The Border Collie He Called a Pet

I stood at the post and looked up the field. The five ewes were set at the top, three hundred yards out, with a man and a dog holding them.

I bent down and touched Flick on the head, the way I always did, and I said, “Come bye.”

She went.

She went wide and smooth, out to the left in a big curving pear shape, exactly the way we had practiced it a thousand times in Maude’s pasture.

She did not cut in. She did not hurry. She came in behind those ewes at the top and stopped dead, and she stood there.

The lift was quiet as a church. She just leaned on them with her eye until they turned and started walking toward me. Not trotting. Walking.

The fetch was straight down the middle of the field.

Those five ewes came down in a little white bunch with Flick behind them, and I barely said a word to her. I did not have to. She knew.

At my feet I turned them around the post and sent them out on the drive. Flick took them through the first panel.

She took them across the field and through the second panel, clean, the ewes walking in a line like they were going to Sunday school.

I glanced once at the bleachers. Maude was sitting forward with both hands on top of her cane. She was not looking at me. She was looking at the dog.

Then the pen.

I walked to the gate and took hold of it with my left hand. I held my crook low in my right.

The five ewes came off the drive and stopped about twenty feet from the opening, and they looked at that dark little box the way ewes always do.

Flick dropped down flat on the grass behind them. She did not move. She just lay there with her chin almost on the ground and looked at them.

One ewe took a step. Flick crept up a foot. The ewe took another step. Flick held.

The others started to follow, the way sheep do, one and then another, and nobody hurried, and nobody broke.

The few people in the bleachers went dead silent. I could hear the wind in the cottonwoods along the creek. I could hear my own heart.

The first ewe walked into the pen. Then the second, and the third, and the fourth.

The fifth stopped at the opening and turned her head and looked at Flick, and Flick looked back at her and crouched a little lower, and the ewe sighed and walked in.

I swung the gate shut and dropped the latch.

Somebody up in the bleachers let out a whoop. Then all of them were clapping.

I looked up at the judges’ pickup, and I saw Zeb take off his hat and hold it in his lap.

The timekeeper called it. From the time the ewes left the last panel to the time the gate closed, two minutes flat. The whole run was seven minutes and forty seconds.

They did not post scores until all the runs were done, but people knew.