The Border Collie He Called a Pet

One morning that dog got into the ewe pasture and ran a ewe through the fence until she broke her leg.

Their father had to shoot the ewe. Then he went up the road and talked to the family, and they cried and said their dog had never done anything like it, and their father came home and made Jerrod help him bury the ewe in the draw.

“Dad said every pet dog is fine until the day it isn’t,” Ross said.

“Jerrod took that to heart. He doesn’t trust anybody’s dog but his own. Not mine, not yours, not the neighbors’.”

I sat with that a while. I understood it. I see what dogs do to stock at the clinic, and I do not blame any rancher for being careful.

But I also knew what Flick was, and what she was not.

“You want me to talk to him?” Ross asked.

“No,” I said. “They’re his sheep. I’m not going to beg a grown man for a favor he doesn’t want to give. I’ll find other sheep.”

Ross looked at me sideways. “Where are you going to find other sheep?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I’m not going to stand in his yard asking.”

I found them a mile and a half down the gravel, on a quarter section with a white house, a red barn that had not been painted since Nixon, and forty old ewes that belonged to Maude Svoboda.

Maude was sixty-eight that first summer. Her husband had passed five years before, and everybody at the coffee shop said she should sell the sheep.

She did not sell the sheep. She did her chores in her husband’s coveralls with the sleeves rolled up three times.

She came into the clinic in May with a ewe in the back of her pickup that had a bad foot.

I went out to help her lift the ewe, and Flick was in my car with the window down, and Flick watched that one ewe like it was the only thing in the world.

Maude noticed. Maude notices everything.

“That’s a nice-looking dog,” she said. “She work?”

“She would if I had anything to work her on,” I said, and I must have said it with more in my voice than I meant to, because Maude gave me a long look under the brim of her straw hat.

“My ewes could use the exercise,” she said. “And I could use the company. Come by after you get off. Bring the dog.”

That was the whole conversation. She paid her bill, she drove off with her ewe, and at five-thirty that evening I pulled into her yard with Flick sitting up in the passenger seat like she was going to church.

I want to tell you what those evenings were like, because I think about them more than I think about the trial.

In western Nebraska in the summer, the sun does not go down until almost nine.

I got off work at five, drove the six miles out, and we had three good hours of daylight every night.

The light came in low and gold across the pasture and made the ewes look like they were made of butter.