Excerpt
The Story of Rose
CHAPTER 1
First Look
A couple of months before I moved to Bedlam Farm in the fall of 2003, I flew from Newark airport to Denver International to pick up an eight-week-old border collie puppy from a working line.
Like many people, I operate on different levels of consciousness. I knew little about breeding, border collies, or farms but I had no doubt I needed one of this breeder’s dogs. I don’t remember coming to this understanding; I just remember getting there.
The breeder, Deanne, met me near the passenger gate in the sprawling Denver terminal. I saw this small, bright-eyed, trembling puppy staring intensely at me. I sat down in the coffee shop, signed the papers, wrote a check, put the puppy—Rose—into a small carrying case, and got my first glimpse of this strange creature as we went through security.
There I had to open the crate and take Rose out. Although she was shaking a bit, she was coolly eyeing the security officers, me, and the X-ray machine (through which she had to pass). She was calm, alert, taking it all in. The guards permitted themselves enough leeway to ooh and aah at this puppy, as people are wont to do. I had two Labs at the time, Julius and Stanley, and they would have been all over the guards, wiggling and licking.
Rose simply stared at the guard as she cooed, “Awww, puppy!” and I was startled by the distinct, withering look of indifference, even contempt, on this small creature’s face. She was having none of it, turning to look at me as if to say, “Let’s get moving, okay? We have work to do.”
Soon we were on the plane, heading home to New Jersey. Rose was in the crate at my feet. I had been strictly enjoined not to let the dog out of the crate, so of course as soon as the plane got to cruising altitude, I bent down, opened the crate, lifted Rose onto my lap, and put a blanket over her. The woman next to me saw this and winked, and if the flight attendants noticed, they didn’t say anything. Rose was shaking for much of the flight, but she seemed to grasp the situation and didn’t try to run away or make any noise. Once in a while I saw her look up at me and take me in.
I never think I know what’s in the mind of a dog, but my own idea at the time was that Rose was coming to terms with her future. This is my guy, and I need to make the best of it. He needs me to be quiet, so I will be quiet. He can count on me. And even then, I did.
I like to think that if you trust a dog to do something, if you give them the chance to do the right thing, then they will. It has worked for me, again and again. I trusted Rose from the moment I saw her, and never stopped.
Rose always seemed to connect somewhere between love and work. I think that place is called devotion. What she loved was work, and she always seemed to get what the work was, even at eight weeks old, even on that airplane high above the ground. I knew she would figure out what she had to do, and from that moment on, she always did.
Rose came home to a colonial house in a crowded New Jersey suburb—the hip boomer community of Montclair—with the aforementioned Labs and a troubled border collie named Orson, a dog who drew me into the life of a farm and into writing about dogs and animals. Rose spent very little time there. She seemed always to be looking beyond the place, just as I was, for her true destiny. She sensed, as I had, that neither one of us would find it there.
Rose was a strange puppy, unlike any I had ever known. She had little interest in food, other than to eat a bit of her kibble from time to time. I saw right away that she didn’t play much but seemed obsessed with tasks—chasing a slingshot ball, for example. She refused to join any puppy play group or enter a dog park. Her major interest in people seemed to be moving them around, from one room to another. Whenever people said, “Awww, what a cute puppy,” she looked almost nauseated and moved to another room. I have to say that I loved her a bit more every time that happened. When they talked baby talk to her and tried to bribe her with a biscuit—“Hey, cutie, how about a treat?”—she would growl at them and go somewhere else. She was never bribable. She was not cute. She did not care what anybody thought of her.
Dogs have learned to thrive by becoming what people need them to be. If you want them to love treats and wiggle and smile, they will do it for you. Rose would not be what other people wanted her to be.
I loved her for that.
In the house, she never played with toys. She had no interest in cuddling. If we were in the living room, she would be elsewhere—on the porch, upstairs in one of the beds, looking out the windows, surveying the terrain. She never played but always seemed to be working. She had no interest in the other dogs. She didn’t care what they were eating, or what they were doing. If they came near her, she would curl her lip and walk away.
In the yard, she once saw a mole dig its way into a hole, and night and day she lay crouched near the hole, waiting for him to return. He never did, but she never stopped looking. She took all of the dog toys each day and rearranged them. She lay in the leaves waiting for squirrels to enter the yard, and then would tear off after them. It was some weeks before I realized that she was not trying to hunt and kill them, but just move them around like sheep.
I got up at 4 A.M. to walk her, just the two of us, for training and bonding. I never put her on a leash, and she always walked just a few feet in front of me, sniffing the ground, scanning ahead. On the way back, she walked behind me, occasionally coming around to herd me a little. If another dog came by to sniff her, she would nip at its nose and move on. If a passing dog roared at her and tried to intimidate her, she would simply ignore them, as if acknowledging that this obnoxious behavior was beneath her.
She always managed to be near me, but was never quite with me. I was always in her sight, but she seemed to pay only the most indirect attention to me. She never had a single accident in the house, never ran away, never chased anything without permission. She reminded me of one of those very precocious children who have absolutely no interest in being a child, and are born into maturity and responsibility.
I knew that Rose and I would be moving to Bedlam Farm shortly. I had just closed on the farm and was planning on buying some sheep. Rose and I began sheepherding lessons in Pennsylvania. Here she changed. Intensely aroused around the sheep, she seemed to forget that I was here on earth. She had found good work, and I was just the transport. I yelled at her so often and in such frustration that the trainer took me aside and told me, if you want a better dog, be a better human.
This was the first great lesson Rose taught me. We were not going to be able to work together if I didn’t practice patience. Learn to wait. Give her time and support and direction, not shouts and commands and frustration. Three times a week, we drove out to Pennsylvania, herded sheep, broiled in the sun, froze in the snow, were devoured by flies, mosquitoes, and ticks, got soaked in the rain, and eventually, learned how to work together.
It was very difficult work, for Rose and for me. I didn’t know what I was doing and had never done anything like this. I was impatient, angry. I shouted at her, stomped my feet, was frustrated at the almost unmanageable intensity of the young border collie, her ferocious desire to work that desperately needed channeling. The breeders are correct. Border collies are not for everybody, and it took a very long time, and a lot of hard work before I came to see that they were for me.
In two months, Rose won a first-place ribbon for AKC Beginner Trial. She moved six sheep around a circular ring two times, and then brought them back to me and lay down. The Irish judge came over to me and said she was one of the brightest and keenest dogs he had ever seen. She could be a star, he told me. Hmm, I thought. A star is born.
The trainer came over to congratulate Rose and offer her a smelly, juicy liver treat, which she threw on the ground. Rose ignored the treat and the trainer and looked back to the sheep and then to me. It was the same look I saw at the Denver airport. When are we going to stop messing around and get back to work?
The next week I drove up to the new farm with Rose, so both of us could take a look. I told my wife that I expected to be on the farm for a couple of years. I would write a book or two there, and learn about dogs and sheep and animals and rural life, and then I would return to my life in New Jersey. At the time, I believed that, at least consciously. My wife loved New York City and her work and life there and had never expressed interest in moving to the country. So most of the time, Rose and I would be there alone.
