The Dog Who Brought the Cows Home

What Duke did on the hill

The first whistle was the one that meant go. Low, then high, the two notes my father made a thousand times. It came out of me clean on the first try, and it carried up the hill in the still morning air.

Duke was gone. He went under the bottom rail and up the slope low and fast, not straight at the cows but wide around to the left, the way a good dog goes, swinging out so far you would think he had forgotten them.

I got up on Ginger and followed at a walk. You do not run a horse after a dog on a gather. You let the dog do the running and you ride where you can see.

At the top of the pasture there are three ash draws full of buckbrush and chokecherry, and the stone chimney of the soddy my great-grandfather built in 1911. That was where the cows were. Up in the brush and around the old chimney, stirred up and bawling, with their calves scattered in the grass on the slope below.

Duke went all the way around them. I lost sight of him for a minute in the far draw, and then I saw him come out on top, on the skyline, a little black-and-white shape against the blue.

He stopped. He was waiting. He was waiting for me.

I gave the stop whistle, short and sharp. He dropped flat in the grass. Then I gave him the long falling one, the one that means come around easy, and he got up and came down off the ridge at a slow walk, his head low, his whole body saying calm, calm, calm.

The first cow came out of the brush. She was an old black baldy with one horn tipped down, and she had a white ear tag that said 14. I knew her. She was one of Dad’s best mothers. She stood at the edge of the draw and looked at Duke, and Duke stopped and looked at her.

Then she bawled once, and her calf answered from down the slope, and she walked out of the draw toward it.

That was all it took. You have to understand how cattle work. Cows follow a lead cow. If the old ones decide to walk, the young ones walk. And these cows had walked off that hill in front of that dog every spring and every fall of their lives.

They came out of the draws one after another. Duke stayed behind them, swinging gently back and forth, never rushing, never barking, just walking. When a cow tried to cut back into the brush, I gave the little rising whistle, and he slid up her side and turned her without ever touching her.

The calves found their mothers on the way down. You could hear it happening. The bawling changed from that high, frantic sound to the low talking a cow makes when she has her calf at her side.

When we came over the last rise above the corrals, I could see the whole yard below. The crew was standing along the corral fence in a row. Pete was holding the gate. Gus was sitting on the tailgate of his Ford with his hat pushed back.