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

by Donald McCaig

  Helen keeps Kiltyrie’s books, orders the supplies (“Some salesman will stop, and John will say, ‘Oh Helen, this fellow wants to sell us our winter nuts (feed),’ and I’ll have to say, ‘John, I ordered our nuts in July’ ”). Helen has tea and cheese sandwiches and biscuits for us when we arrive.

  Grampian is the Scottish National Television Service, and its sheepdog-trial trophy stands on John Angus and Helen’s livingroom sideboard, flanked by bottles of eight-year-old malt whiskey, “bottled especially for Grampian Television.” There are other sheepdog-trialing trophies here and there, and three sets of deer antlers over the mantle. John Angus has been a shepherd stalker in his time, guiding sportsmen after deer when he wasn’t tending the sheep. In the back part of the house, the parlor contains more of John’s trophies, large and small, unpolished. Most sit where they were set down when they came into the house.

  Helen is a strongly built woman in her thirties. She’s big boned, not fat, and she goes straight to the point. Kenny Gibson, the dog trainer, nicknamed her the Buffalo.

  As usual, there are house guests at Kiltyrie—a couple of Welshmen, Helen tells me. They’re out this afternoon, touring the countryside.

  John Angus says, “The sheep at Blair Atholl tomorrow are going to be bloody desperate. They have them from a man who works them from a motorbike, and his only dog is a hunter” (a hunter is a crude working dog who barks the sheep up the hills). “Christ, they’ll be hellish at the pen.”

  “You can wave your bonnet at them, John,” Helen says and John Angus laughs.

  At the Wharton trial, it seems, the sheep were very light (skittish) at the mouth of the pen, quite unwilling to enter, and Flint was too strong a dog for the situation. If John Angus asked Flint to force them, they’d bolt. If he did nothing, they’d stand in the mouth of the pen until the timekeeper called “Time, John.” So John Angus removed his fore-and-aft and dangled it from the tip of his shepherd’s crook and delicately, oh, so delicately, waggled it in the lead ewe’s face. Faced with pure lunacy, this weird thing on a stick, the ewe backed into the pen and her mates followed.

  Helen shook her finger, “After she’d sniffed the bonnet, John. It was the sniff made her retreat.”

  While John Angus phoned the veterinarian about Flint’s eye, I chatted with Helen. I admired her new kitchen cabinets, and she said they were secondhand, weren’t they handsome? A Welsh carpenter had come to stay with them on holiday, and while his family had toured about, he’d installed them.

  Recently, they’d had Helen’s mother for a fortnight’s visit. When younger, her mother had fussed over every poor or sickly soul in the village and now, older and infirm herself, she’d become depressed.

  I said something banal about the difficulty of growing old.

  Helen said, “People hate to grow old when they didn’t do what they wanted when they were young.”

  John hopped Flint into the boot, and we set off for the veterinarian in Aberfeldy. I asked John Angus how Taff’s pups were doing.

  A strong pup sired by a dog like Taff can fetch seventy-five pounds, and stud fees aren’t an insignificant part of a sheepdog man’s income. Some first-rate trial dogs are indifferent to bitches, a few are sterile, and many don’t breed true. The only way anyone can predict how a pup may turn out is to inquire about previous litters. My question, thus, had to do with John Angus’s financial prospects and reputation.

  All intelligent queries about top sheepdogs are highly charged and frequently answered with imperfect candor. John Angus said, “Taff’s pups have a bit of a grip in them until they’re ten or eleven months old. But then you say, ‘Stop that, Doggy,’ and they stop.”

  John Angus paid two thousand pounds for Flint. Tony Illey, who owned Flint, sold him because he wouldn’t go well away from home. Flint was a powerful worker on home ground with familiar sheep, but on the strange ground of a sheepdog course, under pressure, Flint got confused. John Angus (and his bank manager) took a big chance with Flint.

  No two sheepdog trial courses are alike. The trial at Peebles is held in the municipal park; at the Royal Agricultural Show in Edinburgh, the trial is held in an arena. Some trials are held on hills so steep the dogs have to clamber to reach their sheep.

  Since it was first held in 1906, the International Sheepdog Trial has rotated among England, Scotland, and Wales. The International is not the most venerable sheepdog trial, but is, undeniably, the most important. The site is changed each year, and that’s how the trial comes to be named as the “Chester International” or the “Woburn Park International.” This is the second time the International is to be held at Blair Atholl Estate. It was previously here in 1982. Sheepdog men and their families take this occasion for a family holiday, and all the B & Bs in Blair Atholl Village and nearby Pitlochry have been booked since July.

  In August, National trials were held in Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales. Hundreds of dogs compete for slots on the National team, and John Angus just squeaked in. The sheep were hopeless that afternoon, and he finished with eight seconds to spare. Helen admits to smoking three cigarettes during his fifteen-minute run.

  The dogs that run at the International Sheepdog Trial are the most brilliant dogs in the world.

  The veterinarian gives John Angus an antibiotic cream for Flint’s eye and if it isn’t improved in two days, he’s to bring Flint back in. John Angus tells the vet about the flat trial course at Blair Atholl and about the sheep, previously owned by a man who shepherded from a motorbike.

  When we return to Kiltyrie, John lets all the dogs out for a run. Besides Flint and Taff and Helen’s dog, Dougie, he keeps a bitch and three half-grown pups in the straggly metal-roof byre. The dogs are kenneled in old milking stalls. Two slaughter hogs have quarters in the byre, too.

  John Angus perches on an overstuffed chair in the sitting room and unwinds the bandage round his left leg. The leg is purple and shiny, and the ulcer on his calf is the size of a half dollar. John Angus is impatient with his wound (ulcerated varicose veins) and impatient with Helen when she tries to help. “Christ, what a thing! Will you look at it!” He hurls the soiled bandage in the fire. The leg isn’t too painful when he wears low shoes, but his high green wellies rub against it. Helen rolls a clean sock over the fresh bandage and John tugs on his wellies and jumps Taff into the boot, “All right Dougie,” and Dougie jumps in, too.

  Since spring, Taff and Flint have been touring Scotland and the Borders in the Renault’s boot. It is their dark cave, their refuge. In Britain, it is illegal to transport dogs this way, but most sheepdog men do it anyway.

  Kiltyrie is forty-five minutes from Blair Atholl. We pass ruins of fortified houses and the grassy mounds of ancient hill forts. At Fortingall, we turn north. Fortingall boasts a first-rate ornamental blacksmith. “You can’t get him to do ironmongery on the farm,” John Angus says, rather pleased by the smith’s stubborn self-definition. Pontius Pilate was born in Fortingall, legend has it, of a Roman officer and a Celtic girl.

  Most of the hills are high and bare, but some are furrowed from summit to base; rows of furze where the Forestry Commission has planted trees. In some Scottish districts, 30 percent of the hills have been planted in spruce plantations. Endless rows of trees, neat as carrot tops, muffle the hills’ stark outlines and change a way of life dominant in the Highlands since the Clearances.

  In 1745, after Bonnie Prince Charlie and his high-landers were defeated in Culloden by the Duke of Cumberland (known thereafter as “the butcher”), his soldiers pulled down crofters’ cottages, raped their women, and slaughtered their sons. It was a hard and bitter time. But nothing changed the Highlands so dramatically as did the importation of one of God’s gentler creatures. It wasn’t armed men who changed the Highlands. It was sheep.

  Hardy Cheviots and Scottish Blackfaces bared the hills of shrubs and sapling trees. The overgrazed woods died, and the hills revealed their stoney naked outlines.

  For two hundred years, sheep have occupied the domi
nant ecological niche here. Foxes and hoodie crows survived to prey on young lambs. Roe and fallow deer roam.

  Forty years after Culloden, in the great glens where communities had lived, a few scattered shepherds grazed their flocks among the crofters’ shattered byres, the fire-blackened lintel stones.

  In some respects, those who have the daily use of a thing own it, and these shepherds, desperately poor though they were, were kings of this high barren land.

  More than one present-day Scottish shepherd has told me of an affinity shepherds feel for the American cowboy, his resourcefulness and solitude.

  But the cowboy’s reputation for violence (however deserved) has never been part of the shepherd’s mystique. Johnny Bathgate manages Easter Dawyck near Peebles in the Borders. He frequently comes to the States to judge sheepdog trials and once, in California, attended a spring roundup. “Oh they chased the calves down on horses and roped them and threw them down and wrapped these ties. …” He made a wrapping motion.

  “Pigging strings?”

  “Oh, aye. Around the feet and then another cowboy stepped forward with a red-hot iron and marked the beast.” Johnny paused for a second, his gentle eyes wide. “We couldn’t do that over here,” he said. “They wouldn’t permit it.”

  Last spring when I first came to Kiltyrie, John Angus and Kenny Gibson were in the byre sorting potatoes. Helen Smeaton was away on holiday, and the household looked it. Her dog, Dougie, made his bed in a mound of unwashed clothes beside the washing machine.

  After weeks on the road, honest work was a relief and I squatted to help with the potatoes. John Angus said he was away to the Luss trial in the morning and would return to Kiltyrie to collect Kenny and then to the Assynt trial that afternoon, did I want to come? Of course I did.

  That evening, I followed when John Angus took Flint and Taff up Ben Lawers. Every day the sheep would drift down the hill, and at 7 P.M., Taff would drive them back above the tourist road.

  There aren’t many men running in sheepdog trials in Scotland, three hundred perhaps. The dangerous handlers compete frequently, every weekend, and when the season heats up in June, there are midweek trials as well. To be eligible to run in the Scottish National, a dog must have won one open trial or captured several seconds and thirds.

  Purses are small, twenty-five or thirty pounds for a first, and during a season, a handler is lucky if purses pay his gas money. Many farmers won’t hire a shepherd who trials, fearing the trial man will worry his sheep training young dogs. Also, farming doesn’t respect weekends, and the trialist has his weekends booked two months in advance. I asked John Angus how Bobby Dalziel had managed to run so frequently with Dryden Joe. “Oh, Bobby worked at a desperate place.” John Angus shook his head. “They couldn’t get anyone else to stay there.”

  We were off for Luss before sunrise, tea and buttered rolls in our bellies. Lorries, coaches, and caravans slowed our progress along the scenic lochs, and it was eight o’clock before the road widened along Loch Lomond.

  I talk about the differences between Scottish sheep and American ones. I talk about American dog handlers and describe dog trials I’ve watched in Australia.

  John Angus doesn’t hear a word. “Bloody Hell,” he says. “There’ll be water in that wee burn today. At Luss, man. The sheep will balk on the crossdrive.”

  Although Loch Lomond is below the trial field, we can’t see the loch from the course. When we arrive, the course is laid out, with gates and pen, but nobody else is here yet. John Angus lets Flint and Taff out of the boot. “Come along, Donald.”

  In recent years, televised sheepdog trials have become popular here. The Grampian trials are small beer, but the BBC’s “One Man and His Dog” has been a phenomenon. Hosted by Phil Drabble, a countryman with an uncanny resemblance to a Toby mug, and Eric Halsell, whose prim commentary deplores each mistake (“Points off! There’ll be points off for that!”), “One Man and His Dog” is an invitational trial run on scenic courses, generally, as John Angus notes, “with some bloody castle in the background.” The Luss course has been laid out, it seems, with the scenic televised trials as a model. The dogs must slip through a gap in the hedge to find their sheep and fetch the sheep back through a fetch gate athwart a culvert. The dogs must push the sheep up a steep bank, and during the cross-drive, the sheep must leap a skinny water-filled burn. John Angus drops a tuft of wool where he wants his sheep to cross the burn.

  We go through the hedge gap, up the course with Flint and Taff. There’s a grove of trees between us and the waiting ewes. “They are fanatical about trees here,” John Angus says. “They won’t cut a limb off a tree so a dog can see his sheep.” He walks Flint and Taff above the trees showing them where they’ll need to go for a perfect run. We return straightaway to the car, and he pops them in the boot.

  In the States, it’s forbidden to take your dogs on a trial course before they run, but I say nothing because I’m sure it’s the same here.

  We take a drink of coffee from John Angus’s thermos as other handlers start to arrive. Several walk the course. I notice one man drop his own tuft of wool. Soon enough there are fifteen or twenty cars drawn up at the foot of the course; handlers stand about warming their hands in their pockets and talk dogs and sheep, sheep, sheep. Running according to prearranged order, they’ll trickle in all day long. Few will stay for the entire trial. Most, like John Angus, will run at other trials later in the day; Peebles, perhaps, or Carsphairn.

  To test the course, John Angus will run Flint first. As Flint goes through the hedge, John Angus plans to give him a “wee safety whistle” to push him out until he’s beyond the trees.

  When John Angus steps to the handler’s post, all the worries drain right out of him and he is at ease. He takes all the time he needs to set Flint up properly, and then Flint’s off! Flint goes through the hedge and takes the “wee safety whistle,” but when he comes upon the pen where sheep wait before they’re released onto the course, he thinks these are the sheep John Angus has sent him for and he freezes right there. Preemptorily, John Angus whistles Flint by, onto the proper five sheep, blackface ewes, who bounce down the course but jam at the fetch gate, unwilling to clamber up the steep bank.

  At my elbow, a handler murmurs, “That dog’s dear at two thousand pounds.”

  Another replies, “That dog’s dear at a thousand pounds.”

  But Flint masters his sheep, brings them in, and begins his drive. Twice, the sheep come off proper line, but Flint gets them through the obstacles. John Angus and Flint get a quick shed and clap the ewes in the pen. As John Angus comes off the field, he’s fuming at the course’s designer and the trial committee, and several Scots gather round, all wearing that strange sly smile.

  “Oh bloody hell. A hellish course! What fool set up a course so the dog must pass the release pen to find his sheep? Oh, you’ll never see me at this bloody trial again.”

  A few minutes before he’s to run Taff, John Angus takes him out in the woods to relieve himself, to stretch his legs. When they go to the post, John Angus changes his mind and sets the dog off on the left side where we didn’t go this morning. Taff runs out well to a drystane wall, follows the wall until he strikes a wire fence, jumps the fence, and starts to come in perfectly on his sheep but then stops short and begins to drive the sheep away, just as he does every evening with Kiltyrie’s ewes on Ben Lawers. “Taff! Taff. Come by, Taff.” And Taff arcs around behind them and thereafter runs an impeccable course.

  When John Angus comes off, he puts Taff in the boot. “Well boys, we’re off to Assynt.” In the car, John Angus notes, “If Taff’d had a proper outrun, he would have been hard to beat. Bloody course!” He slapped his horn at a sluggish lorry.

  We’re back at Kiltyrie by noon and snatch a roll and cheese and a cup of tea. Kenny Gibson isn’t feeling well and can’t come, so John Angus grabs the Assynt trophy (he won the trial last year), drops it in a paper bag, and we’re off.

  The roads John Angus chooses are invariabl
y the most direct, the crookedest, and slowest. We swoop across the hills on bare-bones single tracks; the Renault grunting up one steep rise after another. John Angus frets about Flint. Kenny Gibson has offered to take Flint for six months to settle him, but, of course, John Angus needs two dogs. John Angus recalls Glen, the dog who came fourth at the Scottish National when he was eleven years old. At the shedding, John Angus was running out of time. From the grandstand, Raymond MacPherson called out, “Be Quick!” (in Gaelic) and John Angus cried Glen in and Glen jumped over the backs of the sheep to shed off the correct one.

  Gloomily, John notes, “Flint’d nae manage that.”

  We seem to be traversing the spine of the earth. It is spare up here, and since John Angus travels with my window open, cold. The sun casts short shadows as we race along. John Angus is instantly less confident once we turn onto the A9 motorway near Tummel Bridge. There are too many cars, all traveling too fast. John worries about Flint stopping for the wrong lot of sheep at Luss. He frets about Taff.

  Until he bred Don, Perry MacKenzie wasn’t a trial man. One fine spring day, Perry and Don came upon a neighbor in trouble. Hector, a crusty old herd, grazed his flock along Loch Inver, a sea loch. One ewe had taken her lamb out to a rock and the tide came in and there they were, the two high and dry. Perry asked Hector if he should send Don after them, and Hector said, “No dog can kep yin beast off that rock, but ye’re welcome to try.”

  Perry gathered a few other ewes at the water’s edge to serve as a magnet before he sent Don. Don swam out into the loch and came behind the rock. Glaring at the ewe, he got one paw up, then another, until he had full purchase, and—an inch another—he backed her until she tumbled off the rock and swam for shore with her lamb after.

  Hector was lavish with praise, “I’ve never seen a dog to do that before. Yin’s a grand dog. A grand beast.”