Maude would carry a lawn chair out to the corner of the pasture, set it in the shade of the cottonwood, and sit there with a jar of iced tea and a kitchen timer in her lap.
The timer was her idea. She said a trial dog had to work against a clock.
We started small. A short outrun, a quiet lift, bring the ewes to my feet. Over and over. Flick wanted to go fast.
Every young dog wants to go fast. My job was to teach her that the sheep set the speed, not her.
“She’s pushy,” Maude said the first week, not unkindly. “She’s got a lot of eye. She’ll settle.”
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
Maude had kept dogs with her husband for forty years.
She did not train them herself, but she had watched him do it, and she knew a good dog from a bad one the way she knew a good ewe from one that would lose her lamb.
By July Flick could gather all forty from the far corner and bring them to me in a tight, quiet bunch.
Maude took to calling out the time. “Two minutes ten,” she’d say. “Three minutes flat. She’s getting there, honey.”
Ross started coming out on Saturdays. He would fix whatever was broken on Maude’s place while I worked the dog. He rehung her barn door.
He replaced the float in her stock tank. He put a new hinge on the yard gate that had been held shut with baling wire for three years.
Maude fed him pie for it. Rhubarb in June, cherry in July, and in August an apple pie she said was her husband’s favorite, though she had not baked one since he passed.
Ross ate two pieces and told her it was the best he had ever had, and she pretended not to believe him.
The pen was Ross’s idea. He came out one Saturday with a pickup load of old pallets and a stack of fence boards, and in one afternoon he built a little pen in the middle of Maude’s pasture, about eight feet square, with a gate hung on two hinges.
“If she’s going to trial, she needs to pen,” he said. “You can’t win anything if you can’t get them in the box.”
He was right. Penning is the hardest part for a young dog, because it is the part where the handler stands still and the sheep start to think.
A pen is a small dark place to a ewe. Every one of them would rather be anywhere else.
That fall we penned the ewes every single evening. Five at a time, because five is how many you get at most of the county trials around here.
Maude would sort off five with her stick and a bucket of corn, and I would send Flick around them.
At first it took us ten minutes. Sometimes fifteen. Sometimes the ewes broke for the fence and we had to start over.
Maude never once said a discouraging word. She would just reset the timer and say, “Again, honey. The light’s good.”
By October, before the sun went down early and the cold came in, we were getting them into the pen in under three minutes.