The Border Collie He Called a Pet

Maude wrote the times in a little spiral notebook she kept in the pocket of her coveralls.

I would like to say that Jerrod ignored all of it. He did not.

One evening late that first summer, with the sun still a hand above the hills, his pickup came down the gravel slow and stopped at Maude’s fence.

He sat there with the window down and watched Flick bring the ewes around.

When I walked over to say hello, he did not say hello. He looked past me at Maude in her lawn chair, and he raised his voice so she would hear him.

“You’ll run the weight off those ewes letting a pet chase them every night, Maude,” he said.

“They’ll come into winter thin and you’ll lose lambs in the spring. Then you’ll be calling me to come buy what’s left for nothing.”

Maude did not say anything. She just looked at him.

But I saw her hands tighten on that jar of tea, and I saw her face go a color I had not seen before, the color of a woman who has been told one too many times that she is too old for her own life.

I was angry. I will admit that. But I did not raise my voice either.

I walked up to his window and I said, “Her ewes are in better shape than they’ve been in five years, and she knows it. Good evening, Jerrod.”

He looked at me a long moment. Then he drove off.

Before I left that evening, while it was still light, Maude asked me, in a small voice I had never heard from her, whether she was being foolish. Whether she was too old to keep sheep. Whether Jerrod was right.

“No, ma’am,” I said. “Your ewes look wonderful. You’re doing just fine.”

But I went home and cried a little in the truck before I went in the house.

Ross found me there. He did not say anything. He just sat with me until I was done.

In January Maude slipped on the ice by her stock tank and cracked her hip. She lay there in the snow almost an hour before the mailman saw her and called the ambulance.

She was in the hospital in town nine days and then in a rehab place for three weeks.

Her son lives in Denver and he came up for the surgery, but he had to get back to work, and there were forty ewes out there that needed feeding twice a day.

So Flick and I fed them. Every morning before work and every afternoon after, all through February, in the cold and the wind and the snow.

Ross drove out on weekends and broke the ice on the tank with an axe.

Flick learned more that winter than she had all summer. She learned to hold the ewes back from the feeder while I spread the hay.

She learned to move them through a gate in a blizzard without a single one getting crossways. She learned what work was.

When Maude came home in March she came home with a walker. The first thing she did was have me drive her out to the pasture so she could see her ewes.