The Story of Rose by Jon Katz

Author:Jon Katz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

A few weeks later, I got an even clearer sense of what Rose could do, and what it might mean to me.

A breeding ram had arrived from Massachusetts and the farmer who sold him to me warned me to be careful around him. He was unpredictable and could be dangerous. The farmer urged me not to turn my back around him and to always have a thick stick with me when I was around him, too.

This kind of vigilance—instinctive to farmers who work with livestock but alien to me, who had mostly worked with well-trained dogs—was something I would only learn through experience. The ram didn’t look all that different from the placid ewes, and he showed little interest in me. One afternoon I put him in with the ewes to get to work making lambs.

I was trying to patch a hole in the decaying mesh fence around the pasture, and I got deeply absorbed in the task. Rose was down in a small fenced-in area by the back of the farmhouse. It had originally been a chicken coop and was falling apart, but it was a good place to keep her. Rose was always a serious and businesslike animal, focused on her work, undeterrable and undistractable.

A border collie working is a creature in its own world. Everything else but the sheep vanishes, and the challenge of the herder is to remind the dog that they are part of the work. If Rose was serious under normal circumstances, she radiated intense focus and purpose around the sheep. Her eyes locked in on them, her head went down, and she projected this sense that everything in her reach would do precisely what she wanted. That was almost always what happened.

In our training, I was working to insert myself in the process, so that the work was done in tandem with me, and not apart from me. With a border collie, that is easier said than done, and we were still working on that, so I wanted to keep her confined while I worked up in the pasture. To be honest, I had forgotten about the ram.

So I was completely unprepared when he charged me from behind and drove my head into a thick, wooden fence post. I saw flashing lights. The force of my head crashing into the post shattered my glasses and opened a six-inch gash in my forehead.

It was not a serious wound, but it sure was bloody and I was stunned and confused. I was lying on the ground, groping around for my glasses, and I couldn’t quite understand what had happened, until I squinted and saw the ram turning to charge me again. I barely rolled out of the way. The ewes were frightened and were taking off, running away from the fence. Carol, my donkey, was circling them, frightened and aroused. It looked like a riot breaking out in the pasture. I had rolled behind the stump of a tree but the ram was staring at me, snorting and pawing the ground.

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