Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men: Searching Through Scotland for a Border Collie

by Donald McCaig

  Reid is dressed in fresh suit, cap, and tie. He has his ISDS badge in the lapel, and his handkerchief is folded neatly in his breast pocket. He has, he says, phoned David McTeir, and Mister McTeir understood. Perhaps McTeir’ll come over and see the other three-year-old bitch. “I’ll have to have twelve hundred for her.” Perhaps the American would like to see her go?

  “Sure.”

  We drive back to the same field I’d seen only once before, at dusk. The same tups huddle against the same far fence. A pretty place to train a dog. Reid steps over the wire fence and sets his three-year-old bitch loose. She is a hearty thing, heavy, squat, and very excitable. “I’ve only had her mesel a fortnight.”

  The bitch cuts in too close to the sheep and gets a mouthful of wool. When she finally does lie down, she sticks and doesn’t want to get up again. After her slight exertion, she pants like a blown horse. I say (politely) that she’s going well for only a fortnight’s training and Reid will soon put her right. I note she’d have difficulties in the States where it’s so much hotter.

  “Aye,” Reid sighs, “Weel. …”

  I am sorry Reid doesn’t have a second good bitch but, at the same time, feel relief. If I can spot the flaws in this bitch, maybe I wasn’t foolish about the wee one. “We should be going,” I say. “It’s a fair bit to Glasgow.”

  In the full light of day, Gael’s neither parrot mouthed nor cow hocked and has limpid lemur eyes. She’s built like a whippet, muscle stretched taut over bone. One ear points forward, the other’s half-cocked to the rear. She’s black and tan except for her white breast, a neck ring silly as a cheap boa, and white forelegs like long kidskin gloves drawn to her elbow. She reminds me of Rona, a Jewish girlfriend of my New York days; Gael has the same deep Mediterranean eyes.

  Reid jumps both bitches into the boot of my car.

  The old herd directs me to all the slow roads, winding through villages, pointing out farms and people he’s known all his life. Once a month he’d drive his wife north, to Glasgow, for the cancer treatments. “She was niver sick,” he says, “Niver had a sick day in her life.”

  He’d been a shepherd in the hills above Girvan. It was a hungry house. He and the other workers would take meals in the farmhouse kitchen, skim milk on their porridge, while the farmer’s family ate in the dining room, taking all the cream. He worked there through the sixties, shepherding that high lonely ground, him and his dogs.

  Tom Reid’s first dog was Jim. Tom was eight years old when his father sold Jim. “I hate to sell a dog,” Tom says. “I dinna like it.”

  Farmer’s lung impairs his circulation, which is how he lost his leg. The hospital was all right except for the telly. Other patients watched the football games all the time, but he doesn’t care for football. His good leg gets stiff traveling, and he rubs it from time to time.

  He had Gael’s mother put to MacKenzie’s Don. “They say Don didn’t breed well, but when he did, it was a topper.” Since Don’s owner, Perry MacKenzie, lives in Caithness, in the north, after Don won the International, the dog was boarded south with the Shennans, where more bitches were available. Reid thinks perhaps seventy bitches were put to Don. He laughs. “I wouldna have put my bitch to him if I’d known what an ugly brute Don was.”

  I got lost in Glasgow. Tom Reid was ill at ease in the city and not pleased to be lost. “I couldna live here,” he asserted. “I wouldna.”

  He’d come to Carswilloch to retire. He had his bit from the government. Now and then he’d help with the tups. He’d always been a great one for the tups.

  We found the veterinary college and ate lunch at an Indian restaurant. Reid said he didn’t like Indian food; he liked honest British fare like gammon, chips, and curry. He was allergic to corn, rice, and wheat. The tinted eyeglasses shaded his cataracts.

  Both bitches passed their test, eyes fine. Pupils dilated, blind, Gael got in the car when Reid asked her to. “You canna abuse a dog,” he said softly. “They never forget it. Until their dying day they willna forget it was you abused them.”

  As the cooler shadows lengthened, we drove back south.

  It was just this time of day that Reid had his car smashup. He and his wife returned from Glasgow, after her cancer treatment, and badly wanted some fresh air, so they took Gael out. As always, quietly, Gael rode between his wife’s feet. It’s a long clear stretch of road before the Carswilloch turn, and Tom slowed, as he had hundreds of times, and touched his indicators and turned. The lorry behind them was coming very quick, had slowed not a whit, and WHUMP they hurled sideways down the road. It was Tom’s door that got crushed, pressed around his sound right leg, and his first thought was, “Dear God, not the other one.” His wife was white faced and making some cry, he wasn’t sure what, and she had her door open and was out on the tarmac. She wasn’t hurt that he could see, but she wasn’t in her right mind either and Tom took hold of the wee bitch’s collar before she could escape the car because she was a wild thing and once she was out, she was away. The wee bitch did her terrified best, used teeth and claw in her urgency. “Bide there, Lass. Bide there, Lass. Bide there. …”

  At the cottage, he took my money and gave me ten pounds back for luck. I promised to write. I said, “I’ll be back for the International. Maybe I’ll see you then.”

  “Aye,” Reid said. “If I’m spairt.”

  And I took Tom Reid’s bonny wee bitch away.

  When I fastened Gael’s lead to the passenger door latch, she was frightened and squirmed over the transmission hump under my feet and she couldn’t ride there, it was too dangerous, so I shifted my luggage to the trunk and overturned the clamshell kennel in the backseat and she scooted under its shelter, gratefully. That’s how we traveled: me in the front, her in the back, shedding her coat all over the rental car’s passenger compartment.

  I’d changed categories again. I’d been a man with a desire: now I was a man with a companion. That night, I stayed at Windy Hill Farm outside Strathaven, where my hostess was quite taken with Gael. “She’s a fetching little thing.” That night Gael slept in the kennel and first thing in the morning I got down and knelt beside it to be sure she hadn’t evaporated in the night.

  A lifetime ago, on my first day in Britain, a tabloid newspaper reported the sad loss of a London Border Collie who’d habitually waited at the subway stop to greet his master home from work. A neighborhood newcomer thought the dog was a stray, took him around to the police who failed to identify him, turned him over to the animal shelter and by the time the owner finally tracked the dog down, all that was left was the collar. The constable who’d failed to identify the dog was deeply distressed, the family was furious, and the newcomer was disparaged as a busybody.

  The story was on page one. It wouldn’t have been news in the States. After we discount the tabloid’s lust for sentimentality, there is a residue: Presumptions made in Britain and America about the nature of dogs are so different, the two cultures might be describing distinct taxonomical species.

  Canis Familiarus Britannicus is a well-mannered beast you can take anywhere: on trains, subways (if he’s little enough to tote on the escalators), on buses and quietly under the table at the pub while his master has a wee dram.

  Canis Familiarus Americanus is a willful but CUTE creature who cannot be trusted in modern civilization.

  In Hondo, an early John Wayne western, Wayne plays a cavalry scout who slips through hostile Indian territory accompanied only by his faithful (collie?) Sam. When Wayne arrives at the Lonely Widow’s homestead and she attempts to feed Sam, Wayne chides her, says that Sam hunts his own food. “Sam’s independent. It’s better that way.”

  In Harper’s magazine, recently, Ingrid Newkirk, National Director of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) described the dog’s fate in a society that embraced animal rights: “For one thing, we would no longer allow breeding. People could not create different breeds. … If people had companion animals in their homes, those animals would have to be refugees fr
om the animal shelters and the streets. You would have a protective relationship with them, just as you would with an orphaned child. But as the surplus … declined, eventually companion animals would be phased out, and we would return to a more symbiotic relationship—enjoyment at a distance.”

  Besides their ignorance of dogs, the John Wayne character and Ms. Newkirk share a curious contempt for them. Those poor, stupid, pampered creatures—wouldn’t they be better off wild?

  It has been twenty thousand years since man and dog formed their partnership. That we have altered the dog genetically is well understood; it is hardly known how they changed us. Since dogs could hear and smell better than men, we could concentrate on sight. Since courage is commonplace in dogs, men’s adrenal glands could shrink. Dogs, by making us more efficient predators, gave us time to think. In short, dogs civilized us.

  “The wild” has always had a grip on the American psyche. “In wilderness,” Henry David Thoreau said, “is the salvation of the world.” Only an American could say that and only an American could think it self-evidently true. “Wild” animals are animals unscrewed up by man or, in a different mood, creatures we can slaughter to our heart’s content. Wilderness is the place where the centuries-old limits on human conduct no longer apply, where a man is a man and a dog is a wolf.

  My home county is rural and my neighbors let their dogs run free, returning home for meals and sleep. These dogs are killed by cars, dispatched by farmers who catch them attacking their sheep, slain by hunters who see them running deer. Most simply vanish.

  When I suggest my neighbors might adopt some other strategy of dog care, they look at me like I’m crazy: Don’t I know a dog wants to roam, wants to be as wild as it can be?

  In America, dogs are rarely seen in offices, shops, subways, trains or buses, and only in our mountain West will you find a dog in a bar. Sometimes I think Americans are afraid of dogs.

  Britain is a country where limits are real, limits of birth and geography. Although portions of the island are remote and rugged, these areas are protected as “parks,” not “wilderness.” The downside of British limits is obvious: It would have been much easier for the Billinghams to become entrepreneurs in America. But the nature of dog training is limits—the dog has his, the sheep have theirs and, most important, the man has limits too. To go beyond those limits, to force the training, to ask the dog to understand what is beyond him invites failure. Working within and against their limits, a flawed man and flawed dog can sometimes achieve a kind of elegance that looks very much like perfection.

  I drove Gael to Tweedhope right away. I wanted the confirmation of eyes more skilled than my own.

  Viv said, “The wee bitch looks just like you, Donald. All gingery.” Fearing she’d offended, she added, “I think Garry looks just like me. Can’t you see it?”

  I fancied I saw a resemblance.

  Viv, Geoff, and I took Gael out to the bluff overlooking the glen where the tups grazed—the tups Viv used for her dog demonstrations. They grazed contentedly on an island surrounded by shallow burns.

  “Shall I send Holly to bring them near?” Viv asked.

  “Let’s see what Gael can do,” I said and unfastened the lead and stood her beside my leg and sent her off with a “whssst,” and she was away, down the bluff, wading/swimming the burn, up nicely behind the tups, and they faced her, a stubborn wall of wool, hooves, and bone.

  “Call her on, Donald.”

  “Let’s see what she does by herself.” Gael came on softly, deliberately, until the tups had enough and turned and splashed into the burn. Once she had the tups heading nicely, she swung back to collect an unfortunate goat lingering nearby. The goat knew she wasn’t part of this act and kept trying to bolt. Gael balanced nicely—the three cheeky tups and the flighty, desperate goat—and brought all four through the burn to the foot of the bluff. Gael was hard to call off, she was so happy.

  “She’s brilliant, Donald,” Viv said. “Brilliant.”

  Geoff, more quietly: “Aye. Yin’s a useful bitch.”

  That night, in Peebles, most of the B & Bs were full up but I found a room, finally, in a house with just one room to rent, at the top of the stairs. The owner, a pleasant young man, was a builder by trade, and his house wasn’t quite finished: a heap of lumber beside the front door, a cinderblock serving for the front stoop. The Edinburgh commuters (he said) were driving the house prices up; this place was worth twenty thousand more than he’d paid for it.

  Under the eaves, my room was lit by brand-new clerestory windows. It’d be hot up here in the summertime, but it was nice enough now. The bathtub was surrounded by kids’ bathtub toys. I lay on the thick featherbed, reading Bobby Burns, and the bonny wee bitch jumped up, like she’d been on featherbeds all her life, and started cleaning her feet. She made me smile. That night she slept beside me, her hard boney back pressed against my broader one.

  Monie a sair darg we twa hae wrought,

  An wi the weary warl’ fought!

  An monie an anxious day, I thought,

  We wad be beat!

  Yet here to crazy age we’re brought,

  Wi something yet.

  In the morning, I drove north again. I wanted to see Gael’s sire to learn, if I could, what genetic blessings and headaches lurked within her modest frame. As we neared Edinburgh, we joined the morning rush hour—thick, exhaust fumes, slow. I never got used to the pure open countryside surrounding the Scottish cities. This side of the bridge: verdant farmland. That side: habitations, wall to wall, thick as cliff dwellings.

  Edinburgh streets are narrow, and cars were parked on both sides. When I spotted the laundrette, I also spotted an open parking space just across the street. I zipped into the space and waited for a break in traffic before opening my door and …

  Gael jumped into the street.

  “GAEL.” I didn’t shout, but my alarm sped directly to her brain stem and when her four feet hit the tarmac, she landed like a lunar lander: stopped, on the spot where she’d put down. “Gael, that’ll do, here,” and she scampered back inside the car and a baker’s lorry whooshed by and I closed the car door so it wouldn’t get ripped off. I couldn’t remember if I’d taken my blood-pressure pills.

  That’s what loss is; how quick it happens.

  Gael hated the car, despised the curvy single track roads, loathed the motorways with their hurry-up noise and vibration.

  In the central Highlands we stopped for lunch in Blair Atholl Village. It was a smallish place and the hills lifted sharply from the valley. I wondered where they’d hold the International—somewhere on Blair Castle’s grounds, I’d been told. I’d pretty well decided to come back in September for the big trial. Having got to know the dogs at the beginning of the season, I hoped to see them at the finish, polished and superb.

  We got back on the motorway and headed north.

  Inverness is crooked streets, difficult traffic, annoying. In Inverness, a busker (street musician) sits from early morning to dusk on the principal bridge across the River Ness. He plays the tin whistle. Some buskers are accomplished musicians. This one plays the same four notes over and over. In the morning, he plays his monody slowly, in the afternoon rapidly. Doubtless he is to be pitied, doubtless he is mad, but his seems a singularly Inverness way to make a living: by irritation.

  I found parking underneath a new shopping mall in the town center. The garage was dark and concrete and echoing, with not much room between car bumpers, and Gael kept tight to my side. The exit doors were marked in red stencil: Emergency Exit Only, so I followed arrows into the building itself, where it was much quieter, and the floor was linoleum (cream colored), and the sign on the single door said: Please, No Dogs.

  Stateside malls have such signs, and I wondered if the sign had come across the water with the mall concept.

  I wondered what the mall’s owners thought Gael was going to do. Perhaps her fault was being an animal, on the premises, with no intention to buy.

  Of course,
it might have just been Inverness. I strode through the door and, a guard buttonholed me, “Sorry sir, no dogs allowed” and I didn’t even pause because I saw a way out forty feet away, “I’m just leaving thanks,” and gone, got away with it.

  That night I stopped at a B & B in Dingwall, in the north. Once more, mine was the only rental room, and the mother shushed the kids for fear they’d wake the American when they ran up the stairs.

  Above Lairg, along Loch Shin, is where they had the last Clearances, a hundred years ago. In some parishes, a thousand crofters were evicted in a single day. This was a hard land, the hardest I’d seen in Scotland. Even the gorse bushes seemed appealing—most other vegetation was peat moss and lichen. It reminded me of stretches of the American West. The streams ran silver beside the road, and it wasn’t country I’d like to break down in at night.

  Scottish National Radio interviewed a professor of folk culture who’d gotten his start when Alan Lomax came over in the thirties. Lomax wanted to collect folk ballads of the Highlands and the Isles, and fifty years ago this professor was his guide.

  The fish lorries came very fast, wouldn’t back down, and twice almost ran me off the road. Just beyond the hamlet of Bad Call (a name that belongs in Montana) is an adventure school, its earnest youngsters training to be self-reliant, learning skills for a world that once existed in fact, but now exists only as sport. Stringent fitness is much more appealing when the society no longer needs it.

  Adventure schools have their own ecological requirements, and the presence of one describes the local terrain. Here, along the empty shore, the road weaves between boulders the size of caravans. This is a moonscape, littered by meteorites. Here and there, there’s a smidgen of browse for livestock.

  J. P. (Perry) MacKenzie has the caravan park at Old Shore, beyond the modern fishing port of Kin Lochbervie. The instant I let Gael out, Don, her father, hurries over (he is an ugly brute) and sniffs her in a businesslike way. He expects only one sort of bitch to visit him and wants to get on with it. For a moment, Gael trots along, ignoring the presumptuous stranger, until she turns and shows Don every tooth in her head. Gael has more teeth than a crocodile.