Nop's Hope

by Donald McCaig

  Handlers who’d rented rooms at the Holiday Inn were under seige from the motorhome campers who took this occasion to go in for a shower. Some Holiday Inn rooms went through ten or twelve towels that day.

  Ransome Barlow lost most of his points at the shed: Bute couldn’t keep the sheep in the shedding ring.

  Dark clouds over the Bighorns were punctured by light when Penny and Hope went to the post. Watching her, Beverly wondered where her daughter washed her hair.

  Penny was so light, so fey, she was like a sprite. But Hope was a young dog with all a young dog’s ways, hearty and bouncy, and when he dropped to the ground, his front went down first and then his back in a slow stage collapse, tail last of all. The fence was lined with handlers, and everybody who’d brought a camera had it in their hands. Penny slightly misjudged the crossdrive gate but otherwise it was a perfect run until the pen, when one of the ewes turned and pawed the ground and Hope hesitated before he came on again and backed his sheep into the pen. Applause in the chilly air.

  Ransome sent Bute to take the sheep off the course. Bute’s sudden arrival confused Hope, and two dogs made more work of it than one dog might have.

  When Penny walked by Ransome she snapped, “I don’t need your help.”

  Ransome felt ill done by. Hadn’t he tracked down Marvin and P.T. for her? And if it hadn’t turned out exactly the way he’d hoped, hadn’t he got even for her? When he came back, brought their pickup to the Fort Collins trial, he meant to tell her what he’d done, had meant to tell her she had nothing to fear from those two hombres anymore, but she’d jumped on him so quick and so hot, accused him of leaving her stranded, accused him of running out on her, that his mouth jammed up and he couldn’t utter a word until it was long past too late.

  Ransome drawled, “I was afraid that weak dog of yours couldn’t get them off the course.”

  “I don’t need your interfering,” Penny said. “I never asked help from you and I’m not starting today.”

  Ransome was under the impression that she’d asked him for a good deal of help over the last months. “That dog’s weak as water,” he said. “Every trial he runs more scared.”

  Hope had tucked himself behind Penny’s leg, and she felt his pressure like a great obligation. “He seems to beat you regular,” she said, feeling as she spoke that her words were helpless, feminine: not enough.

  The bile rose in Ransome’s throat. He swallowed. He looked at the mountain peaks. Some wind must have got into his eyes, left him feeling soft and bleak, like nothing he’d done in his life had been any account and nothing much would be. Him and her—what a silly, silly, silly idea. Down the field a busted-down cowpoke was putting out sheep for the dogs. That’d be him one year. Except for his animals, he’d be alone. “Some of us going over to the Ag Station tonight to work our dogs on some tough sheep, see what they can do.”

  “I bought a ticket for the banquet.” Hope leaned hard against Penny’s leg. It was a wonder she could bear his heavy, furry weight.

  “Hell. Banquet’s just a bunch of speeches from fellows don’t commonly make speeches about how terrific we all are. I already know I’m terrific.” He tried a grin but couldn’t quite bring it off. “Hell,” he said, “go to the banquet if that’s what you want. Me, I got a real dog to train.”

  Penny felt loosened from the earth, everything at risk and flying. She’d take whatever magic was offered her. “Done. But I got to let my Mom know.”

  Half an hour later, Beverly said, “I’m sorry you’re not feeling well, honey. Maybe we could all skip the banquet, go out someplace quiet. Tonight—”

  “I know what tonight is! I can handle it. Best part of a year, I’ve been handling it. You know what tomorrow’s going to be, Ma? It’ll be the day me and Hope win our first National Handlers’ Finals. That’s what tomorrow will be, nothing else, just that.”

  Beverly’s eyes were too soft but that may have been on account of the fading light. It was six-thirty and people were leaving for the banquet. A few had their headlights on. “We’ll always be here for you,” she said, “Lewis and me. You can come home any time or telephone us and we’ll come and fetch you.” And the two women fell into each others arms until Beverly patted her daughter briskly on the back and drew away. “My, aren’t we a pair. It’s time for me to clean up. God bless you, honey.”

  Behind the grandstand, the Cowboy Chuckwagon cook put the day’s receipts in a green canvas bag. To his wife he said, “I suppose it could have been worse. We aren’t going to get any crowd tomorrow if it snows.”

  At the banquet, under the banner 15th Annual National Finals—Purina is Proud to Sponsor the Handlers’ Finals, Judge Davidson and his wife sat with association officials and their wives. The trophies were nearby, on a velvet-covered podium: the big Handlers’ Association shield, smaller trophies for the best qualifying runs, the glitter of silver trays.

  Everybody wore their Saturday night best: western shirts, corduroy jackets, string ties. Even Nathan Mooney was wearing a tie. Before anybody ate, Lewis Pulfer stood and offered grace, and Beverly bowed her head and put out her hands and their table was soon linked by clasped hands. When Lewis said, “Amen,” the room chatter resumed.

  “I don’t see Ransome Barlow here tonight,” Ethel Harwood said. “Nor his pals. Why in the world fellas like that want to get involved with sheepdogs …” Beverly was picking at her food and Lewis was beginning to think that Penny’d made the right decision not coming tonight.

  Nathan Mooney made a short speech, thanking all the people who’d done so much to make the trial a success and announcing that they had a trophy to award to the most promising new handler, a handler who was attending the Nationals for the very first time. “And the most promising new handler is Miz Penny Burkeholder with her dog, Hope. Penny, you here tonight?”

  As Lewis walked through the patter of applause to collect Penny’s trophy, Nathan said the Burkeholders were a real sheepdog family, that the Burkeholders were the only family to have two people qualify for the top fifteen who’d run tomorrow, and since he’d already given that much away he might as well announce the official qualifiers, that the fifteenth dog was Red Oliver, with Roy. Applause after each name and Lewis was surprised to find himself fourth place overall, after Penny, Ransome, and Bill Berhow. “Nice going, honey,” said Beverly, patting his arm.

  On the podium, Herbert Holmes explained that this year’s Calcutta paid to four places, not a cumulative score, repeat, only the top four scores tomorrow, and then Herbert was auctioneering, crying up the prices. “Red Oliver from Texas and Roy, do I hear fifty dollars, fifty, fifty, fifty, fifty-five, now sixty, thank you,” and the spotters cried up the bidders and the Scottish judge shook his head in wonder.

  Ethel Harwood “bought” Lewis for $320. Ransome fetched nearly $500, and Herbert started the bidding for Penny at $500. “Five, five, five, do I hear five, thank you, Lewis, five-fifty, do I hear five-fifty. Yes! The young man sitting with the Burkeholders. Lewis, will you go six, six, six. Five seventy-five then. I’ve got five seventy-five, do I hear six …”

  Oren bid Lewis up to $800, which was an all-time record for the Handlers’ Calcutta. Lewis’s stoney face broke into a grin, and he reached across the table to shake the younger man’s hand. “Thanks for turnin’ loose of me. I would have gone on forever.”

  “Now come up here to the head table and hand your money to our secretary here,” Herbert said. “And for the rest of you, we’ve got a good cowboy dance band here tonight, so you all stay as late as you want and have a good time.”

  Herbert Holmes was first out on the floor with the judge’s wife. Oren offered to partner Beverly Burkeholder, but Beverly said, “Not tonight, thanks so much. I think Lewis and I’ll go back to our motor home. It sure was nice eating with you.”

  Lewis shook a few hands, said a few “See you tomorrows,” and the couple went through the motel lobby, where they’d turned off the waterfall. It had cleared outside, the clouds blown away, and
Lewis said, “Beverly, I believe that’s the dog star. You think that’s good luck?”

  She linked her arm in his. “No matter how it turns out,” she said softly, “I’m glad I came.”

  IT’S HARD to ruin a good dog. Dog trainers who salvage disobedient family pets—re-creating in the dog an image of a good dog—sometimes tell you a dog can never be ruined: hurt yes, discouraged, yes, but no dog, they say, is irreparable. This article of faith is both brave and necessary, but the dogs that come to them have been damaged by the ignorant.

  People often wonder just what trainers give the sheepdog in exchange for its boundless willingness. Food treats and praise sit on the trainer’s shelf, untouched, unused. The sheepdog is shown its possibilities, he learns what life is like for a good dog and is invited to walk in a rational world whose farthest boundaries are defined by grace.

  There are dog saints as there are human saints. And a saint is a saint because his faith cannot be broken. A young dog’s faith is absolute—he literally cannot imagine how he could be other than he is. A young dog has never seen hell. It takes a wonderful trainer to show it to him.

  THE SKY WAS BLACK and rolling. The alfalfa fields beside the road were achingly green. The dead range grass was blond as a young girl’s hair. Part of Penny noticed the wonderful light that hovered between clouds and earth, and part of her thought it didn’t make any difference.

  The road climbed into the low hills, past the irrigated fields onto pure rangeland. Where the road crested, Penny could see fifty or sixty miles, rolling seered hills, grass, rimrocks, and ridges. One of Ransome’s buddies led the caravan, ten pickups in a row, license plates from all over the country.

  Penny passed the historical marker for the Fetterman Massacre, the rock spire that identified the spot where eighty cavalrymen under Captain Fetterman failed to make good his boast that he could, with a handful of troopers, ride right through the entire Sioux Nation. It is easier to sacrifice others if we don’t much care what happens to ourselves.

  Penny checked her trip odometer. “Five more miles and I’m gonna turn around.”

  Hope thumped his tail, but Penny didn’t respond to his remark.

  Four and a half miles later, as Penny was watching for a wide spot where she could turn, the lead pickup flipped its blinkers, and soon enough the entire line blinked as one: left, left, going left soon.

  It was the John Douglass Agricultural Research Station, and the road was a lane and a half, nicely graveled and graded. You could see the whole spread; the light glistening off the caretaker’s white trailer and the pole barn’s roof shiny as tin foil. A rail fence outlined the parking lot behind the barn, and as they pulled up, the trailer opened, backlighting the cowboy in the entryway. He held a bowl and was scooping food into his mouth.

  Penny got out to pull on her down jacket. Ransome Barlow said, “Smells like snow.”

  The caretaker was wizened, somewhere between fifty and seventy. He slipped a loaded spoon under his stained white mustache and brought it out shiny. “I didn’t think you’d show,” he said.

  “Couldn’t keep us away from it,” Ransome said with something like a smile. “Heard you got some tough sheep up here? We got some dogs for ’em, just the ticket.”

  The cowboy set his bowl on a gatepost.

  Suffolk rams are big, some well over three hundred pounds, and every few days, men had caught these rams and stuck needles in them to draw blood for hemophilia research and for ovine research and to teach clumsy vet students how to draw blood. These rams were mad.

  The lot behind the pole barn was twelve acres, falling away from the barn’s doors. The mercury vapor lights cast a blue light. The fence was high tensile wire, ten strand, strong enough to hold horses.

  Penny kept her hands in her pockets and tried not to shiver as three men and their dogs went inside the barn after the rams. At the bottom of the pasture a handler waited, ready to train his dog. A tremendous commotion inside, heavy objects thumped the walls, a dog yelped, and four rams burst out of the barn, and before the man at the door could close it, smashed back inside.

  Ransome turned to Penny. “Do you think your dog can bring them out of there?” he asked. “Get ’em a hundred yards out in the lot and we can work them.”

  Without a word, Penny started for the barn where the bumping continued and one dog was barking, yip, yip, yip.

  Inside, Penny found two men dragging a ram, one on each hind leg while a third man waited to slide the door open.

  One dog had climbed a loaded hay wagon, another was atop the automatic feeders, a third yipped from the space underneath a stocktub. The men were grunting and sweating and one man delivered a kick as he rolled the sheep out the door.

  Penny stood aside while they dragged two more sheep out.

  The man sliding the door had buttons gone from his shirt. “You puttin’ ’em out? Good luck!”

  Penny said something to her dog. The three rams clung to the safety of the barn door and Hope ran in to peel them away. Startled by Hope’s sudden appearance the rams jumped a few yards down the hill and Hope swung behind them, smooth as glass, but the sheep leader saw the men waiting—for me?—and spun and charged and Hope leapt to meet him, bit him on the nose, once, twice, and the ram shook his head and trotted downhill, and his companions followed.

  The handler at the bottom sent his dog, which gathered the sheep, fetched them to his master, and then the sheep panicked and bolted straight for the barn, and Hope raced to intercept them, keep them in the field.

  With Hope between the sheep and the barn, it was barely possible to work a dog. The sheep paid no attention to the dogs unless they nipped, and when they nipped, the sheep bolted back to the barn until Hope intercepted them.

  Hope faced three-hundred-pound rams with his will, his glare, his attitude, and sometimes, his teeth.

  The barn men changed the sheep, brought out new ones, but they were no different.

  The world outside that lighted pasture went dark and it was a stage with crazy animals facing Hope, weaving and bobbing.

  Penny thought: They aren’t going to beat me.

  Hope thought: Oh, they come, they come and again they come, and I turn them and again they come. Is this the world? Is this how it is for me? He asked Penny for help, but she wasn’t listening.

  At Penny’s command Hope faced the enormous hysterical animals and time after time Hope stopped them, and some of Ransome’s buddies got disgusted and quit but others waited because they hadn’t had their turn and fair is fair.

  Hope begged Penny, but she couldn’t hear what he said.

  Penny thought: They can’t do this to me.

  When a ram broke past Hope and crashed into the barn door trying to burst through to shelter, Penny kicked it, and Hope read that as a command he should attack, so he gripped the ram’s wool and hung on, like a forty-pound sea anchor.

  “Turn loose of him Hope, damn you, damn you,” Penny screamed.

  Hope thought: I am mistaken. I have betrayed her. He let go and the ram ran over him. When he scrambled to his feet, he couldn’t look at Penny, fearing what he’d see there. He asked himself: Who am I?

  The sheep became the mindless creatures most people think they are. They became their terrified impulse to hide themselves back in the barn where nothing could get to them.

  “Ransome, you gonna work Bute?”

  “Nope,” Ransome said. Under the bleak lights Penny and Hope fought those rams: meat and muscle, heads lowered to butt.

  None of the handlers were trying to work their dogs anymore, they just watched the hopeless crazy fight, and when a ram knocked Penny off her feet nobody laughed, and when Hope grabbed a ram nobody cried out.

  Ransome turned away. “I’m goin’ down the road.”

  “We gonna see you later? Have a few beers?”

  Ransome never looked back.

  The rams came at Hope full tilt, and he leapt to meet them and was smashed off his feet and the woman was screaming something,
some command that made no sense now and probably never had.

  THE NATIONAL FINALS had been featured in the Billings Gazette and all the Wyoming papers. Since Sunday dawn broke warm and seasonal, several thousand Wyoming stockmen and women decided to come out and see what a really well-trained dog could do. Most drove pickups; a few Cadillacs and Continentals nosed in among the trucks, but not many Mercedes or Volvos.

  Ranch Border Collies hopped out of the back of pickups to chat with trial Border Collies as the announcer explained the course, said that every competitor was a champion, said there’d be special events on the grounds all day, said they should get a Buffalo Burger if they were hungry.

  Lewis Burkeholder wore his whipcord trousers and sport jacket, his go-to-church tie, his dress Stetson, so white it sparkled. Beverly was dressed in a tailored green suit. Lewis had bought her a flower at the Holiday Inn this morning, a small purple orchid, and she had it pinned to her lapel. Several times that morning, Penny’s parents walked past Penny’s pickup, but though Hope was chained underneath the truck, the camper was closed up tight and there was no sign of Penny.

  “Handlers’ meeting. Will the top fifteen competitors meet with the judge?”

  The course had grown bigger since the qualifying runs, the crossdrive stretched out five hundred yards wide and the outrun was nearly a mile.

  “After the fetch,” the judge said, in his soft Scottish burr, “it’ll be different than yesterday. Today you’ll do a double lift. Stop your dog when he’s brought his sheep through the fetch gates, then send him off again, over there, make another outrun to pick up his second lot. When you’ve joined both lots, you can do your drive and crossdrive, same as yesterday, only bigger don’t you see, and then you’ll bring fifteen sheep into the shedding ring and shed off the five with ribbons around their necks, take them to the pen, quite simple, yes? Any questions?”

  Somebody asked, “When’s the next plane out of here?”