The Border Collie He Called a Pet

I answer phones, I hold dogs for shots, and I know every rancher in the county by his truck.

That is how I met Ross. He came in with a heeler that had tangled with a porcupine, and he stood at my counter holding a towel over that poor dog’s face and apologizing to me like the porcupine had been his fault.

Ross works for the public power district. He is a lineman, and he climbs poles in weather most men would not walk to the mailbox in.

He grew up on the sheep place with Jerrod but he never wanted it. He wanted a job with a paycheck that came on Fridays.

When their father died, the place went to the two of them, and Ross signed his share of the sheep over to Jerrod for a fair price paid out over ten years.

Ross kept a few acres and the old house by the windbreak. Jerrod kept everything with wool on it.

So the sheep were Jerrod’s. I want to be plain about that, because people later asked me why I didn’t just push.

They were his sheep on his ground, and you do not push a man about his own stock.

I bought Flick as a pup from a woman in Wyoming who runs good working lines.

She cost me eight hundred dollars, which was most of my tax refund that year, and I drove four hours each way with her in a laundry basket on the seat beside me.

Ross thought I was a little crazy. He did not say so.

He just said, “Where are you going to work her?” and I said I figured Jerrod might let me help out with the ewes once she was ready.

Ross got quiet then. He rubbed the back of his neck the way he does when a job is going to be harder than it looks. “Maybe,” he said. “Don’t count on it.”

I started her on ducks first, a half dozen Khaki Campbells I bought from a lady at church.

Ducks are good for a young dog. They move slow and stay bunched, and a pup learns to give them room without anybody getting hurt.

By ten months she was ready for sheep. That was when I asked Jerrod the first time, standing at his tailgate after Sunday dinner at Ross’s mother’s house.

I asked politely. I offered to work her on the far pasture where she could not hurt anything.

“No,” Jerrod said. He did not raise his voice. “I don’t let pets in my sheep.”

“She’s not a pet. She’s a working dog. I trained her the same way I trained the others.”

“Every dog’s a working dog till it kills something,” he said, and he got in his truck.

That night, on the porch, with the sun still up over the shelterbelt, Ross told me the story.

It was summer the way it always seems to be summer in the stories men keep to themselves.

When Jerrod was twelve, a family from town moved into a rental place a mile up the road. They had a big friendly yellow dog that the kids loved.