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

by Donald McCaig

  Up we go, over barren hills where the roads are closed from December until May.

  Early this morning, Ray Edwards phoned, and when he heard of Taff’s grip, he said John Angus should go back to the tape (of Taff’s whistle commands). When Ray wanted Taff around tight at the drive gate, he’d whistle “WHEET!” or if Taff was to come even quicker, “WHET-WHET!” or if he was to come around but get back at the same time (and thus avoid the danger of a grip), “WHEET-WHEET-WHEEEE.”

  The hills above Fortingall are beautiful and bleak. When we passed a hill where the Forestry Commission had begun planting rows of trees, John Angus turned to the wee Irish: “In forty years,” he said, “the only place you’ll see a shepherd is in a museum.”

  On this, the second day of qualifications, the grandstands were packed and the peeps of their stopwatches more numerous, like crickets.

  I speak to Philip Hendry, the ISDS secretary who invites me to lunch with the duke. Hamish MacLean comes off after a nice run with his Lynn bitch and is surrounded by men in wellies and waterproofs asking for pups. Does he have any from his last litter? When will he breed her again? “I get eighty pounds for a pup,” Hamish warns, but the buyers wave questions of price aside. “Lynn’s next pups are spoken for, I’m afraid.”

  J. M. Wilson once said the proper thing to do with a dog that’s qualified at the National is put it away until the International. This sound advice is universally ignored. When a man has a dog that’s almost, almost perfect, it’s beyond human restraint to leave the dog alone. Instead, they’ll work on that slight imperfection, screwing the dog down tighter and tighter until, under the pressure of the big trial, the dog just falls to pieces.

  Many a man came off the course today, abashed at problems he’d caused himself, overtraining his dog.

  When J. R. Thomas’s Jos makes a mux of it, J. R. bends down and gives Jos a half pat, half cuff. Sheepdogs like honesty; they like to know where they stand.

  The back portion of the restaurant tent has been partitioned for the ISDS party, the duke and his guests. I don’t know tent etiquette. When do I remove my hat?

  The duke is a strongly built, portly man who runs a rural business with a castle, enormous acreage, and a hundred full-time employees. He’s slightly ill at ease, though able, at Hendry’s suggestion, to produce a welcoming speech to sponsors and honored guests. The Welshman sitting beside the duke will host next year’s International at Glamorgan. Glamorgan, he says, has the finest orangerie in Europe outside Brussels.

  The fare is plain: beef, potatoes, carrots, jug wine. Some of the guests (myself, I think) have been invited to fill the quota for “Overseas Guests.” Midway through the meal, as the duke and the Welshman discuss deer-management techniques, an elderly Canadian at the end of the table gets to his feet and begins filming with a video camera. He interviews his countryman, a burly mustachioed man in a blue parka, seated across the table from the duke.

  “Are you having a good time in Scotland?” the film-maker inquires.

  “Oh yeah, fine.” The burly Canadian leans into the center of the table. “I’m having lunch with the duke.”

  The camera swerves to record the duke who rests his fork.

  “And we’re having this lunch, which ain’t too bad, you know, but I hope we don’t have to pay for it; I hope it’s free.”

  The duke snaps, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”

  Afterwards, when I asked the duke why the trial was at Blair Atholl, he was vague, saying that, of course, this is sheepdog country, and they came to him in 1982 and again this year, and he said yes. “I’m an amateur, really.” “Amateur” was a bigger more languorous word out of his mouth than it looks on the page.

  Outside the tent, the duke turned to Ray Ollerenshaw, the ISDS chairman, and muttered, “I loathe that.”

  What he loathed was a minivan, slathered with Day-Glo posters. “No better bone china in Britain” “Your own dog hand-painted on a plate.”

  I was struck by the number of concession tents and caravans. By British standards for agricultural events, the International Sheepdog Trial is only midsize. Yet, the Bank of Scotland is here, ready to take a farmer’s deposit or cash a check. There’s a Subaru dealer, and the Alliance Insurance Company. I ask the insurance agent if they insure dogs as well as livestock and they say yes, yes they do. There’s a tent midway, in which Davidson’s Veterinary Supplies, Lochan Countrywear, and the Highland Confectionery enjoy a brisk trade. A jeweler sells pendants. Glenfiddich has a caravan. There’s a bookstall. In the gift shops, popular items include painted porcelain tableaus—shepherd, Border Collie, two ewes; Border Collie with three lambs—and framed prints of the same subjects.

  The woman at the Chum Pet food booth gave me a can of dog food. I’d bring it back for Gael: The familiar taste would be like a Christmas haggis for a Scot far from home.

  When John Templeton runs Roy, even the Welshmen stop gossiping. I stood with Kenny Brehmer beside the grandstand waiting for the great dog to make his try. A young shepherd leaned out of the bleachers. “You’ll be Donald McCaig, then?”

  I guess he knew me from my hat.

  “Tom Reid couldn’t come. He told me to ask about the wee bitch, Gael.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Even in our mountains, Virginia is much hotter than Scotland, and when I brought Gael home, in early July, the grass was waist high on a man. Gael is less than two feet tall. There are no landmarks in a grass jungle, just a wall of plants with sheep path openings and parks they’ve grazed down. I would stand beside the barn and send Pip to one side and Gael to the other and within moments all I could see of them was their roostertails through the damp grass. I do not know how Gael learned to navigate, how she found her sheep.

  Most handlers who work with imported sheepdogs adopt a Scottish dialect but Gael was now in a country where almost everybody else talked strangely. She stayed close to me, paid no attention to my wife, Anne, ignored Pip once they’d settled territorial claims with brief growls.

  Although Border Collies are so keen to work—so justified by work—they’ll work for anybody, they do best once they’ve bonded to a man (or woman) and understand the nuances of expression and character. It can be a long courtship: ten months to a year. Gael and I were in love; we were not yet a marriage.

  There’s no sheepdog trialing in Virginia in July and August, and on the farm we try to complete our sheep chores by 10 A.M., before it gets really hot. Dogs are not particularly efficient hot-weather workers—they only sweat through their tongues and the pads of their feet, and willing Border Collies can literally be worked to death in the heat. If a dog survives heat stroke or convulsions, he’ll be susceptible ever after. And many a Scottish dog, imported from a cooler climate, has been ruined on a single scorching hot American afternoon. Although Gael was smooth coated and thus slightly more heat tolerant, her body would take time to adjust.

  Gael is a soft dog, quick to learn, calm around stock. When she was weaned from her mother, Tom Reid turned her over to the retarded girl who raises all his pups, gives them the attention and cuddling they require. At eight months, when she showed interest in stock, Tom broke her to work. “She’d slip in with the sheep every chance she had and it was the devil to catch her.” Once he had her settled into a fetch and her balance was right, he loaned Gael to a shepherd pal who was lambing. At a year and six months, Gael met hirsels of wild sheep on a great Hill. The work taught her what she needed to know: that if she rushed her sheep, cut in on them, came up short, she had to do the job over and it was always harder the second time. Reid ran Gael at a couple nursery trials, but she was too strongly right-handed. Often pups settle a young bitch, and it worked with Gael. When I met her, at Dalrymple, she’d just run her first open trial.

  Although I had a tape of Reid’s whistles, I didn’t use them at first. We repeated the lessons Gael learned as a puppy. At first, I simply walked her. If, unasked, she went to the sheep and brought them to me, I’d call her off:
“That’ll do, Gael, here.” It was three weeks before I sent her for sheep. WHSSST. From that point, quite slowly, we began reprising her training.

  American sheep are, generally, heavier than Scottish sheep, much harder for a dog to move. The dog is trained for working big spaces with sheep who’ll bolt when the dog’s within a hundred yards. Most of our work is in ten-acre pastures and the dog must haunt her sheep, working within twenty feet of their tails.

  Gael is smaller than most Border Collies and her smooth style doesn’t upset her sheep. She has no grip in her. This advantage turns to disadvantage with sick or stubborn sheep—she’ll bring them, but very slowly. No big problem on the farm but difficult on a trial course with a time limit.

  Thus, the wee bitch needed to learn a new language, climate, landscape, and new work rules as well. She finally compromised on a grip. She never did learn to bite a sheep but when a ewe is being particularly hateful she’ll jump at her face and snap her teeth and that usually does the job.

  With ordinary luck, Gael should continue to improve until she’s seven or eight. Older, she’ll be wiser, but her body will start to slow down.

  I didn’t say any of this at the International to Tom Reid’s friend. What I said was, “I am well pleased with Gael.”

  “Aye, Tom will be glad to hear that,” the young man said and we both turned to watch Templeton’s Roy.

  John Templeton and Roy have won the International Driving Championship (Aberystwyth), the International Doubles Championship (Strathaven, Bonchester Bridge, Glasgow, York) and three National championships. Roy has been in the Scottish team every year since 1981. But Roy is 9½ years old. Internationals have been won by dogs Roy’s age, but it’s uncommon.

  As Roy went out, Kenny Brehmer turned to me, “Aye Donald. Have you seen any good dogs here then?”

  I replied that, yes, I had. “A few of them are good enough to be competitive in America.” Just two Scots pivoted to identify the daft American. Other Scots shuddered like a collective chill had passed through all of them.

  John Templeton’s commands tumble over one another like a burn over rocks, liquid and quick. Roy steps this way or that. That’s when I count the commands: 17 in 15 seconds, and they’re so soft, I’ve missed some.

  The Scots forget the brash American to watch a legendary dog. “Look at the bloody wee machine,” someone breathes.

  John Angus and I leave after Stuart Davidson’s run. Helen had left earlier, with the Welshmen. She’d chores to do before she dressed for the International dinner.

  At a motorway convenience store, John stops for petrol and a gray-haired woman comes to fill our tank. She remarks that it’s been nice weather for a sheepdog trial, and John says, “Aye, but my Taff dog had a grip. He was doing grand until he came to the drive gate, and when I whistled him round, he gripped that horned ewe and cowped her. They want such a tight turn at that panel. Bloody tight turns! Taff’s never done a thing like that before.”

  The woman cuts the pump, “Well, it’s been nice weather for it.”

  As we race back to Kiltyrie, John Angus says that yesterday the four judges didn’t agree whether Taff had gripped or not. “It was two for me and two against.” The English judge insisted they call John off.

  I say that I met the Welshman who would sponsor next year’s International, that it would be at Glamorgan, Wales, that they have the second finest orangerie in Europe.

  “Aye,” John says, “I’m told that course is a bit dodgy on the left.”

  When we pulled into the steading at Kiltyrie, Helen came out and looked at both of us, “What have you done with the wee Irish?” she demanded.

  Blair Castle sits smack on the main route through the central Highlands. In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie stopped here with his Jacobite army on their march south. Later in the rebellion, the castle was occupied by English forces, and Lord George Murray, Charlie’s commander, unsuccessfully besieged it. If the castle had fallen to Lord George, perhaps the English army, its flank exposed, might have delayed its march to Culloden, and Charlie might have fought better if he’d fought another day.

  I doubt the Jacobite cause might ever have prevailed, but history does like a joke, and we have one here at Blair Castle: a Jacobite redoubt that thwarted a Jacobite assault and tonight celebrates sheepdogs, whose final brilliance was polished on the hard hills created by the Clearances.

  For Scotland, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s adventure was a political and military disaster. But Jacobite sentiment (half fierce, half embarrassed) lives on in remote rural Scotland, and tomorrow, at the International Sheepdog Trial, many Scots will wear Charlie’s emblem—sprigs of white heather—in their lapels.

  Blair Castle is a storybook castle, chunky and white. Queen Victoria granted the dukes the right to maintain the only private army in Britain: the Atholl Highlanders. They are, today, a gentlemen’s drill team and social club whose principal function is to supply a piper and fusiliers to fire the courtyard cannon for the tourists.

  The sprawling three-story structure is filled with museum-quality antiques and funky stuff. There’s a splendid collection of china: Wedgwood, Sevres, Meissen, Derby (complete with photostats of the original bills). A music stand in the drawing room holds the score of the Atholl Quadrilles by one Finlay Dun. Blair Castle is a family home, four hundred years of things people just couldn’t bear to throw away. There’s a moth-eaten tartan (two hundred years old), intricately cut paper passes worked with the names of executed Jacobites. After Charlie’s exile, these would pass you into Jacobite gatherings (and gloomy gatherings they must have been, too). In the same case are cameos of Charlie and the last garter he wore on his deathbed in Rome.

  Blair Castle is chockablock with arms and armor, but its bookroom is the size of my linen closet (its linen closet is the size of my house). For a castle, this is a chipper sort of place, willing to be silly. Beside a William-and-Mary state bed, with weary silk hangings and sullen ostrich plumes, a descriptive card worries about the bed’s provenance, noting it might not have been in Holyrood (where legend had placed it) and cheerfully concluding, “The search continues!”

  The ballroom makes a great postcard, and I bought a dozen of them. It has a hunting-lodge flavor, with stag horns on the creamy end walls and naked wooden trusses supporting the splendid wooden roof.

  Arriving a little late—we had the wee Irishman’s suit in the car if he tracked us down here—we met Stuart Davidson at the castle’s front door. I thought Stuart had won the qualifying today, but the judge’s placed him third, after Adam Waugh and Meirion Jones. Stuart made light of it.

  As we passed through the narrow passageway en-route to the bar, John Angus paused to rate each set of antlers. Most, in John Angus’s view, were none too good.

  We sat at table with Alec Barbour, the duke’s factor; Mr. Tull, the farm manager; and Mrs. Tull. The farm manager wasn’t feeling well and didn’t have much to say. John Angus and the factor fell into a spirited discussion of deer poachers and rogues of their acquaintance. The wine labels read, “Bottled especially for Blair Castle”; the Scotch broth was excellent, the lamb overdone. Helen took a phone call from the wee Irish. He’d found another bed. Would we bring his suitcases to the trial in the morning?

  In his after-dinner toast, the duke quoted pastoral poets and lamented that the shepherd’s dog has never been as honored as the shepherd. The duke offered his hope “that the shepherd’s dog may find his proper place in literature,” and the shepherds, not keen readers, most of them, said, “Hear, hear.”

  Helen was pleased that the speeches were short. The tables were pushed to the walls, and dancing began. Farmers in dress tartan kilts, their wives in gala finery, sailed into St. Bannerman’s Waltz and The Pride of Erin. I’m no dancer, so I stepped outside with Alec Barbour. The International was here, he said, from the tradition of Scottish hospitality (the same hospitality that had me—and the wee Irish—at Kiltyrie). “The duke wouldn’t say no,” he said. “Blair Castle was one of the fi
rst of the great houses to open its doors to the public.”

  We strolled around back of the hulking white ghost, lit with floodlights so motorists could see it from the A9. Alec pointed out the duke’s quarters—a homey one-story extension, possibly servant’s quarters at one time or stables. The duke of Atholl’s living space was less grand than many homes in wealthy American suburbs. Of course, the attached castle had grandeur to spare.

  Inside, highlanders danced The Dashing White Sergeant and the Edsome Reel. Women flirted. Men brought trays of drinks from the bar. Helen led me onto the dance floor. She was a splendid dancer and, remembering Pat McGettigan, I avoided stepping on her foot. Men sweated through their white shirts, jokes were told, funny lies. It was one o’clock, soon after they called “Time, gentlemen,” when the murmuring started, the music dribbled to a stop, and eyes turned toward the table where we’d had dinner. Strong men surrounded the table, “Give him air.” “Is there a doctor? A doctor, please?”

  Mr. Tull, the farm manager, lay flat on his back, shirt open, his jacket beside him. Burly men pumped his chest and breathed for him. “He wasn’t drinking, no.” “They’ve phoned for an ambulance from Pitlochry.”

  His damp white shirt stretched across his back, John Angus MacLeod knelt gently at the man’s feet. Delicately, like he might touch a failing lamb, he took the man’s left hand for a moment, held it, laid it down.

  The CPR team was noisy. When they started to thump Mr. Tull’s chest, we went out and sat in the bar. Another Scot was talking nervously about a handler who had a great run at the National and after he came off the course, he vomited, knelt beside the water tub, you know, the one they keep to cool the dogs, and took a drink from it and splashed water on his forehead and fell over, then.

  Helen looked at John Angus.

  John Angus said no, the farm manager was gone. “I took his little finger and bent it back and there was no pulse in there. If you can’t get a pulse there …”