The Border Collie He Called a Pet

She sat in the passenger seat with the window down and counted them out loud.

“Forty,” she said. Then she put her hand on Flick’s head through the open window and kept it there a long time, and I looked away so she could have her face to herself.

Lambing came in April. Maude had fifty-one lambs out of forty ewes, which is a fine crop in this country.

She did not lose one ewe, and she only lost two lambs, both to the cold on the same night.

Jerrod heard about it at the co-op. I know because the man behind the counter told me Jerrod had asked twice whether it was true.

We kept at it all through that second summer and into a second fall, every evening the light allowed, Maude in her chair and Flick in the grass and the ewes going around and around.

The June after that, the county fair board sent out the flyer for the stock dog trial.

It had been held at the fair for as long as anybody could remember, out on the big grass field behind the grandstand, with a couple of low aluminum bleachers along one side.

There was a nursery class for young dogs, a ranch class, and an open class. The open class was the real one.

Twenty-five dollar entry fee, five range ewes per run, a ten-minute limit, and two judges whose scores got averaged together.

Jerrod had run his red dog in the open class for six years. He had won it twice, and he usually placed. Everybody knew him at the trial. Everybody knew his dog.

I filled out the form at the kitchen table one evening and Ross looked over my shoulder.

“Open?” he said. “Not ranch?”

“She’s ready for open,” I said.

He was quiet a second. Then he said, “Jerrod’ll be there.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s a public trial. It’s not his sheep.”

Ross nodded. He took the form from me, wrote the check himself, and put it in an envelope.

“I’ll mail it on my way to work,” he said, and he kissed the top of my head.

The last week before the fair, Maude would not let me skip a single evening.

She was off the walker by then and walking with a cane, and she came out to the pasture every night with her lawn chair and her timer and her spiral notebook.

“The pen,” she kept saying. “Everybody at that trial can gather. Not everybody can pen. You win it at the pen or you lose it at the pen.”

On the last Thursday, Flick penned five ewes in one minute and fifty seconds. Maude wrote it down and underlined it twice.

Then she closed the notebook and said, “That’s enough. Don’t wear her out. Let her rest.”

That Sunday at church, the pastor read from Psalm twenty-three, the part about the shepherd and the still waters.

Maude sat beside me in the pew and patted my knee once, and neither one of us said anything about it.

The trial was the second Saturday in August, the last day of the fair.