The Border Collie He Called a Pet

When they handed Jerrod his white ribbon he took it and nodded and said thank you to the man, plain and polite. Then he went back to his truck.

After the ribbons, Doyle needed help getting his ewes back into the trailer. I went out to the pen with Flick to help him.

The five ewes from our run were still standing in it, chewing their cud in the wind.

I was standing at the pen gate with my crook when I heard boots on the grass behind me. I turned around and it was Jerrod. He had his hat in his hands.

He stood there a minute and did not say anything. He looked at Flick.

She was lying in the grass at my feet with her eyes on the ewes, the way she always was.

“How long?” he finally said. “How long you been working her on Maude’s?”

“Two years,” I said. “Every evening the light allowed.”

He nodded slowly. He looked off across the field toward the bleachers, where Maude was still sitting on the bleachers with Ross beside her.

“I said some things to Maude,” he said. “That first summer.”

“You did,” I said.

He was quiet a long while. Then he turned his hat around in his hands and said, “I’ll go talk to her.”

And he did. I watched him walk across the field.

I watched him stop at the end of the bleacher and take his hat off again and say something to Maude I could not hear.

I saw her look up at him a long time. Then she put out her hand, and he shook it.

When he came back he stood beside me at the pen gate. Doyle and his boy were backing the trailer up. The ewes were starting to get restless.

“Dad lost a ewe to a pet dog once,” Jerrod said. “You probably heard.”

“Ross told me.”

“I never trusted anybody’s dog since.” He looked down at Flick. “I should have looked closer at yours.”

I did not say anything to that. I just waited.

Jerrod put his hat back on. He cleared his throat once, like a man about to ask a favor he has never asked anyone.

“I’ve got to gather the north pasture next week for weaning,” he said.

“Two hundred ewes and their lambs, and my dog’s not as young as he was. Would Flick help me bring them in?”

I looked at Flick. She looked at me, and then at the ewes in the pen, with her ear folded over like it always was.

“Ask her,” I said. “She’s the one who’ll be doing the work.”

Jerrod crouched down in the grass, slow, a big man with bad knees, and held out the back of his hand.

“Flick,” he said. “Would you?”

She sniffed his knuckles. Then she licked them once and went back to watching the sheep.

The next Tuesday I drove her out to the north pasture before sunup, and she gathered two hundred ewes and their lambs off that hillside in forty minutes while Jerrod stood by his truck and did not say a word.

When the last lamb went through the gate he took off his hat, scratched his head, and finally laughed.

“Well,” he said. “I’ll be.”