The Dogs of Bedlam Farm

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 City of God

  Chapter 2 Bedlam

  Chapter 3 Dog Days I

  Chapter 4 Team Bedlam

  Chapter 5 The Donkey Lady of Belcher

  Chapter 6 Dog Love

  Chapter 7 The Good Dog

  Chapter 8 Cold Mountain

  Chapter 9 Dog Days II

  Chapter 10 Family Circle

  Chapter 11 Lambing Season

  Chapter 12 Dog Days III

  Epilogue Peaceable Kingdome

  Excerpt from Going Home

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other books by Jon Katz

  Copyright

  Prologue

  THE JULY SUN WAS BEATING DOWN ON THE PASTURE ON A STICKY afternoon. Flies and gnats swarmed all over me; the smell of poop was pungent; and Carolyn Wilki’s usually compliant sheep were getting grumpy, tired of being chased around and eager to leave their fenced enclosure—which contained dozens of them, along with me and my troubled and complex border collie.

  “Lie down!” I was saying again and again, louder each time, to no particular effect and in a voice I vaguely and distastefully recognized but couldn’t quite identify. My dog Orson, like many of his breed, had his own agenda, which bore little resemblance to mine.

  He was tearing around the sheep, crashing into them, grabbing mouthfuls of wool. I waved my crook menacingly; if he’d held still long enough, I might have clobbered him.

  I wasn’t enjoying this. This wasn’t like the Discovery Channel. I was soaked in sweat and covered with bites and welts and caked with unspeakable stuff. Worse, my dog had not lain down, not even once. Orson’s notion of herding didn’t involve the fabled, exquisite interplay with the herder-shepherd. His idea was to grab the biggest sheep and drag it around a bit.

  Carolyn, the trainer who’d pulled this dog and me back from the abyss, chugged over to me on her all-terrain vehicle. She owned this Pennsylvania farm, and she was a formidable presence as always in her slouch hat, which she wore in all weather, and flapping cape. “Leash up your dog,” she ordered in a displeased tone, “and leave the pen.”

  Carolyn had become a close friend; we yakked and squabbled endlessly about life and dogs. Like many professionals in the dog world—vets, breeders, rescue workers, trainers—she’d lost some of her capacity to be tactful or optimistic about the way people handle their dogs.

  “Look, Katz,” Carolyn snapped. “That wasn’t good dog training in there. You’re getting angry, talking too much, being too reactive. Face it: if you want to have a better dog, you will just have to be a better goddamned human.”

  I was surprised; that wasn’t what I wanted or expected to hear from a dog trainer. But what she was saying struck home, deeply. She was talking about anger, impatience, impulsiveness, frustration, an inability to watch and listen—enormous problems all my life, still not easy to vanquish in my mid-fifties. Only my helpless love for this screwy dog could cause me to undertake such an overhaul.

  Two years after that hot and bothered afternoon in Pennsylvania, though I can’t say whether I’m a better human—I’m still working on it, and ultimately, it’s something for others to decide—I do have a better dog.

  Carolyn was right, perhaps more than she imagined. I’ve come to see my dogs as a reflection of my willingness to try to improve, as well as an unsparing measure of my frequent failure to do so. Orson is a different dog than the frantic, matted, and terrified creature who arrived in a crate at Newark Airport several years ago. He is calmer, more responsive, more loving—the result, I’m convinced, of my struggle to learn and grow and to be more patient, less angry. For better or worse, I see Orson’s progress—and that of my other two dogs—as a mirror of my own humanity, a benchmark of my progress. Or lack thereof.

  SOMETIMES IT ONLY BECOMES CLEAR WHAT A BOOK IS REALLY about later on, after it’s published, when readers and time and life and memory have done their filtering and perspective brings things into focus.

  It’s only now, for example, that I realize that two of my books—Running to the Mountain and A Dog Year—are, despite their differences, about the same thing: trying to become a better human. For me, this lifelong struggle has become enmeshed with dogs, almost inseparable from them. There are many other means, and I didn’t particularly choose this path. The dogs, I think, chose me.

  When Carolyn yelled that day in the pasture, she wasn’t attacking me, just giving voice to a powerful idea: dogs are blameless, devoid of calculation, neither blessed nor cursed with human motives.

  Insofar as they have problems, except for genetics or unusual circumstances, it’s usually because we either inflict them or fail to correct them. They can’t really be held responsible for what they do. But we can.

  Dogs have their own identities and personalities, certainly, but they’re also living and breathing testaments to our pasts, our families, our strengths and frustrations. They have their own traits and instincts, but to a considerable degree they are what we make them, what we teach them to be.

  Dogs that we raise from puppyhood reflect our willingness to know and love and train them properly. Dogs we rescue or inherit are often more complex, and can challenge us even more.

  In either case, we are profoundly responsible for them. It’s become increasingly fashionable to see dogs as human substitutes, childlike equals, or even, in some cases, superiors. I see our extraordinary relationship with them differently: they are voiceless, so we must be their advocates, their stewards.

  Staring in shock that July day at my traumatized border collie, who was frantically trying to please me and to make sense of my confusing commands, I recognized that I had a lot more work to do on myself, though I already had done plenty.

  What a different life it’s been since that revelation. I can hardly believe to what degree Orson (formerly named Devon) has altered my existence. My two beloved yellow Labs are gone, one of cancer, the other of heart disease, replaced by three creatures who are in most respects at the other end of the animal spectrum: three border collies—Orson, Homer, Rose. The cabin about which I wrote a book (Running to the Mountain) is gone, sold and then replaced by an aging farmhouse fifteen miles north, with four decrepit barns, a milk house, and forty-two acres of pasture and woods.

  My work is completely different—I write about dogs now. I have new and wonderful friends, and have begun the terrifying and painstaking work of reconnecting with my original family, especially my dear sister, with whom I’d been out of touch for years.

  And all of it is the result, directly or indirectly, of acquiring this dog—an animal I briefly had the conceit of thinking I had rescued, but who now seems to have done a businesslike job of rescuing me. I am his rescue human, I like to joke, even as I’ve come to understand that it’s no joke at all.

  I have to credit a retired English professor for some of the ideas in this book. Last year, Orson and Homer joined me on a three-month book tour, in a sojourn that took us from New England to Kentucky and into the Midwest. One spring night in Brookfield, Wisconsin, an elegant, bookish-looking woman approached me after a signing. She loved books even more than dogs, she said, and therefore had no questions about puppies, poop, or excessive barking. She just liked my books and offered a brief but knowledgeable critique of several. After we talked a little and she was preparing to leave, she asked, “I assume you’ll write about dogs again?”

  I nodded; I wanted to write about dogs and the people who owned them until I dropped.

  “Then I have a favor,” she said, “assuming it doesn’t violate your ethics. Write a book in which no dog dies. At my age, it really matte
rs.” She shook my hand and walked off.

  I smiled most of the way back to my hotel.

  So I can safely say a number of things about this book. It is about how several dogs led me to confront my own sense of humanity and challenged me to try to be a better human being. It’s about the startling degree to which dogs can enter and alter a human life.

  It’s about a mean winter I spent on increasingly rebellious legs, in manure-caked boots, on a remote, windswept hillside in upstate New York, with a few lifesaving friends, the usual various ugly ghosts from the past, and more livestock than any suburban rookie should attempt to manage. It’s also about the fact that crisis and mystery are, as always, around the corner, rushing toward me.

  Finally, and with gratitude to Professor Chernowitz, I am happy to say what while no truthful book about any life is without loss or suffering, no dogs die in this book.

  JON KATZ

  Bedlam Farm

  West Hebron, N.Y.

  Chapter One

  CITY OF GOD

  BEDLAM: a place, scene, or state of uproar and confusion

  Columbia Encyclopedia

  FAR IN THE DISTANCE, AS THE MORNING MISTS BEGAN TO CLEAR, I could see a livestock trailer heading west on Route 30 from Salem toward the hamlet of West Hebron. From this hill behind my new house, I could spot visitors approaching from miles away.

  There were plenty of farms around this quadrant of upstate New York, lots of places livestock haulers might be going, but my guess was that this was Wilbur Price of Bethel, Pennsylvania, delivering a ram named Nesbitt and the ladies, fifteen “dog-broke” ewes.

  Which meant it was time to walk down the hill. Change was just around the corner, big change.

  For three border collies, there could be no more meaningful event than the arrival of sheep in their backyard. For me, the change was more complex, but a big transition nonetheless, another midlife crapshoot. I was stepping out of one existence and into another, a shift inexorably linked to these three dogs.

  We all clambered down the hill as the trailer descended into town. In a few minutes, this farm, known around the county as the old Keyes place—somehow I doubted it would ever be known as the old Katz place—with its listing and peeling dairy barn, an even more askew pig barn, an overgrown chicken pen, and several other outbuildings, would be home once again to livestock. Everyone in the tiny village could look up the hill and see animals grazing, as they had for generations.

  I was no farmer, and this place wouldn’t really qualify as a working farm. I am a dog lover and writer, and this would be, in part, a dog-centric adventure with my border collies. Even before the animals arrived, in the few weeks since I’d moved in and begun preparations, I could hardly believe the amount of work involved just in overseeing forty-two acres and a Civil War–era farmhouse. I could only imagine how difficult and relentless real farmwork was, particularly in brutal winter. My work would be fractional in comparison, and I wouldn’t rely on the farm to provide my family’s livelihood—an enormous difference.

  Wilbur, a garrulous man in a giant baseball cap and overalls, was indeed waiting at the gravel driveway with his noisy cargo. We shook hands and chatted about the weather and the drive and his dicey encounters with fog en route. Wilbur, I realized, drove sheep and cows around all day and didn’t want to pass up the chance for a more satisfying conversation.

  I, on the other hand, was eager to populate my farm and get it rolling. After considerable effort and dismaying expense, I had fences up, hay and straw in the barn, and corn and feed stashed in critter-proof containers all over. I was as ready as somebody like me was ever going to be. But I’d learned that country talk can’t be rushed. It had to have been a long and lonely ride up from Raspberry Ridge, my friend Carolyn’s sheep farm and dog-training center. These ewes were loaners from her much larger flock.

  We knew these sheep. My elder dogs and I, frequent visitors and herding students at Raspberry Ridge, had taken them to graze in the pasture countless times in rain and sunshine, in deep night and bright day, heat and cold. We’d moved them around during herding trials, chased them during our lessons, retrieved them from the woods when they wandered, midwifed a few of their lambs. We also knew—and were appropriately wary of—Nesbitt, who’d sent me flying more than once.

  I could hear them all shifting and bleating in the trailer, probably hungry and thirsty. I heard an asthmatic-sounding bray, too, which meant that at the last minute Carolyn had decided to send the donkey along with the rest of the crew. The donkey lived alone in a pasture, and Carolyn thought she might have a better quality of life at my new encampment. Carol, the donkey, was a sweetheart, whose affections I’d won with gifts of apples; I wondered if she’d recognize me in this strange new environment.

  Wilbur finally sensed that it was time to get moving. He slowly backed the truck a few feet inside the barnyard gate and slipped the latches that opened his trailer.

  Carol the Lonely Donkey hee-hawed again, looked around, snarfed down the donkey cookie I was holding out for her, and trotted down the ramp. She did seem to remember me, and in any case appreciated the cookie.

  Behind her, fifteen sheep and Nesbitt came charging past me, headed for the lush grass that covered the hill, and immediately started crunching away. Unlike dogs, sheep are not complex in their attachments. Grass is good. Grass is always good.

  I shook Wilbur’s hand and wrote out a check on the cab of his truck. Bedlam Farm was in business.

  My dogs, corralled in their own spacious fenced enclosure a few yards away, sat frozen; they seemed shocked, wide-eyed, ears and tails at the alert. One rarely sees a more focused look on any creature than I saw on the faces of Orson, Homer, and Rose.

  The autumn wind was sharp, parting the mists on the hill. I looked up to see a small flock of sheep and a donkey grazing near an old apple tree. I could hardly believe it myself; they looked as if they had grown out of the ground and had been there forever. Wilbur declined coffee and other amenities, saying he wanted to be home for dinner, and after much rattling, banging, and slamming, the truck rumbled off down the dirt road into town, back to the world.

  It was one thing to drive out and work with Carolyn’s sheep once or twice a week from suburban New Jersey, where much of the time my dogs and I lived an ordinary-looking life with my wife. It was quite another to be responsible for sheep living just outside my kitchen window.

  They would need shots and worming and medical certificates from a vet. They would need to be shorn, to have their hooves trimmed. They’d need corn to build up calories for the winter, vitamin supplements when the ewes got pregnant, straw to lie on, and hay to eat once the grass withered in the first hard frost. They needed a continuous supply of fresh water, even in sub-zero weather.

  In a few months, their newborn lambs would need to be located instantly, dried, and placed under heating lamps, separate from the rest of the flock. Lambs often required special supplements, and they’d need to be tagged and registered and have their tails docked. And everyone would need shelter from the vicious winter storms that would be arriving in just a few weeks.

  All of these things had to be provided when the ice was packed a foot deep on the ground amid waist-high mounds of snow. And I had to—wanted to—take care of almost all those things myself.

  When we bought this place, my wife, Paula, had set down three ironclad conditions: no firearms; no farm or other heavy machinery; and the gargantuan 1982 Chevy Silverado pickup I’d bought for hauling hay and other farm chores was not to be driven more than five miles in any direction. She was convinced that it would break down at inconvenient times; I had to be able to walk home.

  Anybody who knew me understood the wisdom of these conditions. So while I would need help with barn repairs, drainage ditches, anything involving heavy machinery, the work was otherwise mine to do.

  So as Wilbur drove out of sight and I waved goodbye, I was elated but also unnerved. There was no going back.

  OUR DAY HAD BEGU
N MUCH EARLIER, AROUND FIVE A.M., WITH our new morning routine. Orson, Homer, and the puppy, Rose, had labored up the steep hill behind the house with me, the wind whipping around us, tearing leaves off the trees at the top of the ridge. Even in the forbidding predawn, I could scarcely believe I owned such a beautiful tract of countryside. I could hear the occasional yip-yip of coyotes—“coy dogs,” the locals call them—and wondered how soon they would be circling my soon-to-arrive sheep.

  To be honest, I was the only one laboring up the hill, heading for two Adirondack chairs placed at the crest. The dogs were racing and gliding effortlessly, zipping around in enthusiastic circles the way border collies go everywhere—back and forth, round and round, always somehow keeping me in the center. I’d become used to walking in this odd way, aware vaguely that I was being herded. The two adults, Orson and Homer, had plenty of energy, but Rose positively zoomed, galloping from one corner of the pasture to the other in the time it took me to go a few steps.

  Every dog has a story, but Orson’s is better known than some. A breeder in Texas had retrieved him from someone she deemed an unsuitable owner, then sent him to me after reading one of my books, in which I talked about my late, beloved yellow Labs. Orson, then named Devon, was a dog in trouble. He was anxious, confused, apt to jump onto passing minivans, herd school buses, raid the refrigerator and jump through windows; we brawled until I found a great trainer—Carolyn—who helped turn our lives around.

  He was followed by Homer, as sweet and submissive as Orson was difficult, but a dog who presented challenges of his own. Then a few months ago, our pack had been joined by Rose, the nuclear-powered puppy with strong herding lines who made the other two seem like stone statues. People ask me why I got a third border collie, and the truth is I hardly know. I still can’t quite explain why I got the first one.

  “Guys, this will be a great day for you,” I announced. “Soon there will be fifteen ewes in this field, along with a grumpy ram named Nesbitt and maybe a donkey. You’ve got to watch out for Nesbitt. He’ll nail me.”