Say No More (21 page)

What’s wrong?
I woofed at him.

But of course he didn’t understand my meaning.­­

His head drifted down again, tension plain in his jaw. He sucked in a thin breath, then let the air out slowly, as if savoring every molecule of oxygen.

Dogs have a sense that something is not right without knowing what or why that is so. If humans have this same ability, they don’t act on it. It’s why we sense earthquakes before they occur. We feel the ground shift deep in the earth’s mantle, feel its layers slide one against the other, the whole globe groaning deep within its molten belly. We know the power of lightning, how it can strip the air of electrons and stab them through your body, or a tree, or a rooftop. We feel its tingle from miles away, the warning carried on the sonorous undulations of thunder. We smell the danger of fire and know that its smoke can rob you of breath and singe your lungs. We know these things without ever having been taught them.

And we know when our humans, the ones we follow and wait for and guard with our lives ... we know when they are hurting, whether or not they bleed or cry out in pain. The confession lies not in the obvious, but in the unspoken — in the grimace, in the furrowed brow, in the far-off stare. The mournful tilt of the head. The sigh. We dogs can do none of these things ourselves, but we read them so well in humans. It as if God made us specifically for that purpose. As if He gave us the knowledge, but forbade us the power of tongues.

Watch, observe, He said, just ... be there. But say nothing.

Worry gripped my heart. I nosed the back of his left hand, lying limply across his knee. With painstaking slowness, his fingers curled around the top of my muzzle, stroked it twice.

“Mr. Penewit?”

I whipped around. Tucker Kratz tossed a cigarette stub on the ground and smashed its orange embers beneath his worn boot.

“They’ve been looking for you. You were supposed to be up after Clancy, but they couldn’t find you. Arden Ashbrook took your spot, but you still have time. Best hurry, though. His dog’s wound tighter than a top and is about to get thank-you’d off the course.”

“Be there in a minute,” Cecil said. “I, uh, need to use the facilities.”

With a nod, Tucker lit another cigarette and left, his trail of smoke weaving through the parked cars.

Carefully, Cecil set his hat on the trampled grass beside him and wiped the sweat from his brow and neck with his sleeve. A mother hauling two whiny young children walked by. The little girl with bouncy curls, the one who’d patted me on the head, started toward me, but her mother, upon seeing the pale-faced Cecil huddled beside the tractor, reeled her in with a correction. They stumbled on, the mother yanking, the little girl looking back, and the even littler boy crying because he was hungry.

Cecil grabbed the end of my leash and stood. Before he took his first step, he steadied himself with a hand against the giant tire. “You’ll be fine, girl. But me? Well, let’s just get through this and go on home. Chores don’t do themselves, now, do they?”

If it were up to me, we wouldn’t have come here in the first place. I didn’t quite see the point. But then, I never got a vote, did I?

—o00o—

The group of sheep we drew was a motley conglomeration of half-breeds. One had the face of a Suffolk, but the honey coloring of a Katahdin, while two others were mottled like black and white Paint horses. The rest were a curious mixture of tawny and white shorn woolies. They stared at me through the bright orange bars of the gate panel where the tarp had slipped to the side. I yawned and looked away. No need to get them riled before our turn had even begun.

“Guess we got the leftovers, eh, girl?” Cecil looped my leash over his shoulder and clipped the ends together. His fingers curled around the top end of his crook, clenched, released. I gazed up at his blanched face, hoping he’d reach down and rub his calloused fingertips across my topskull for good luck, but his gaze strayed to the stands, eyes squinting against the long rays of afternoon sun.

To show him there was nothing to worry about, I sank to my belly in the loose dirt. Particles of gritty sand dug between my toes. I sneezed at the dust and put on the most bored faced I could arrange, which is an easy thing to do when your expressions are limited. It’s all in the ears, you see. I kept them relaxed, not flattened against my head or perked at full attention. Then, I yawned for emphasis.

“Whenever you’re ready,” the judge announced from the shadows of her box.

Cecil flashed his number at the judge, then stuffed it partway back in his pocket. He ambled to the take pen, his steps more plodding than sure. I trotted alongside him, my head down so as not to threaten the sheep. They stomped nervously, sending up little puffs of dust with each slap of their hooves.

As Cecil reached for the latch and pulled back, his entry number fluttered from his pocket. The gate swung open. At his command, I took one step, one slow, measured step, toward the pen, my muzzle aimed squarely for the right side of the group where there was the most room. A second step — and they bolted from the pen like a rocket launched off its pad. Cecil threw himself against the fence just in time to avoid being trampled to death.

They had blasted the gate open with such force that it ricocheted back. Cecil caught the edge and slammed it shut.

I remained where I was. My job, I knew, was to gather the sheep in a bunch and take them where my handler commanded. Even though I had already watched a dozen runs and knew the course by heart, my place was to never assume a course of action. It was to execute the plan my handler chose. Sometimes that was hard to do. Very hard. Like now.

Every neuron in my body shouted at me to take off, seek out the furthest sheep, cast as wide as the confines would allow, and come just enough within that sheep’s line of sight to cause a change in direction. Hopefully, a calm, collected change. That possibility, however, had been shattered in the first heartbeat.

There are times when it’s best to let livestock discharge their fear and not play a part in it. It takes a wise handler to know that and a dog that trusts in that handler enough not to assume anything less. Over the years, Cecil and I had developed a oneness, that extra sensory ability to operate as a single unit, two parts of a whole.

To the onlookers in the stands, it must have looked like chaos unfolding. Like Cecil had taken the lid off Pandora’s Box, and I was merely some befuddled dunce, a sidekick at his downfall.

Head high, the black-faced wether bounded to the far side of the arena. The shorn sheep clipped blindly after him, their shorter legs churning madly. But the others, the mutt-sheep, scattered like colliding marbles. One raced toward the center chute, another followed, then changed course, while the rest loitered near the take pen, hopeful that the scatter-brained among them would snap to their senses and return to the safety of home base.

Cecil studied the situation. This was not altogether unlike some days at home, when new flock members were assimilated with testy older mothers and frantic lambs. So Cecil did what was prudent in that situation. He turned his back and walked away from them, calling me to his side with a voice so soft that no one but me could have heard.

Murmurs drifted down from the stands. Had he given up before even starting? What was he doing? Why not just send the dog?

He planted his crook in the shifting dirt, pivoted slowly around it, and watched as the sheep looked at us, then at each other, then back at us. The black-faced sheep twitched his ears, hovered a moment in indecision, then cantered back toward the center chute to join the few there.

Cecil lifted his crook, shifted three feet to the left, and waited. The sheep loitering by the take pen were wedged together as tight as gobstoppers in a gumball machine. The one with sideways ears twitched her shoulders and the movement rippled through them like whitecaps on choppy water.

Until that moment, I had restrained myself admirably. I had waited for Cecil to assess the situation, to formulate his plan of attack, and issue the directive. But he had hesitated. And I could see so clearly what should come next.

Popping to my feet, I ducked behind the
Old
Man — let’s face it, he was being slow — scurried to the right three steps and dropped. Aware of the shift in pressure, a single ewe moved away from the group a few feet. Only a few. It was enough.

I crept forward. Low like a Border Collie. And I eyed that single ewe with the realization that she had become the transient leader of this offshoot faction. She had assumed the power of decision. The rest would do as she did.

I was an Australian Shepherd. Usually, we worked upright, with a looser eye than our distant Scottish kin, the Border Collie. But like other working breeds, we also
think
independently. Had I moved toward them too quickly, used my physical presence alone, they would have reacted in the extreme. It would only take one crazed sheep careening headfirst into a fence panel and breaking her gracefully arched neck for us to not only be excused, but possibly banished from trials indefinitely.

Control is measured in minute increments and I displayed that to the utmost degree.

“Stay,” Cecil uttered.

I froze where I stood. Time stalled. Perhaps it even moved backward. The crowd was mute.

The single ewe tucked back in with her group. I took one more step, and they turned their heads toward those at the far end. Still aware of the ones orbiting the center chute, I shifted to the left. They, too, trotted toward the black-faced one.

“Steady, girl,” Cecil said, his voice low and even.

As one congruent unit, they marched through the first panel, no more than a few inches between any two. I balanced myself perfectly as they progressed to the second set of panels. There was a momentary spurt in their speed, so I dropped back, releasing the pressure, and they eased their pace. As the first few daylighted through the second obstacle opening, Cecil turned, stepped into me, and commanded, “Way to me.”

He meant the other direction, so I ignored the command and went the opposite way. He didn’t correct me. Like a boomerang, I reversed direction, sailing out in a clockwise crescent, facing away from them.

Sheep are fast, but there is always one among them that is not as fast as the rest, that hangs back in uncertainty. It is to this weakness in the group that we dogs play. The group, when it truly behaves as one, slows to compensate for this. That is our advantage.

I flew, as I had never flown before. Fleet, sure-footed, focused. And I met them halfway, before they had even passed the center line, parallel to the opening of the Y-chute. Black-Face led his frightened minions toward the yawning chute. Cecil, who knew enough of how sheep think to place himself properly, stood to the right of it. By now, they were figuring out that he was their safe haven, that he would not allow harm to befall them. Their instinct, however, was to race at him full speed, as if the moment they reached his feet all danger would cease. The problem, you see, was that Cecil was on the
other
side of the fence panel.

I may have mentioned before sheep are not the brightest creatures on Earth.

To sheep, it seems like I, the dog, am the wolf. However, dogs are vastly different from wolves. We may have sprung from the same ancestral tree, some of my species may even look like wolves, but the greatest difference lies in our thinking and our behaviors. We dogs do not need to hunt for our survival. We can. Some do. Most of us, however, fully understand that humans will feed us all we need, sometimes with very little work on our parts. Grace’s poodles had to do nothing more than let her dress them up and ride around in her purse (the shame!). But I digress ...

The sheep were on a direct trajectory for the fence panel when it occurred to one of them that perhaps they could not go
through
said panel. This caused Black-Face to stop. Confusion ensued. The cohesion of the group began to dissolve.

“Awaaay to me,” Cecil said.

This time he was right. I had anticipated this counter move. Having sat patiently all day, watching other dogs fail so miserably at this juncture, I recognized their error. To put the thread through the eye of the needle, you must first pull the thread away from it, then turn it into the tiny metal loop before slipping it through. The sheep had to overshoot the opening to a slight degree. If the dog then checked them on the other side, but far enough away to present pressure in the direction of the chute at precisely the right spot, they would go through that seemingly too narrow opening because it was the fastest and seemingly safest way to get away from the dog.

In the split second that Black-Face considered this, Cecil turned his body slightly and backed away from the chute’s end, headed toward the re-pen. This was their invitation to sanctuary. They followed him as I walked calmly behind. All ten. Filed through that slim canyon of metal tubing like children lined up for a carnival ride.

Thus, I became the second dog of the day to succeed at the center chute.

As the sheep trotted tranquilly toward their haven, Cecil appraised me with a look that reminded me our work was far from done. It could all unravel in a single misstep, an ill-timed flank, a hesitation. He flicked his crook at them — a warning to respect his territory this time, for he had command of the wolf. They halted. He took hold of the latch, lifted it, slid it back, and carefully opened the gate.

When he was clear of their path, he told me, “Around”, which meant I could go either left or right. It didn’t matter which way, so long as the job was done.

They went in, tucked themselves against the backside of that little square prison, and turned to look at me. The wildness that had possessed them at the beginning was gone from their eyes. They were home. They would join more of their kind soon.

I lay down to let them know my task was done. I would not pursue them any longer. The gate floated shut as Cecil slid his hand along it. The ‘clink’ of the latch resounded like the chiming of a bell, signaling the end of an ordeal.