Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men

by Donald McCaig

  I was confounded by Scottish distances. Villages, thirty miles apart on the map, I’d think: Okay, that’s half an hour. But commuting ease wasn’t a Scottish problem. Each village would be complete: its own post office and proper hotel, its grocer, newsagent, tearoom. And an hour on single track roads to get from one to the next.

  Scotland is deeply invaded by the sea, and I was often ferried across sea lochs and firths, watching the countryside slide by, relaxed for a change as someone else took me to wherever it was I was going.

  Young bitches?

  “Aye, you should have seen it at the nursery finals. The day after, fifteen dogs were put on the plane for America.”

  “I sell all my dogs to Scandinavia. All eye tested and x-rayed, oh they pay a frightful price.”

  Faithfully I read the dog ads in the Scottish Farmer and phoned up but each was sold, already gone. “Aye, the man came for her yesterday, sorry.”

  It was beginning to dawn on me there might not be a fine young bitch to win my heart, that I was hoping to luck into the same dog Scottish dog men spent a lifetime seeking. I wouldn’t settle for a pup. There were plenty of promising pups in America. If I failed, I’d fail entirely.

  Farmers were putting up their first growth alfalfa as silage and I hoped my own hay cutting, at home, was going well.

  Dunoon is a short ferry ride from Port of Glasgow, and the town has been a working-class resort for years. There are plenty of confectioneries and gift shops, and the news agents sell tartan undershorts and postcards with jokes about Wee Willie and what is under a Scotsman’s kilt. Scottish kitsch.

  Down the peninsula, beyond the place where the road narrows, past the beautifully named hamlet, Toward, is the farm of Alasdair Mundell, a tall black-haired man who’s president of the Scottish Branch of the International Sheep Dog Society. In the sea loch below Alasdair’s farm, two bulk liquefied gas freighters lie at anchor. They were built by the Dutch and are stored here unused. They are gray and big like naval vessels, and rust stains dribble below the anchor hawser.

  “After they built them, the American cities wouldn’t let them in,” Alasdair explained.

  The countryside is so fragile among hard international concerns.

  Alasdair farms with his son Boyd, who tenants next door. The hills behind rise so abruptly, I had to crick my neck. I’d offered to help Alasdair with his work but wasn’t unhappy he’d refused. Looking up that hill, I thought how my heart would pound, how I’d suck for air. Mundell’s dogs’ muscles are like stone. I asked about a young bitch in the byre, a young bitch named Liz. “Oh, she’ll not be the one you’re looking for,” says Alasdair Mundell.

  “Who’s she from?”

  “She’ll be out of Templeton’s Roy, but. …”

  “Perhaps I could see her?”

  The young, beautiful bitch was batty. When she was let off the lead, she thought she was free and ran about like a silly beast, only just controllable.

  Boyd Mundell’s Lynn bitch was scraggle tailed, boney, with half-flopped ears and no chest to speak of. “She’s an old-fashioned collie,” Boyd said with a grin. Lynn got beautiful when she worked; graceful, she gave the sheep the space to go where she wanted them. And Boyd was so fond of the homely wonderful bitch, I didn’t have the heart to ask if he’d sell her.

  Boyd’s father had another new bitch, Meg, off the eminent Welsh sire, Bwlch (pronounced “Bulk”) Taff. I liked Lynn much better than Alasdair’s Meg, but in September, when I come back to Scotland for the International, Meg will have qualified for the great trial: Lynn won’t have made the cut.

  I had to trust my eyes, what else could I do? I had to believe that the right bitch would call out to me. But I felt a babe in the woods, depending on the Scot’s restraint, their unflagging courtesy. That was what woke me in the middle of the night worrying. Where am I? Dunoon? I’d switch on the bedside lamp and read a couple of poems by Bobby Burns, who’d written The Twa Dogs after Luath, his Border Collie, was beaten to death, and who died himself before the age of forty.

  In our culture, humans with a special knack for animals have always been thought queer, or worse. The witch’s handiest allies were the beasts she summoned to do her bidding, and her familiar was always an unclean spirit in animal form. The idiot lad who alone can ride the killer stallion and gentles, with a touch, hurt mastiffs no one else dares approach—that lad is a staple of our fictions.

  Since the Greeks, philosophers have answered our deep cultural need to separate ourselves from animals and famously have defined man as “just like other animals but rational, or tool making, or able to make promises or. …”

  Western thought patterns have separated man from animals as surely as subject from verb and body from mind.

  Learning a dog’s worldview, altering it (within bounds), accepting a dog’s understanding as sometimes more reliable than a man’s—these commonplace tools of dog training are a mild cultural treason. The rare dog handlers who, by gift or necessity, become truly dangerous inhabit a reality most of us can scarcely imagine—every day they share the thoughts, habits, tics and aspirations of a genuinely alien mind. When I asked these men about their connection with their dogs, they were reticent. They were also, without exception, masterful and deeply obsessed.

  Above Dunoon, along Holy Loch, where The United States provisions its nuclear submarines, Stuart Davidson has his modest, newish home. At the head of the loch rises the great hill farm Stuart manages and that’s where Stuart showed me Craig and Moss, same way bred, both impeccable, powerful, bold.

  Stuart has enough self-confidence. When he flew over to judge a big trial in the States, he disqualified his host’s dog for gripping. “Oh, the man came up after to complain,” Stuart says, bland as cream pie. He paused, letting me feel the weight of his competence. “Do you get to many trials then, Donald?”

  “Aye.”

  One cocked eyebrow. “You’re becoming a Scot yourself, eh?”

  I blushed. Stuart’s pretty young wife brought more tea. The trophy case in the neat sitting room was big around as a grown man, and it gleamed of silver and gold: bright plunder.

  No, Stuart doesn’t know of any good young bitches for sale. Bill Wyatt phones him from the States: “Get me the best,” Bill says. “Money’s no object.”

  Once more, Stuart raises an eyebrow.

  Before I leave, I ask Stuart if it worries him, living so near ground zero—the first place the missiles would hit in the event of war. “You die if you worry, you die if you don’t,” he says.

  I drive beside Holy Loch eyeing American nuclear subs. On the streets, U.S. Navy dependents shop for groceries. One angry looking young man is pushing a baby carriage. He wears a Texas hat, not unlike my own.

  It has got to be a relief to sleep at the same B & B twice. Windy Hill Farm outside Strathaven is quiet, and I’m the only guest. When my hostess brings me tea and biscuits, she asks if I’ve found my bitch yet. “No ma’am, not yet.”

  I ring up the Templetons, and May Templeton says, yes, John’d love to see you, but he’s going to the market and won’t be back until afternoon.

  “I’ve not seen a Scottish livestock market,” I said. Perhaps I could tag along.

  She was flustered. “John’s planning to leave at eight.”

  “That’d be fine.”

  The Templetons’s farm, Airtnock, was a brush heap in 1965 when they bought it. Although, early on, John had notable successes at the sheepdog trials, it was hard for him to leave May to manage everything on the farm. The minute John came off the course, he’d hop his dogs into the boot and go straight home.

  Theses days, Airtnock boasts 100 milking Ayrshires, 250 sheep, and a herd of Limousin beef cattle. John’s able sons help out. Although John Templeton is one of the most dangerous dog handlers to walk onto the trial course, he makes his living as a dairyman.

  This morning he’s off to Lanark to sell a feeder steer. “Oh,” he says. “Don’t bring your camera. It’ll be stolen.”

/>   Okay.

  He also says, “Fasten your seat belt. It’s our law.”

  Okay.

  He has the calm, pale face of a medieval saint, someone whose concentration on salvation is absolute. John is unfailingly polite. “Gilchrist Spot,” he says, “was too strong. Wiston Cap was mild and sulky, except when he was right and then nothing could touch him.”

  “What about Jock Richardson?”

  “He was a silly man.”

  I am accustomed to rough stateside livestock markets, where waiting stock trucks drool manure through the racks and the farmers have come straight out of the field—or at least their overalls have. American farmers dress like men who are working themselves to death, Scots like men who never lift a hand.

  After we unload the steer, John hoses out the truck box. “Oh yes,” John says, “a wash is provided for the transporters; it’s our law.”

  The market is several barns and sale rings. Some, like the octagonal sheep ring, are ancient. Farmers and stock have stood under these skylights for a century. I wished I had my camera. John Templeton shakes a few hands and talks up his calf, “He’s had a wee knock on the ankle getting on the truck, but it’ll soon be right.” After they’re groomed, the calves are put in clean straw-bedded pens.

  Wearing a short white vet’s coat, the auctioneer stands above the sale ring, in a pulpit. “This is Mr. Jennings with his calf, a grand calf. One-fifty, do I have one-fifty? One-sixty, thank you sir; one-sixty, sixty; one-seventy, seventy; seventy-five; seventy-eight, seventy-eight (BANG); sold at one seventy-eight. Thank you, sir.”

  Each animal’s farm is named. It is believed in Scotland that some farms always produce superior stock. In the States, animals come out by age or type or grade, pure hurly-burly. In the States buyers don’t ask where a beast came from.

  John Templeton’s steer calf brings 226 pounds—not the top price, but not far below it.

  The British are cutting back on milk production, and this day good Fresians come into the ring, their udders so full of milk some walk sideways. Many will go to Saudi Arabia. In the octagonal ring, lambs are being sold for slaughter, and butchers’ boys stand right in the ring and feel the animals’ backbones (chops) before they bid.

  The Lanark Market restaurant has sturdy oak tables and waitresses dressed out of a 1940s movie, The Harvey Girls, perhaps. Middle-aged women in white aprons over black uniforms and lace caps bring respectable farmers their lasagna or steak and kidney pie.

  John Templeton talks about other Americans who’ve come over. Arthur Allen at every International, taking notes on each dog that ran. “Oh he didn’t like you talking to him.” John pays.

  Outside, farmers sell hay and eggs and live chickens and the only fresh produce I saw in Scotland.

  John takes a different route home, past his uncle’s farm near Sorn, where John got his start in sheepdogs. The ground is low, rolling hills, and though we passed through miners’ villages, I saw no mines. This country provided the iron and coal that made Glasgow a great industrial center during the nineteenth century, but there’s no evidence today it was ever anything but farmland.

  John says good dogs are in great demand. Nearby, Hugh, a young dairy sheepman, has a Roy bitch that John fancies. John offered fifteen hundred pounds for her, but Hugh Ferguson wouldn’t sell. John says Hugh has just bought himself a new estate wagon. Perhaps that fifteen hundred would come in handier now.

  The farm above Templeton’s was bought by the Forestry Commission which planted it in spruce. The spring which watered that farm and Airtnock waters others below, and when water is lacking, Airtnock, being highest, suffers first. Water is low now, but as we arrive, John, Junior, has just come out of the fields and is washing his tractor. Both the Templeton’s tractors are newish, washed sparkling clean.

  Like farms in northern New England, the outbuildings at Airtnock are contiguous, and the kitchen door opens on a low stone passageway into the old byre where they dogs are kept. I was glad to see that grand old dogs, now retired, are treated as well as the most promising young ones. John Junior’s bitch, Di, is for sale. She’s a pretty black and tan but will not meet my gaze.

  The milking parlor is wet and steamy as a drive-through car wash, the cows on each side of a steel pit where John and John, Junior, connect and disconnect hoses for the milking machines. Raw milk pulses through clear plastic tubes to the bulk tanks.

  After milking, John Templeton takes his Roy dog to the back pasture where he grazes his sheep. “There,” John points to a sour tussocky field. “It was all like that when we first came here.” He sends Roy for the sheep and as soon as the dog is well out, John commences a symphony of whistling.

  This deluge of commands is John Templeton’s controversial trademark. Many shepherds believe “the fewer commands the better” and, unless a dog has gone wrong, most issue no commands after they send a dog until the dog has brought the sheep to the man’s feet. Fetching livestock (sheep or cows) is the Border Collie’s simplest, most instinctive work and there are many routine American farm dogs that can’t do anything else. They’ve never been taught to drive stock away from the man. The only part of a sheepdog trial where a man is penalized for commanding a dog is the outrun because it’s thought the ‘natural dog’ will need no commands to gather his sheep. Probably this herding instinct was originally predatory. Perhaps the ancestral Border Collie was a small, clever beast, quick enough to outrun escaping prey and turn it back into the jaws of the pursuing pack.

  In Australia, Border Collies are never taught to drive, and at their trials (which are quite different from the British-American variety), handlers are penalized any time the dog gets between the man and his sheep. The Australians fear that their bush-wild merino wethers can’t be caught once the dog gets on the wrong side of them.

  As Roy fetches his sheep at Airtnock, John Templeton never takes his eyes off him and whistles every step of the way. His whistles tumble over themselves like a bird song, quick, light, and happy. Roy is a sleek, black and tan, smooth-coated dog, at the top, or near the top of every Scottish National since he first started running, eight years ago. He and John are a famous combination.

  John chirps as Roy makes split-second adjustments, perfectly balanced on his sheep, moving them with his eye.

  (I fear this must seem easier and more comprehensible than it is. Go outside with one of your kids—your spouse won’t stand for it—and try what John Templeton does with Roy: “Go right, go left, left, left, stop, walk up, lie down, right, go slow, left” as the child is concentrating on some delicate precise task, say, juggling three eggs in the air. Perhaps you thought what John and Roy did was pellucid: Man Commands, Dog Obeys. As you clean up broken eggs and dry your child’s tears, you may recall that communion and communication intertwine at their roots.)

  John Templeton is a master musician, creating a song that enthralls both John and Roy. The mind of man and dog is in that music.

  It was another sort of music at the Chester International when Wiston Cap brought his sheep straight down the fetch line to Jock Richardson’s feet, in uncanny silence, without command.

  A bit later in the day, John, Junior, and I take Di out. Di won’t be for sale long. Each time John Templeton Senior goes to America to judge a trial, he returns home with orders for well-bred dogs. And like Alasdair Mundell’s new Meg bitch, Di is sired by Bwlch Taff. As we walk to a field with a few sheep, I am optimistic. Maybe Di’ll meet my eyes when she knows me better.

  Like his father, John, Junior, whistles constantly, commanding Di, commanding her. The outrun is a bit ragged, but acceptable, the fetch quite neat. She’s a pretty thing too, and young.

  “Would you please send her again without commands?”

  “You’ll nae be wanting to see her drive? She’s got a good drive.”

  “Just the outrun and fetch please. No commands.”

  Without John, Junior’s help, Di is a loose cannon. She races straight down the middle, panics her sheep into flight and
scatters them. Her tail is flying like a foolish flag.

  “She’ll need settling,” John, Junior, says.

  “Aye. Just a little more training.” That’s me talking, noncommittal as any Scottish dog dealer. But it was antics you expected from a puppy, not a started dog, and her tail—oh dear.

  As Jock Richardson says, “If the tail’s no right, the dog’s no right.”

  When a dog man comes to inspect the sheepdog you hope to sell, he likely won’t care about coat length or color. Prick ears or flop ears? All the same. He will, invariably, stoop to look the dog in the eyes.

  There are a good many theories about eye types: light versus dark brown; brown versus blue, but that’s not what these men are looking for. They’re looking into an honest dog’s soul.

  When the dog is tried on sheep, they’ll want to see a wide, natural outrun and well-balanced fetch. They’ll have the dog press tups into a corner until the tups turn and the dog must show courage. Just as the dog is concentrating hardest, they’ll ask it to flank: to see if the dog is sticky.

  A sticky dog can be loosened, a frightened dog given confidence, a tight-running dog can be widened out. But if the tail is set wrong, carried badly or afraid, it’s No Sale.

  The sheepdog’s tail is his physical banner, emblem of his working habits and style. Foolish tail: foolish dog.

  I do wish Di had been right. She was a pretty thing.

  John Templeton has been on the Scottish Team at the International almost continuously since 1964. Team members’ badges are modest gold rectangles, country and date: Scotland 1978, Scotland 1979. John Templeton’s badges dangle in his trophy cabinet like battle honors on a general’s chest.