Bruce and his family had seven sheep dogs and more than two decades later, I remember all of them: Baz, Caz, Beau, Kelly, Polly, Jock.
Almost all.
They abounded with charisma and hung around in dedicated pairs.
To the commands:
“Righto!” seemed to silence and stop every dog in its tracks.
“Come around” would just have them run a loop around the flock and with a “no!” you could change the dog’s direction.
“Back!” meant the very damned opposite, having derived from “go to the back” which sent off any dog toward the far side of the flock, even if there wasn’t a flock.
“Here!” brought them back. Go figure.
“Back here!” was something I invented, using common-bloody-sense as you will see.
“Get ‘em up!” could mean anything you needed because the dogs were actually attuned to what the issue was – usually a small breakaway.
To task:
A fence needed mending in a distant paddock in the middle of a hot day and Bruce and I set off with all seven dogs crammed onto two bikes.
“Follow me, Ted.”
They still call me Ted.
The paddock had the functional design of a fence cutting halfway through a large dam.
Bruce took four of the dogs over the horizon leaving me with just one job.
“Ted, can you push that lot there through into that paddock next door?”
I alighted the bike — it fell over — and looked at Kelly, Polly and Beau seated in front of me.
“We’re in this together,” I said.
Push sheep through a fence. Was it one-by-one? Did I have to get behind and shove? Was it head first? I will never know.
Surely I didn’t just need to use the gate. He definitely said ‘push them through’.
The vaudeville started when I sent Polly ‘back!’ to the far end of the flock.
What no-one told me was that Polly did not follow the natural curve of a flock’s perimeter, but instead ran massive arcs inverted to the mob’s shape, much like a spitfire coming in for a burst of machine-gun-yapping, and then she’d peel away.
She was therefore effective about a fifth of the time.
“Does she always do this?” I asked the other two, who refused to make eye contact.
Before long, with all the right commands, we had brought the flock out into the middle with Beau and Kelly doing the heavy lifting while Polly’s Battle of Britain re-enactment raged on inside her head.
A breakaway. “Righto Beau!” He stopped barking, stopped running and sat down. That wasn’t it.
“I mean get ‘em up!” I pointed and he turned too quickly and collided head-on with Polly doing one of her strafings.
While the tangle of legs and bared teeth unfurled in the long grass, I needed Kelly next to me.
“Come back!” She ran off to the back of the flock – as instructed.
“Back!!!” she took a few confused steps even further back.
“BACK!” now nearing the horizon.
That’s right. “Here!” I corrected and just as she almost reached me, I said quietly “Good girl, thanks for coming back.”
And off she went again.
“Back here!” and she had a bit of a breakdown and ran home.
The other two were fighting.
The rest is a blur.
Bruce took up the story some years later amid the well-oiled mirth of a hundred wedding guests.
“So, I come over the hill, you see.” (laughter)
“And it’s a mess, total mayhem (more laughter), the bike is on its side (more, still), one dog has vanished (a few ‘whoops’) and the other two are having a fight; no-one’s in charge, the sheep are everywhere, two are stuck in a fence and one of them is swimming across the dam!” (roof comes down).
“And Andy’s just standing there in the middle of it all.”
(He used my real name.)
“So, I yell out: ‘Righto, just SIT DOWN!’
“And Andy dropped like a stone down onto his bum into the long grass — out of sight.”
*Fade to black, laughter to echo
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