Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men
Searching through Scotland for a Border Collie
For Anne—
who kept the home fires burning
Of course you should talk to your dogs. But talk sense!
J. M. WILSON
1
Running with the Big Hats
I saved his life once. It’s wild down by our river, shaded by shale cliffs that contain the river’s wanderings. Old-timers talk of skating parties on the ice: hissing blades, kids’ yells, a bonfire crackling on the pebbly bank; but the river has only frozen hard once in the twenty years we’ve lived on the farm.
It was late January, a still morning, brutally cold. Winter hung from every tree, and the glaze on the alder stems poking through the river ice—that glaze was winter, too. The dog’s toenails clicked on the ice. Pip’s tail was a gallant plume as he skated toward the far shore and in.
He’s a strong swimmer. During the dog days of July, he spends hours down here paddling around. Quick as he was in, he turned and tried to haul himself back onto the ice. He scratched at the slickness and paddled so hard his chest came clear of the water, but he found no purchase. The current sucked at his hindquarters, and he fell back. Again and again. When he tired, the river would take him under the ice downstream until he lodged somewhere.
Since the water came only to my rib cage, it wasn’t particularly brave going in after him, but, my, it was brisk. I hurled Pip onto the ice and addressed the matter of my own return to dry land, which was rather more difficult than I had imagined. When Pip ran back to help, I shouted him away. It’s true what they say: If you flatten out on the ice, it bears more weight, and that’s how I scootched to shore.
As I hurried up the lane to the house, my pants legs stiffened and gleamed. Pip circled me—ice in his belly hair, ice in his ruff—something like wonder in his wide eyes. He is a four-year-old, forty-pound, black-and-white dog. I am a forty-five-year-old human. Sometimes the souls of unalike species can marry.
He’s the first working dog I’ve ever owned. He sleeps beside my bed at night. After we’ve spent a day wrestling sheep through manure-filthy pens, I stand him in a shower before I let him into the rest of the house.
Since Pip was two, we’ve been running in sheepdog trials. Sometimes we’ve done well, usually not. We’ve run in the novice classes with other inexperienced handlers and their inexperienced dogs. We’ve never run against the Big Hats.
Pip’s life hasn’t always been happy. When we had foot rot in the flock, he worked every single day while my wife trimmed feet. It was hot and it was angry and bloody and covered with blood and pus and flies. At the end of the day my wife would be in tears, and the exhausted dog would drag himself into the corner, too tired to eat his dinner. I’ve used him on cows with young calves and winced as he dodged their charge, their hoofs. I’ve worked him too long and too hard in the sun. Few marriages are uninterrupted bliss.
Pip has aspirations. In the next turn of the karmic wheel, he hopes to return as a flamenco dancer: starched white shirt, black pants, proud castanets.
Like some princes, he frets about poison and suspiciously sniffs each scrap offered from your fingers though it’s identical to the scrap of a moment ago.
His nickname is Broadway Joe.
He knows that men only kick the contemptible, and he won’t be touched—even gently—by human feet.
Pip’s what sheepdog men call “hyper.” He’s too rapid, rather too keen, and that can get him into trouble. Livestock appreciate a calm, deliberate dog and will accord it respect. A jumpy, down-again, up-again dog makes them skittish.
A Border Collie moves livestock by controlled intimidation. He pushes them along with a threatening glare. This glare is called “eye” and is probably related to the wolves’ tactic of selecting a victim in a herd by catching its eye and asserting dominance before starting the attack run.
Some stock dogs are more powerful than others and can control livestock from a greater distance. That is an advantage for the same reason that a long lever is better than a short one. Thirty feet out, the shift of a powerful dog’s head can alter a flock’s direction. Nearer, the dog has to run from one side of the sheep to the other, unsettling them.
When sheep ignore him, Pip comes in too close. When they defy him, he takes it personally and is quick to nip. When a dog bites (grips) a sheep on the trial field, he is disqualified.
Pip has good points, too. He has good balance and thinks well for himself. If you need a dog to fetch sheep out of a thicket, Pip’s the dog to send. Wait around a bit and, directly, he’ll bring them to you.
Pip is dead honest. You can read it in his eyes.
Dog trialing is an amateur sport. Purses aren’t great, and trials are often far apart. Not too many men are willing to drive a thousand miles with their dogs to run ten minutes on a trial course for a top prize of $750. Those few men do know dogs. They give training clinics, sell pups, import dogs, train dogs for others, put on demonstrations at state fairs and agricultural exhibitions, and put forty thousand miles a year on their pickups.
Since many successful trial dogs are imported, already trained, from Scotland, a Scots dialect is commonly used for dog commands. It is bizarre to see a broad-chested American rancher—in boots, a Western shirt, enormous Stetson—waving a Scottish shepherd’s crook and urging his dog to “Lie doon, Mon. Laadie, lie doon.”
The Big Hats—that’s what the top handlers are called.
Ralph Pulfer has been running dogs for twenty-five years. By his own count, he has imported better than two hundred dogs. I doubt he’s counted his trial trophies—he has a room full of them. Ralph is a formidable competitor and has twice won the Grand National Championship. Although Ralph always brings a couple of dogs to run, his top dog is the classic seven-year-old Shep. Shep is a biddable dog—extremely responsive to commands. He was winning trials before I bought my first Border collie.
Lewis Pulfer, Ralph’s brother, is a soft-spoken, articulate man and a very stylish handler. His red bitch, Dell, has won many trials and is the dam of several champions. Dell often finds her daughters and granddaughters competing against her.
This year, Lewis is trialing Moss, a powerful dog—energetic and a trifle hardheaded.
Bruce Fogt and Tom Conn are among the best young handlers. Bruce has won the Kentucky Blue Grass, the Blue Ridge Open, and the California State Fair. Bruce trained his Hope bitch himself, and she’s a wonder to watch. She’s a medium-size, black-and-merle bitch, strong, responsive, smooth as glass. Tom Conn is running Rod, who won the BBC television trials before coming to the States. These televised trials, “One Man and His Dog,” have been enormously popular in Britain. They’d seem funky and peculiar to most Americans, but Americans are often uneasy around dogs.
Jack Knox has trained more dog handlers than anyone, traveling every year from Michigan to Alabama, Oregon to Maryland, teaching beginners how to work their dogs. Jack is running his nine-year-old Jan bitch and Hope, his six-year-old male.
And there’s Stan Moore with Midge, Bill Wyatt with Cap, John Bauserman with Bess, Joe Lawson with Drift, and Ethel Conrad with Tess. I love to watch them run the open course. They make it look so easy.
I have a writer’s concentration, intense but flickering. This concentration is useful writing about dogs; less so when trialing them. Going blank for ten seconds won’t wreck an essay, but is disastrous with sheep coming on like the express and your dog slewing about like a drunk.
Too often I substitute will for sensitivity. I’m a man whose second thoughts are better than his first.
As a team Pip and I are uneven. At our best, we can tiptoe a dozen spooky rams alongside the unfenced border of my wife’s vegetable garden. At our worst, I blue the air with bellowing while Pip grabs some desperate sheep by the wool and won’t turn loose.
A sheepdog trial is the most difficult test of a man and dog ever divised. Tubs of cool water are kept at the end of the course because, after just ten minutes of running a trial, the dogs need that water to drop their body temperatures back to normal. Many good farm dogs have come to grief on a trial course. It’s the difference, you see, between racing at Indianapolis and driving Aunt Millie to the airport.
The outrun is three-hundred-plus yards. The lift is the first moment of contact between the dog and his sheep, when they read each other. The dog fetches the sheep to his handler’s feet. Then, he pushes them away through several freestanding gates (the drive). Finally, man and dog press the sheep into a six-by-nine-foot pen. At most trials the dog then takes one sheep off from the others, the shed, but there’ll be no shed at the Blue Ridge Open. It’s just too hot. Time limit: ten minutes.
Judges deduct points for overcommanding, undercommanding, going off line, wobbling, losing contact with the sheep, circling the pen, and numerous other sins. Good runs are characterized by respect: sheep for dog, dog for man, man for dog and sheep. Good runs are smooth and quiet. When respect breaks down, things go to hell in a hurry.
The Blue Ridge Open Sheepdog Trial is held in May near White Post, Virginia, an hour southwest of Washington, D.C. It’s a two-day trial of the first rank: strong sponsorship, a challenging course, and a Scottish judge. Each dog runs twice for a cumulative score. Dogs and handlers come here from Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Tennessee, and Ohio. The Big Hats are coming.
Late Friday night, the nearest motel is already full with Border Collies and their owners. On the lawn, handlers stand about swapping lies while their dogs strut around, tails erect, observing dog rituals.
When we go inside, Pip jumps up on the other bed and gives me a look. His eyes are whirling, Betty Boop eyes. After all, he is another species—his mind unfathomable.
Next morning I don’t bother with breakfast, and he doesn’t eat anything either. On the way to the trial grounds, he rides up on the front seat. I’d like to listen to Bruce Springsteen, but Pip doesn’t care for rock ’n’ roll.
Spring is further along here than home. I see where one farmer’s already mowed his first cutting of alfalfa. Another has put up his winter rye in great green round bales. Round bales look wonderful fresh and so dumpy and awful old.
This is the fringe of Virginia’s horse country. The farms are working farms, but most have wooden jumps built over their woven-wire fences so the Hunt can ride through.
Sunnybrook Farm is a livestock farm. There’s a big red wooden barn with stalls underneath, a modern tenant house, freshly painted white with green trim. The high-tensile fences are taut, straight as a die. The road climbs through the farm onto a high lush pasture. Bluegrass and orchard grass and clumps of trees for shade. A young girl at the gate is collecting a dollar from spectators. If this is like most trials, there won’t be many.
Campers, vans, and pickups are lined up behind the course. Lawn chairs and coolers overlook the field. The judge’s booth is a horse trailer. Novice dogs started running at 7:30 A.M., and the judge will work until 6:00 P.M. when the last of the dogs make their try.
I say a few hellos, shake a few hands. On the course a young dog is in trouble, his handler’s commands unheeded. Sheep can read an inexperienced dog, and this one can’t do a thing with them. The sheep bolt off the course, and the dog and handler are disqualified.
The novice dogs and handlers are listed on the Scoreboard. Hell, novice is where Pip and I belong.
Sheepdog trialing is a farmer’s sport, so talk is about crops and weather, markets, sheep, cattle, and dogs—always dogs. “Haven’t seen you since the Alabama Trial. How’s that Mirk dog of yours?”
Pip tugs at the lead, eager to sniff other dogs’ signs. I take this as a bad sign—a sign that Pip’s insufficiently serious.
There’s a quiet locust grove behind the course where it’ll stay shady as the sun moves across the day. When I tie Pip, he sighs and flops down.
I’m scheduled to run seventh, Open Class, after Ethel Conrad and her Tess. Last year Tess won more trials than any other dog in Virginia. Ethel was invited to the David Letterman show, where Tess herded ducks with perfect aplomb despite Letterman’s attempts to turn her into a joke. Tess has worked sheep on the Capitol Mall before the secretary of agriculture. Oh boy.
There are men here who run a thousand sheep and cows. I chat with a woman who’s looking to buy three sheep so she can work her dog. Some of the handlers never got past eighth grade; others have Ph.D.s. Their dogs are more uniform: All are well schooled.
You could probably buy some of the novice dogs for less than $1,000. One addled young dog grips his sheep at the pen and is disqualified, and his irritated handler marches off the course. Right now, you might get that dog pretty cheap. Open dogs go for $2,500 and up. And up. Last year, Ralph Pulfer sold his Nan bitch for $8,000.
The judge, Viv Billingham, is a slender blond woman with sun lines at the corners of her eyes. Viv and her husband Geoff shepherd 750 ewes on the duke of Roxburgh’s estate in the Cheviot Hills (the Scottish Borders). With her bluff, powerful dog Garry, Viv has twice made the Scottish National Team. We Americans have watched her and Garry on tapes of “One Man and His Dog.”
Ralph Pulfer arrived at the Blue Ridge Trial a couple of days early to teach this woman judge a thing or two about the fine points of judging an American trial. I gather he ruffled Viv Billingham’s feathers.
Scottish trial men are often invited to judge the bigger American trials. For the judge it’s an inexpensive (if rather doggy) American holiday. Their hosts get a few private tips, a familiar voice when they phone up the UK wanting a dog—as well as somebody to score eighty dogs from sunup to sundown, attentive to each one.
Usually a judge will work several trials, the hosts splitting expenses and airfare, but Viv is the very first woman judge ever invited “to cross the water” and some of the good old boys didn’t want to be judged by a woman, no matter how able, so Viv will only judge the Blue Ridge and later in the week will give a training clinic to defray expenses.
She’s never worked in a training ring before and says, “The only proper training for a sheepdog is the Hill,” but is so pleased working the young dogs she soon gets the hang of it. Many novice dog handlers own dogs that are better bred than they are trained. Most go back to this or that imported trial winner who will, like as not, be the son or daughter of an International Champion. Thus, the dogs Viv sees here are grandsons and granddaughters of the dogs she knows in Scotland, and as each dog comes into the ring she says, “Oh, dear, Dryden Joe?” or “Fortune’s Glen?” or “Willie Welch’s Don? He must be. Does he have a tendency to run a bit too wide, out of contact with his sheep?”
And often she’ll describe a dog’s character before it does any work at all, because she’s seen its grandsire or granddam run in trials. “He’ll be a little sulky then, won’t take correction?” “Tell me, does he turn his head back to you, looking for instructions? Keeking, we call it. Oh, his sire was a terrible keeker.”
It is politically unpopular to claim that human character traits (intelligence, courage, ingenuity) can be inherited. But that’s the working belief in the sheepdog breeding world. It is thought that a dog sired by Wiston Cap, one who looks like the old man, will likely behave like his eminent sire.
In various human cultures, it was believed that the same applied to human rulers, that “blood would tell.” Alas, not many British dukes are bred as closely as his poorest shepherd’s dogs. Even fewer dukes are bred for accomplishment.
What is likely true about dogs is unlikely with men.
What the British noted about their dogs, they attributed to their kings.
Viv Billingham judges by Scottish standards, which are quite rigorous. If your sheep go off course, you’re disqualified. If your dog grips, you’re disqualified. If you fail to pen your sheep and don’t complete the course, you’re disqualified. The scorekeeper writes “DQ” after another novice dog’s name. DQ—that’s the score most novices have.
I wander back to the course to visit with the pit crew—the men putting out sheep, three at a time, all day long. By day’s end they’ll be sunburned, bone weary, and stinking of sheep. Last year I worked back here.
Somebody wishes me good luck.
From here it’s easier to see things from the dog’s point of view. The dog sails out, out, and cannot see the sheep until he’s almost on top of them. The instant the dog loses faith in himself or his handler, he’s lost, and many young dogs get in trouble today. Out here, a handler’s commands are almost inaudible, and whistles are fainter than bird calls.
The good dogs glide toward their sheep, ignoring the workers, the pickup trucks and trailers. The sheep drift down the course with the dog on their heels.
Ralph Pulfer steps up. He’s first to run in Open Class with his four-year-old bitch, Maid.
My stomach feels like I’ve swallowed a brick.
When I go back to Pip, he wriggles gladness. I sit beside him to calm him, but he’s calmer than I am. “What’s so different about today, Boss? We go out, get sheep, pop them in the pen, right?”
Right.
I walk him to loosen him up and give him a chance to void himself. He has a fine time, sniffing and peeing on every bush where other dogs have passed—quite the model of the stud Border Collie. Right now, I’d rather have a worker than a lover.
I bring him to the edge of the course to watch another dog’s lift. When the sheep come out of the release pen, I say, “See sheep? See sheep?”
You bet he does.
My own big hat came from Houston, Texas, and a cowboy pal of mine gave me the silver concho hatband. I wear it for weddings, funerals, and sheepdog trials.
As we wait I try to find my own center, but it eludes me. It seems very hot, and Pip scoots under the truck next to me. At the time, I thought he was just seeking shade, but later I realized he was afraid.
The announcer calls my name, does some sort of introduction about my being a writer and so on. I don’t hear much of it. With Pip at my side I step onto the course. Until the dog brings the sheep to the pen, the handler must stay at the handler’s stake. If he leaves and goes to help his dog, he’ll be disqualified.
I stand Pip beside my left leg, and though my mouth is dry, I manage to send him out. Pip’s quick, and he flies out in a fine, plain outrun. When he disappears in a dip, I put the whistle to my mouth to redirect him, but no need, he comes out fine, right on target.
The big hat is awful damn heavy.
Pip sails up nice behind his sheep but stops thirty yards short. Since you lose fewer points redirecting your dog than letting him persist in his mistake, I shout, “Get back!” and whistle him on. Thank God, he takes my commands, and the sheep come hell-for-leather. The fetch line is supposed to be straight, but no time to worry about that now, worry about Pip pushing them beyond me and off course. I command Pip to “Stand,” but he keeps on coming, full tilt. “Stand,” “Stand there!” “Pip! Lie down!”
The sheep sail on, heedless, intent (I fear) on racing off course, and for our score: DQ—a fat zero. Too soon I flank him around, just as the sheep are slowing short of the handler’s stake. I look at the sheep, they look at me. They’re half tame, accustomed to men and dogs.
Pip’s where he should be to start the drive, but he has arrived five seconds early, and the sheep turn below me instead of above. There’ll be points gone for that. The drive isn’t too bad—a little jerky—and the sheep go right through the panel, just like they should but, once more, I flank Pip too early, and he drives them back the way they’d come, undoing all the good he’d done. The sheep start across the course but break into a run, and I go blank. Pip stops and looks at me. “What now, Boss? What’s the plan?”
When they are three-quarters the way to the final gates, I hook him around and, once again, Pip gets there faster than I had expected and turns the sheep before they have had a chance to go through the gates.
The three sheep are panting as they come up the hill toward me and the pen. Pip’s tongue is hanging out a yard.
We must get them penned. No pen, no points. There’s a line attached to the gate, and I wrap it tight around my hand. The sheep come on, Pip lies down, and the sheep are coming straight at me, ignoring the yawning gate of the pen. Now what? Now what?
Once sheep start circling a pen, you start losing points, and it gets much harder to get them inside. The handler can’t touch the sheep at the pen, but it’s okay if they run into him. I drop into a goalie crouch right in front of the sheep. We are eyeball to eyeball, and I hiss at them like a furious goose.
“Pip, get back!” Wonder of wonders, Pip does as he’s bid, and with the pressure relieved, the sheep slip into the pen and I bang the gate shut behind them.
Pip is panting hard, and his eyes are wide. When he flops in the water tub, I slosh water over his back and neck. Already the next handler is at the stake, and his dog is running. I can hear the whistles.
As the day wears on, the Big Hats post scores in the sixties and seventies. Pip and I have 48 points.
We do beat Ralph Pulfer and Shep, but we haven’t earned the victory. The Scottish judge has just taught the American expert a lesson in manners.
When Pip’s feeling better, I park him in the shade. “We fared right common, didn’t we partner?” He gives me a look. He doesn’t need me to know how badly we did.
There’s a handler’s supper at Sunnybrook after everybody runs, so I return to the motel to clean up. I’m peeved at Pip for the short outrun. En route, I play Bruce Springsteen. Loud as I like.
The farmhouse at Sunnybrook is a big, rambling sort of place. Most handlers eat outside on the porch. Stan Moore and Lewis Pulfer have had good runs and are pleased and modest. Some who have done poorly blame their dog or the judge. Most of the Big Hats talk about other trials, other runs.
American handlers are eager to hear about doings in Scotland, and in the dining room, Viv Billingham holds court. Viv describes eminent dogs: Wiston Cap, Wilson’s Cap, McTeir’s Ben, Fingland Loos, Wilson’s Roy, Richardson’s Mirk, and Sweep … and the shepherds who showed these dogs their life’s work and enjoyed a man/dog conversation of subtlety and power. Viv speaks about last year’s International, the most important sheepdog trial in the world, where, on the final day, the dog works so terribly far from his shepherd. She tells us about men we know only because we’ve seen the dogs they’ve exported. We rich Americans are as curious about poor shepherds and their dogs as soap opera fans are about the stars of their favorite shows. We want to know everything. Of her own success, Viv says only, “Over there they say Garry made me. I don’t mind them saying it. I owe Garry more than I can ever pay.”
She also says, “It takes great courage for a dog to get out there and do his best before strangers. When a handler does a poor job, he makes a fool of his dog. Don’t think the dog doesn’t know it.”
Later, outside, handlers describe good runs and joke about spectacularly bad ones. Wives chat. Kids play together. A big smiling handler starts to tell how his Missy dog wandered onto the highway, but he can’t finish and turns away so nobody can see his tears.
Later, they show a videotape of “One Man and His Dog” in the living room. Still later, when most folks have gone off to bed, you can hear a couple of disappointed handlers, drunk, still working their dogs down by the old red barn.
Back at the motel, when I cut my car lights, Pip’s face is peering through the curtains, waiting.
The second day of the trials they changed the running order, but it made no difference to me and Pip. When I brought him out on the course, he crouched like a feral creature, a fox caught suddenly in the headlights, and it was trouble the moment I set him off. I lacked confidence in him and he in me. Soon he decided to take matters into his own hands. I wrestled him around the course with shouts and bellows. Twice he tried to nip, but both times I shouted him off. We avoided DQ, by a hair. After the pen, he was so disgusted he didn’t wait for me but took off for the cooling tubs on his own.
As the final runs were made, clouds were building in the east. Stan Moore slipped in the standings. Lewis Pulfer and Moss turned in an elegant run. Lewis’s whistles were so quiet I wondered Moss could hear them.
Afterward, the handlers and dogs gathered while Viv Billingham awarded trophies. First: Lewis Pulfer with Moss. Second: Bruce Fogt and Hope. Third: Tom Conn with Rod. Of forty entries, Pip and I were twenty-fifth. Dogs sniffed their sniffs. Handlers made plans for trials farther down the road.
Before I got in the car, I spoke to the judge. She said, “Yesterday, when that dog of yours seemed to be stopping short on the outrun, he wasn’t short. He was correct. The sheep were facing him, you see, and if you hadn’t shouted him on, they would have lifted off straight and easy.”
Oh.
It was raining pretty hard by the time we hit the interstate. Rain drummed on the roof of the car, and Pip lay on the front seat, his head turned to the door.
“Better luck next time,” I said.
Pip was so mad he wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t meet my eyes for three days.
2
The Only Proper Training for a Sheepdog Is the Hill
Three of the next four winters were mild. Thanks to my wife’s hard work, our sheep flock flourished. I renovated an old orchard, and that year our firewood was aromatic of apple trees planted before I was born. I replaced the rotting timbers under our barn with new twelve-by-twelves. Pip and I got older. I decided to go to Scotland.
I was incurious about the place.
Many Americans boast about their Scottish roots, trace genealogical connections to this savage sept, that barbarous clan. In summer months, crowds of Americans travel hundreds of miles to gather in some hot meadow with like-minded souls for Scottish games: ox-shaped worthies heaving immature telephone poles, folk dancers prancing nervously around claymores (the swords Scots used after more sensible fighters switched to firearms), and amateur bagpipers caterwauling. Some Americans, I am told, don kilts for these festive gatherings.
The Scots do make good whiskey. In Bobby Burns, they had a great poet, but I’ve never drunk enough whiskey to understand him. They breed and train the best sheepdogs in the world.
My father’s father was a Scottish Catholic, a granite cutter and IWW radical who was middle aged when he contracted silicosis. As he weakened, he scooted his wife and three kids from kin to kin across the High Line (the United States-Canadian border). He’d park his family with more prosperous relatives while he looked for work. (“Just until spring, Jess. In the spring, you’ll all have to go.”)
The richer kinfolks lost patience quicker than the poor ones did, and during my grandfather’s last months, the family squatted with his wife’s sister on a hardscrabble waterless homestead carved out of a Montana Indian reservation. To his dying day my father hated potatoes. That winter, potatoes were what they’d had to eat.
In 1971, when I quit my advertising job in New York City and moved to a rundown Appalachian farm, my father was sick about it. After all, he’d boosted his family into the middle class, given both his kids college educations. I suppose he’d thought us safe, a long way from that dirt-roof soddy and the bitter smell of the other people’s laundry his mother had to wash.
“Why,” my father asked, “are you throwing it all away?”
In my father’s papers, after his death, I found a letter he’d written when he was a boy. It was directed to his mother’s mother, who had a small house in Great Falls.
Millet, Alta.
Aug. 30, 1915
Dear Grandma,
School starts today but Bob and I aren’t going. I will be glad when we leave this place and see papa. We pray for you every night. We are going to have a surprise party on Bob for his birthday. We have went to two children’s parties. I wish you were with us.
Your loving grandson,
Donald McCaig
The boy’s letter was written on the back of a letter his father had written to his wife. Since, inevitably, both letters would be seen by the grandmother, it’s hard to puzzle out the dynamic. Presumably, the boy’s mother wanted the grandmother to know how desperate they were.
give her no chance to refuse. I wish we could get to Denver this fall then I could work and you keep house. Don’t fret about Alice. [His sister, Alice, had a state job in Denver.] Your going to Denver will never put her in bankruptcy and she writes a good many of those hard luck letters. I think mamma so you won’t expect anything of her. I don’t doubt she has been sick but she can’t get along for ½ year on nothing and you wont cost her any thing and if I don’t get that far there are lots of ways you could help her. and she knows it.
No biographers puzzle over the strategies that characterized these unsuccessful lives. My family was too poor to be interesting. The McCaigs came to Canada sometime before 1840. I figured: If this hell was what they immigrated to, what hell was Scotland, where they’d emigrated from?
Our farm was lovely that February. We had extra cords of firewood and the pipes didn’t freeze. Though it stayed fairly cold, we had only light dustings of snow. The farm lies between the Shenandoah and Bull Pasture mountains and they’re steep enough you can’t see their tops unless you’re standing in our frozen hay-fields in the middle of the valley. Our near neighbors are two miles down the valley, and on frosty mornings, I’d hear their coon dogs yelp.
But sometimes, as I walked through the stick trees of the winter orchard, I’d be discontented. Those footprints in the snow: those were Pip’s; those, the rabbit’s who lived under the brushpile; those, my own, made just yesterday. I’d wave at a neighbor driving by: Red Wright. I remembered when Red bought that blue Chevrolet.
At eight years old, Pip was getting past it. The dog who’d once been too quick needed cunning to catch young ewes. The dog who’d jumped every fence on the farm now waited patiently for me to open gates for him.
Me, I’d got older and just wiser enough so it hurt. I’d made stupid, willful mistakes training Pip and my blunders showed every time Pip ran out on the trial field. Because I’d urgently wanted control of a keen young dog, I’d downed him each time I was unsure and destroyed his natural rhythm, created that clappiness that upset the sheep. I’d trained his flanks (“Go right, go left”) in a big field without sheep. Consequently, now, when I asked him to make a “blind” outrun—no sheep in sight—he wouldn’t: He circles my legs, anger and confusion warring in his brown eyes.
The miracle is that Pip worked at all—that we had any instants of clarity. With a better trainer he would have made one hell of a sheepdog.
I was like a middle-aged man, looking back at my marriage, knowing I could not undo what I had done, not the least part of it, yearning for the impossible: to start over fresh.
I thought to make a pilgrimage. Three months in a foreign land, filled with dog trainers whose routine work is completely beyond anything we can do here in the States. Shepherds and farmers who somehow create dogs who are achingly beautiful. I would sit at their feet. I would find a young bitch and bring her back with me. I would begin again.
I wrote Viv Billingham: How are things?
I hear you quit the duke of Roxburgh and moved to a new place. Do you like it? How’s husband, Geoff? Geoff, Junior? Are there any good young bitches for sale? I’m coming over in April.
Viv never answered. I wrote to Barbara Carpenter, president of the British Border Collie Club. She wrote back: Pastor’s Hill House lay between London and Scotland and she’d welcome a visit.
I should probably add that I’m a terrible traveler: don’t care for airports, airplanes, unfamiliar roads. Away from home I get fretful and discouraged. I hate to be a stranger.
Friday, April 23, 6:35 P.M. Greenwich time, a travel-goofy, nervous American honked out of Heathrow Airport in a red Ford Fiesta that had its steering wheel and gearshift lever on the wrong side. My luggage rode in the back seat, heaped in the clamshell halves of the dog kennel I hoped my young bitch would use, if and when I found her.
My prayer: I’d know her when I saw her. I had a thousand pounds to spend and three months to search Scotland before my wife wearied of caring for a 300-acre farm and 150 ewes without my help. That night, on the M3 motorway, my wife seemed close. So did the hospital.
That Friday was a bank holiday and, in Britain, when banks go on holiday, everybody else goes too. The motorway was bumper to bumper with merry souls. I cowered in the far left lane among the grocers’ lorries and caravans (travel trailers), while bolder motorists jetted by on the right at ninety and a hundred miles an hour. Britons are an extraordinarily warlike people. Hell, they conquered most of the world. Why did I expect namby-pambies on the motorway? Big, smooth sports cars passed me. Junkers, crammed with drunk kids, passed, too. If my great grandmother hadn’t been dead, no doubt she’d have passed as well.
From time to time there’d be a police pulloff, but I never once saw a cop. Perhaps the police go on holiday along with everybody else. It was a jolly throng.
Blurry with jet lag, I anguished over the simplest decisions: Time to stop for gas? Dare I chance a faster lane? American diplomats frequently brag of visiting four countries in as many days while enacting treaties that affect life and death. Henry Kissinger nicknamed his jetlag “Shuttle Diplomacy.”
It got gray, then dark. The traffic thinned as holidaymakers peeled off for their rural retreats. Across the Severn River Bridge, I exited the motorway into black countryside. Briefly the road was two lanes before it shrank to one lane and shriveled further. Tremendous trees edged closer to the road until they clamped fast with thick overhead branches interlaced against the night sky. Brute stone walls shouldered into the verge. The road adopted a six-inch curb, which I’d smack every time I met oncoming traffic. I’d strike, bounce into the air, and barely regain control. No, I’d told the car-rental girl, I didn’t want the optional collision insurance.
“But it’s just two pounds, seventy a day, sir.”
Farmhouses, dark. Villages, dark. I supposed, if I lost the faint thread of Mrs. Carpenter’s directions, I could sleep in the car. I’d hate that.
The streets in Bream were plenty wide for a horse and rider, even a fat horse and rider. I squiggled between stone buildings, figuring that if my right-hand mirror didn’t get knocked off, my left mirror could take care of itself. I comforted myself that no other car had ever got stuck. If a car had got stuck, it’d still be here.
Pastor’s Hill House is a two-story Jacobean stone farmhouse on eighty grassy acres. Stone outbuildings, slate roofs, stone workpens.
I didn’t see all that when I got out and stretched. The car ticked. Fluids gurgled. Metal shrank and cooled. For the first time I sniffed the spring English countryside. It was a dank, luxuriant smell—attar of roses. Overhead, the chilly stars winked. But these were British stars. Dogs cried out, “INTRUDER, INTRUDER!”
“Oh hush now, you, Tag, hush.”
Straightaway Barbara Carpenter led me into her home, through the kitchen, into the siting room, with its table, two plump chairs by the fire, and a couch (which Border Collies had appropriated). Two dogs came over to say hello. The others decided to wait a bit. “I hope you haven’t eaten,” she said, pouring a cup of strong tea. “It’s just stew.” Chunks of beef, carrots, onions, potatoes. What is good over here is good over there. I was back in dog land and, suddenly, sleepily, everything was all right.
Since the British aristocracy was selected for war skills, and since hunting approximates those skills, and since writers eat by praising the rich (“Old King Olaf is a mighty King, flattens his foes with his pinky ring”), there is a considerable literature on sporting dogs. Border Collies, the dogs of poor, frequently illiterate shepherds, have been rarely sung. Though Samuel Pepys noticed them, it wasn’t until 1829 that anyone (James Hogg in A Shepherd’s Calendar) wrote anything memorable about them. Collections of sheepdog books make a scruffy library: Government pamphlets issued by the Queensland Agricultural Board (Practical Cattle and Sheepdog Training) vie for space with skinny privately printed tracts (Ten Thousand Dogs, The Sheepdog in South Africa