The Dogs of Bedlam Farm

by Jon Katz

  I try not to envy anybody else’s life, but sometimes I met couples around Hebron who’d plotted, schemed, and worked half their lives to buy a piece of land and move to the country. My only marital regret was that we hadn’t yearned for that together. Still, I honored her choices, as she honored mine.

  Even if we never had the same dream, that didn’t mean we didn’t have a great marriage. Paula loved writing and, more recently, teaching, and she was doing both based in New York. She had friends in the city and felt connected to our New Jersey town. I’d been less lucky in friendship and had less to leave behind. Yet the connection I did have there—Paula—was the most important of all.

  So, therefore, the tug and the pull. When I was here, I wanted to be there. Back there, I needed to be here. I loved the solitude here. Some things are heard only in deep silence. To me, space and quiet meant freedom. But I also needed to talk with my wife each morning, once or twice during the day, again before bedtime. We were on the phone a lot.

  I felt confident she’d be up more often than before, but maybe never as much as I wanted. And with my flock to care for, it was harder for me to shuttle back and forth than it was from my mountain cabin. It made the farm bittersweet. When I thought of Paula so far away for so long, I sometimes ached. I knelt so that one dog or another could lick my face. It was comforting. No one with good dogs is ever truly alone.

  Dogs go only so far, but we were on this trip together. Not to put too fine a point on it, this was Bedlam, sir, and we were its inhabitants. The framed print of a mill, which the farm’s former owner had left on the living-room wall as a sort of benediction and house-warming gift, even came from the attic of an old psychiatric hospital called “Bedlam Hall.” Jesse had discovered the print when she worked there thirty years ago, stored among the “cage beds” and “lockdown chairs” once used to restrain patients, and smuggled it away. Now, she said, it seemed to belong here.

  We belonged here, too, maybe to learn humility. I wouldn’t be the least surprised if soon people started paying admission to watch us bumble around. We’d see how far a balding, semicrippled middle-aged man and three good working dogs could get on a real farm in the real country, where grocery shopping required a forty-mile round-trip.

  When Orson arrived in my life, he challenged me in an elemental way. He opened doors and walked out of the house, jumped through a leaded-glass window (twice) and over fences, launched guerrilla attacks on neighborhood barbecues. He rarely listened to me, let alone obeyed. No creature on earth had ever been more attached to me, and I loved him ferociously. Yet I couldn’t begin to recount how he’d frustrated me, how many times I yelled commands at him at increasing decibel levels. A few times I even threw things at him, from choke chains to shoes. I had never felt so provoked.

  When I began the serious process of learning how to really train him, with Carolyn at Raspberry Ridge, what I saw in chilling relief wasn’t a bad or rebellious dog, but an angry and impatient man. Rage, smoldering throughout my life, was never far from the surface, and much as I adored this dog, he had a genius for flushing it out. I didn’t like the voice that sometimes came out of my mouth when I tried to train my dogs. It was, a psychiatrist friend helped me recognize eventually, my father’s voice: critical, scolding and judgmental.

  My father loved me as much, I’m sure, as I love Orson. Perhaps he never realized that he was causing damage. In any event, he couldn’t help himself. Whereas I believed I could help myself, and I wanted to. This reform was one of the most basic unfinished tasks in my life, and the dogs represented my best chance to evolve. Perhaps that’s what I was really doing at Bedlam Farm.

  THERE WERE A MILLION TASKS ON THE FARM, BUT NOT MANY involved dogs yet, which was probably a good thing. Orson was too crazy to herd, Rose too young, Homer too unpredictable in close quarters.

  My herding needs weren’t complicated. I needed a dog that could go out to the pasture and bring the sheep down to the barn at feeding time, or at night, or during a storm. I needed a dog to keep the sheep from storming me while I was toting buckets of corn and feed. I fantasized about a dog that would even help me take the sheep out of their fenced pasture to the lush meadows higher up the hill or across the road. A dog like that, however, would require more herding skills than I’d been able to impart in three years.

  Herding is a complicated undertaking, even with storied border collies. To be useful at all, the dogs needed to learn how to approach the sheep at a wide distance—an “outrun” that took them around a clump of sheep without stampeding them. They needed to learn how to lie down on command, instantly, to anchor the flock with their presence, and to “stay” there. And to understand “come by,” moving around the sheep from the left, and “away to me,” moving around to the right. They needed to keep a healthy distance, so the sheep felt safe enough to graze. They needed to use their eyes and bodies to intimidate their wooly charges, not their teeth. The dog had to learn to work with the herder, too, moving in relationship to the human. A trained border collie was always maneuvering to keep the sheep between him and the shepherd.

  Yet none of these skills was really natural to a dog. The border collie is a close cousin of the wolf, a predator whose instinct is to chase and eat sheep, not to lie patiently alongside a grazing flock. My cranky knees could testify to the persistence, the months and years required to get these dogs to do what looked so natural on TV. Our herding was complicated by the donkey, who was protective of the sheep—I was counting on her to help ward off coyotes—but didn’t like to be herded by dogs or anybody else.

  My goals for each dog were different. With Rose, I had to first let her get comfortable with sheep, then train her slowly and positively. Orson, as always, needed to learn how to follow commands and not knock the sheep around. Homer got into a frenzied state around sheep, sometimes even a dangerous one, though he’s normally a good-natured, somewhat timid soul.

  In our canine constellation, Homer had always been the easy dog, especially compared to the intense and excitable Orson. Homer was the sweet one, the one who wanted no trouble, the one who loved kids and whom kids loved to cuddle; with him, I didn’t need to be so watchful.

  Maybe that’s why Homer had quietly become less attached, as I’d noticed over the past several months. He rarely stayed in the same room with Orson, Rose, and me. He lagged behind on walks, and didn’t come as promptly when called. For a while, because he seemed listless and lethargic, I feared he might have some physical problem. The vet checked his heart, his joints, his thyroid. He was healthy, she said. That left, by default, a training problem. With three dogs, one a puppy, it had been tough to make time for Homer’s issues. But I had to. He was a great dog, and I owed it to him.

  For the moment, the dogs’ major job was to race around the woods and fields, after which I combed through their coats for stickle-burrs and ticks, both plentiful. But I also took each dog to work with the sheep, briefly, each day.

  One such afternoon as we approached the barn a beat-up old Chevy pickup pulled into the driveway. It had the unmistakable signatures of a farm truck: it reeked of manure; its paint had flaked almost completely off; its bed was stacked with rusting tools and bits of machinery; clots of hay and mud clung to the tire wells.

  Jay Jeffers was, in fact, a farmer, who lived down in Argyle. He showed up complete with weathered face, faded baseball cap, and the deliberate walk of a man with stooped back and battered knees. He’d just come from milking his “girls,” he said. He’d been doing it for thirty years and, like most of his fellows, he didn’t expect to be in business much longer. Small-farm life was dying fast, and nothing spoke to that decline more than the arrival of people like me.

  “Saw your collies, just wanted to stop by and see them work.” He leaned over to pat the circling dogs. “Beautiful dogs. I could sure use one. Wonder if they could move calves.”

  I sent Homer tearing off after the sheep so Jay could watch. Homer plowed into the middle of the flock, rather than circle arou
nd it as border collies were supposed to. Still, the sheep, accustomed to working with amateurs, turned and hustled toward the barn. Homer got the job done. Jay whistled appreciatively.

  “Ever think of getting one?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “Couldn’t afford one and don’t have the time to train one. Don’t want to pay all those vet bills, either.” By now, I knew what that meant. Farm dogs had better stay healthy. Repairing a broken leg could, in a bad month, make the difference between profit and loss.

  Jay was the first but not the last farmer to stop by. As the weeks passed, quite a few pulled their pickups over to watch me work with the dogs and the sheep. Their appreciation for the dogs was heartfelt, but no one expected ever to have one himself. They all said almost exactly the same thing: they’d love to have a dog like mine but couldn’t afford the money or the time. It made me increasingly uncomfortable.

  Real farmers all had barn dogs—mutts—to keep down the rodents and chase off predators. But only émigrés from Boston and New York had herding dogs. And, of course, we were the ones who didn’t truly need them. For us, herding was a pleasure, a hobby. Jay had no hobbies. His “girls” needed milking twice a day, every day.

  Like most of the men who came by, Jay was in his late fifties or early sixties. He knew his time was coming. They all expected soon to be dealing with knee and hip replacements and, if they were lucky, retreating to Florida for the winter. They also wanted to keep some home base around Washington County, so they could stay close to their kids and grandkids. Dogs were not in the picture.

  THESE FIRST DOG DAYS WERE SWEET AND EASY, EVEN A BIT formless. The dogs dozed in the front yard, lounged in the fenced area out back, raced after critters. We wandered the trails around the house. Otherwise, my days were spent on the phone and meeting with workmen, trying to get the barns and house ready for what was ahead.

  This regimen would become a pleasant memory when winter arrived. I’d spent some part of the previous six winters in my cabin, and had helped Carolyn through several lambing seasons—which often seemed to coincide with blizzards—at Raspberry Ridge. I had some sense of what was coming. Maybe we’d luck out and have an easy winter.

  But even if we did, all the sheep’s nutrition would have to come from me, tossed down from the barn loft or carried over in buckets. I’d need a dog’s help. I’d had a small training pen built within the fenced pasture, for practice.

  For Rose, the first task was to be comfortable and calm around sheep. An Irish border collie trainer with whom I’d struck up an e-mail friendship over the last few years suggested I stand back and give Rose time alone with sheep, to make sure she wasn’t intimidated.

  “Let her solve some problems,” Wink advised. “It will build her confidence. If she gets too excited or nervous, take her out, but otherwise let her alone for a bit each day. She’ll get easier about it by the week.”

  Good advice. I stood by the pasture fence and opened the gate. “Get me sheep,” I ordered as Rose rocketed up the hill. Nesbitt stepped forward and stomped the ground, but Rose just barked and feinted until Nesbitt, unnerved, backed down. As I would soon learn, confidence was not an issue for Rose. Nesbitt could scare off the easygoing Homer, but not Rose (or Orson, either).

  My other training efforts with Rose were also paying off. By hand-feeding her, I got her to focus on me in a way that made training easier. She certainly knew her name, as I repeated it every time she gulped down a mouthful of food. I made training a game as much as possible. “Rosie, come!” I’d shout, scattering the ground with liver treats. In a few days she learned to come roaring out of the woods and down the hill whenever I said “Come,” without my ever raising my voice.

  She was a star student. I used a crate to housebreak her, a process that took no more than a few days. I also made sure she had a lot of quiet time. Dogs often know how to go nuts, but not how to stay calm. For every hour spent herding or romping, Rose spent an hour in the crate. The breed can be plenty hyper, and there were times when Rose could be, too. But I needed quiet hours for writing, and keeping me company was as much her work as chasing sheep. She seemed to understand this. When the computer went on and I started clacking away at the keyboard, she went to her crate and cooled out—at least for a while.

  We did basic obedience training, too, for a few minutes both morning and evening, plus scattered lessons throughout the day. I held bits of hamburger up over her head until she sat down, and when she did, I praised her: “Good sit.” I held food on the ground in front of her until she lay down. “Good lie down.” I’d never forged such a positive and simple, not to mention effective, relationship with a dog.

  It was astonishing to see how pleasant—for owner and dog—positive training could be, and how quick. It mostly depended on how patient, hardworking, and enthusiastic I could be. The dog was happy to oblige, especially for some liver treats, just as Carolyn was always insisting; she saw positive training as the basis for the human-dog relationship.

  Within weeks Rose was coming, sitting, and staying more or less reliably, and I’d only resorted to my exasperated voice a few times. I wish I’d known how to do that when Orson and Homer arrived. Orson didn’t seem to care much, at least not after a while; but I knew my sloppy, testy training had rattled Homer.

  Orson, a former obedience show dog with a troubled history, was still too berserk to guide sheep. Whenever he entered a gate, he became a different dog, excited, overaroused, almost out of control. He’d tear off after the flock and scatter them. I was going back to square one with him. We would approach the training pen and walk slowly around it as I dropped treats on the ground whenever he stayed calm. Then we’d lie down next to the sheep and I would brush Orson, scratch him, sometimes even sing to him, just to keep him steady. He might never herd, but at least he could learn to walk quietly by my side while I took care of the sheep.

  Oddly, it was Homer who was having more trouble. Circling some sheep in the meadow, one crisp morning shortly after their arrival, he let one break away. Instead of cutting the ewe off, Homer went roaring after it and, ignoring my shouted commands, gripped its knee, opening a small wound. When the ewe finally broke free, panicked, she ran straight into a fencepost.

  This stunt would have been more than enough to get a dog disqualified at any herding competition, and it was very upsetting. No more herding for Homer until we started our training over, I vowed as I bandaged the ewe’s leg. He could have seriously harmed one of the animals he was supposed to protect. Wink had one unbreakable rule: Don’t hurt the sheep. It was my rule, too.

  By chance, Dr. Amanda Alderink, a large-animal vet from Granville, was scheduled to come by that afternoon, to check out the sheep and give them their inoculations. As soon as her truck pulled into the driveway, Carol disappeared, sneaking through the barn and rematerializing a few minutes later, high up in the pasture under the apple tree. Dr. A. laughed. “Donkeys are wicked smart,” she said.

  But she had come that day for the sheep. She came into the training pen where I had gathered the sheep, dispensing a seminar on sheep care along with the animals’ shots. I asked her to check the ewe’s bitten knee to make sure it would heal well.

  We flipped the ewe on her side—sheep become immobilized and docile when they can’t look down at the ground. “Whoa,” Dr. A. said. The ewe had a gaping bloody wound in her abdomen, an awful sight—but one hidden by her thick fleece, so I had missed it. She’d probably ripped herself open on the fencepost while running from Homer’s assault, Dr. A. thought, and she would need surgery to clean and close the wound.

  A few minutes later, I was lying on the ground, holding the anesthetized ewe while Dr. A. probed and stitched. She worked quickly and quietly, but the operation still took much of an hour, involved large quantities of blood, and took place, as the sky darkened into an icy drizzle, during the first freeze of the year. The wetness seeped down my shirt and up my pant legs. Welcome to Bedlam Farm. I didn’t know what made me more
uncomfortable, the cold and gore or the fact that it was a result of my own dog and his obviously inadequate training. Homer, chagrined and perhaps anxious, avoided me for the rest of the day.

  To stop working sheep with Homer, even for a few weeks, could be a serious matter. It left me without a working dog I could really trust. But for the moment, knowing that the ewe would recover, I was more concerned with barns and hay and the floating heaters that would prevent the animals’ water from freezing on January nights.

  Meanwhile, we savored a string of sunny autumn days, a riot of colors, long walks at dawn and dusk, and endless amounts of Country Bullshit.

  THE FIRST SUNDAY AFTER THE SHEEP ARRIVED, I WAS WALKING up the pasture to open a gate to the adjoining field. Nesbitt, I thought, was a safe distance away. He wasn’t. The Rams, it turns out, is a very apt name for a football team. Nesbitt charged me from behind and drove me forward five or six feet, into a cedar fencepost. I saw the proverbial stars. My glasses and cap flew off. My hands and shirt were bloodied, apparently from a cut on my forehead. From the ground, I glanced around and saw Nesbitt rearing back for another charge; I scrambled to my knees and creamed him across the forehead with the plastic grain bucket lying nearby. He seemed startled and I remembered (too late) Carolyn’s oft-repeated warning: Never turn your back on a ram.

  I wouldn’t have gotten butted that way if Orson had been in the pasture. The first time Nesbitt rammed me in Pennsylvania, Orson jumped the barnyard fence, grabbed Nesbitt by his tender parts, then pulled him over on his side. Nesbitt hadn’t bothered me since. But now Orson was down in the dog pen behind the house, barking furiously. He could see what had happened but couldn’t get out. Homer and Rose were my only defenders—and Homer, ignoring Nesbitt, was once more blocking out my shouts and tearing after the ewes, who scattered and ran. Rose, however, quickly zeroed in on Nesbitt and went after him.