting old friends. The stockdog world is small and many handlers knew Nop had been missing. They examined his scars and thin condition and sympathized. Lewis didn’t talk about Doug Whitenaur. He didn’t know quite what to say.
Workers setting up soft-drink stands and hotdog booths. One of the horse barns was filling with craftspeople, their trinkets and wares.
The barn behind the judge’s stand was reserved for handlers and dogs. Some handlers kept their animals in these stalls until the very last minute so they wouldn’t get overexcited by crowd noises and smells.
Nop trotted along at Lewis’s heels, taking it all in.
Big Steve Brown, Walnut Hall’s farm manager, shook Lewis’s hand and said there’d been a couple real good runs yesterday, that Penny looked real good, real good, and they were going to start at eight on the dot so they could finish qualifications and get right on with the finals. “Good luck,” he said.
The handlers who met behind the judge’s stand were looking sharp: neatly blocked Stetsons, pearl-buttoned, wide-yoked western shirts, gabardine slacks. Most carried long Scottish shepherd’s crooks. Some wore three-piece western suits and ties.
Doug Whitenaur looked terrible. His hands twitched, his eyes were muddy, he needed a shave. Perhaps his sport jacket was meant to be daring. It was merely shoddy. His hair was greased back, defying what had been a very good haircut. Doug Whitenaur didn’t look like he belonged with honest men.
Lewis stared at him, angry and puzzled. But Whitenaur wouldn’t meet Lewis’s eyes.
One handler disputed a course rule with the judge. He argued that a sheep dog trial is meant to replicate real farmwork: gathering, fetching sheep, bringing them through the gates and, finally, penning them in the farmyard. To allow a handler to skip a gate and proceed directly to the pen would be unrealistic work.
The judge admitted the point but wouldn’t change the rule. They’d always allowed handlers to proceed directly to the pen when time was short.
Whitenaur rubbed his raspy chin. He didn’t speak loud. “Yesterday was qualification day,” he said. “All the dogs were supposed to be here. Right here.” (He jabbed a finger at the earth.) “It isn’t right for a dog to show up this morning and get the same chance to run as the dogs who showed up on time.”
Mildly, the judge noted, “I didn’t see you here yesterday, Lewis.”
In his mind, Lewis listed a few of Whitenaur’s sins. What effrontery! “I’m in the program, fourth from last. The final eight dogs are going to qualify today.”
“Yes,” the judge said. “But they were supposed to qualify yesterday. All the other dogs were here.”
Lewis hadn’t intended to run. He hadn’t intended not to run, but he hadn’t intended to run, either. Lewis tightened. The last time he lost his temper he nearly landed in jail. It would do him no harm remembering that. “My Nop dog was stolen from me,” Lewis said, through his teeth, “and I recovered him yesterday. It’s been a good many months since he saw a sheep and months since I worked any kind of dog, but we’re here to win this trial.”
The judge looked to the handlers.
“Let Lewis run,” one grizzled handler growled.
“We’re here to run dogs, not keep ’em from running.”
“It’s an open trial. Everybody who entered can run.”
The judge bit at his upper lip. “Since Lewis’s name hasn’t been called, I don’t see what harm it’d do.”
“I just hope Lewis does as poor a job against those contrary sheep as I did,” one Texas handler grumbled, which broke the tension and everybody laughed. Next time Lewis looked, Whitenaur was gone.
The first handler walked out with his dog to the handler’s circle. Acres of clipped green pasture rising away from his feet. The dog sees the sheep and trembles. The course is fenced into a long diamond shape and three hundred yards away, at the far tip of the diamond, three sheep are released. The dog streaks out on his outrun, wide and true. When he comes around for the lift, he comes in too close.
The sheep bolt like rabbits, the dog in hot pursuit, and getting these sheep through those panels is like threading an embroidery needle at 70 mph. These sheep have never been a flock before so they break apart: a whiteface to the right, both blackfaces drifting downhill toward the drive panel.
A chill falls over the watching handlers.
“Last time those sheep saw a dog, it was a coyote eating their mama.”
“Out west they got a way of handling sheep that like to break off like that. A rifle.”
“I don’t mind that those sheep don’t know each other, but those sheep aren’t even speaking to each other.”
Three terrified range ewes, careening every which way. They are healthy yearlings, at the peak of their strength and, by God, they can outrun a dog in a dash.
At the pen one ewe crashes right over the dog. The dog doesn’t bite.
The morning wore on, short-tempered and fleet. Even working fifty yards off the sheep, the dogs could scarcely control them. After a run, it took three or four men, dogs and sometimes a station wagon to clear the sheep off the course. Sixty yards behind the pen, spectators could hear the dogs panting. No dog had managed to pen those wild sheep this morning.
When his turn came, and he walked into the handler’s circle, Nop looked poor. His skin was tight over his ribs and the bumps on his spine showed, every one. His coat was tattered, lusterless and rough.
He stood well on his feet. Yesterday he’d found Lewis and this morning he and Lewis had woolies to work. What more could any dog want?
His tail curled down against his buttocks. He locked on his sheep like guidance radar.
“Way to me, Nop!”
Ahhh. Nop whipped out in a pear-shaped outrun, going deeper, deeper: woolies, far away and high.
Two whitefaces, one black. They eyed the crowd near the pen and were afraid. None of the three had flocked before and none trusted the other. Very spooky.
Nop’s heart hammered as he slipped around much deeper than his usual balance point because he sensed their nervousness, small movements, fear.
When he was directly behind, Lewis whistled him to a stop. Briefly, Nop was puzzled. He’d forgotten how to work with a man. When he’d worked the rodeo calves, he’d gone it alone.
A stylized step forward. Another. Freeze.
The sheep drift away downhill.
In the judge’s booth, one judge murmured, “Full points for the lift. My God, that dog’s got power!”
Another judge was diagramming Nop’s fetch on a course map. “Remember Pope Robertson’s Lash I? He had power like that.”
Stiff-legged as maiden aunts, the sheep slipped down the hill with the dog coming steadily behind them. When they balked at the fetch panel,
Nop froze. When they wished to dodge around the panel, he simply swayed his body without moving his feet and that delicate adjustment was enough to push his woolies through the opening.
Below, some handlers were holding their breath.
Nop’s body was quivering. His breath was rapid. His legs felt very heavy, surprisingly heavy. He loved Lewis, but more, Nop loved his work.
The handler’s circle was short clipped grass. Wild sheep have been known to balk at a chalk line drawn on the ground and every step these animals took brought them closer to the crowd they feared.
Lewis backed to the farthest edge of the circle, giving them room. “Steady, steady, Nop. Nop, Nop, ah Nop!”
The lead sheep stepped onto the grass and her mates followed, shoulder to shoulder. Nop had created a flock from three strangers and they worked now with one mind. Nop blinked and cleared his eyesight. He backed off and came around wide to urge them toward the first drive panel, only eighty yards uphill.
They didn’t want to go through and maybe Nop had misjudged because one woolie broke bad and Nop had to pour on the steam to head her. He backed off to get to his balance point and stumbled. Cleared his vision again.
On the crossdrive he was working closer, too close really, but when the woolies got any distance away, they were just blurs. Lewis’s whistles were urgent. All three sheep broke around the crossdrive panel. No points.
Nop raced full-tilt to head them before they got off course and managed to get out front, but his legs didn’t do what they were supposed to do and he hit the dirt, rolled and twisted upright again, seeking control.
His legs went out from under him. Woolies escape. Shameful. No balance. No control. Lewis at the pen. Can’t try. Tired.
And Lewis Burkholder screamed, “No!” He dropped his crook and ran onto the course, disqualifying himself and Nop.
Nop’s breath was rattling gasps. He lay on his side and didn’t see Lewis when he picked him up. With Nop cradled in his arms, Lewis ran for the nearest watering tank, feeling the sick feeling he was too late and wouldn’t reach it in time.
Nop had gone into toxic shock. Unable to remove his own body wastes fast enough, he was poisoned.
Nop's Trials Page 24
