The Dogs of Bedlam Farm Read online

  If the winter taught me anything, it was to accept that I was getting older. Yes, it was a brutal winter, taking a toll on everybody. But it would have affected me differently even a few years earlier. There were limits to what I could take now. The morning chores so wearied me that I was falling asleep at the computer at noon. I was popping anti-inflammatory pills like popcorn. My conceit—that I was no “gentleman farmer,” that the dogs and I could do this alone—was the epitome of hubris. Yet I couldn’t let it go. I am not a brave or courageous person, but I am a willful one. The only way I was going to leave the farm this winter was in a hearse, I told myself. I finish what I start.

  One morning, awake at five A.M., I threw on a pair of sweatpants and a jacket and let the dogs out. It was profoundly discouraging to feel so achy and spent even before the sun had risen. The sun was unlikely to show itself that bleak morning, anyway; the valley was shrouded in yet another layer of new snow, topped with a veneer of icy rain.

  The thermometer said minus fifteen. I dreaded shoveling and wading through the mess to carry out extra feed and hay. I had to muck out the barn, where the donkeys dumped all night, and put water into the tub by the barn.

  When Orson and Rose came rushing back in, snow-covered from charging around the giant drifts that surrounded the house like a Civil War fortress, I made a sudden judgment call. “Sorry guys,” I said, “but I’m sleeping in for a while.” I turned up the heat and crawled back into bed. It was my lowest point; I was wearing out.

  As great working dogs do, mine entered the spirit of the moment, hopping onto the foot of the bed, sleeping quietly alongside me. I think I must have had a fever that morning; I simply crashed. I heard Rose growl a few times, was vaguely aware that Orson had gone downstairs to investigate something, but I paid no attention.

  I woke up at eight-thirty in a rush of guilt and alarm. When people ask about the single most powerful feeling in owning a farm, I always say it’s the responsibility of caring for so many utterly dependent creatures. If I don’t haul feed and hay, they don’t eat. If I don’t drag the hose out of the basement and across to the barn, they don’t drink.

  I hustled out of bed and pulled on my thermal socks, long underwear, two layers of shirts, a neck warmer, a hat over a ski mask, gloves and liners, and thermal boots supposed to protect feet at forty below and likely to get a chance to prove it any day.

  I must have looked like a country version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy. I could barely climb down the stairs in all those clothes. I was hacking and sneezing and already limping, and I hadn’t even left the house.

  When I stepped out the back door, I was stunned. Paths had been shoveled everywhere—around the door, around my truck, along the back of the house to the barns and the pasture gates, even to the bird feeders. The hay feeder was filled with hay. The feed trough held corn and feed and the sheep were happily chowing down. The donkeys’ oats were in their buckets and Carol and Fanny were crunching away. The water tub was already filled to the brim.

  “Lord,” I said to the dogs. “This is a miracle.” I have never needed a kindness more.

  I am a lucky man with a wonderful family who loves his work, but I have not been as fortunate, or perhaps as worthy, when it comes to friendship. I find it hard to talk to strangers. I do not expect help to materialize when I most need it. I don’t believe people will extend themselves on my behalf. I’m not good at asking for help, anyway, or at accepting it. But Ray and Joanne had breached that wall, and Anthony just leaped right over it.

  Holly told me later that Anthony got up at five that morning to plow driveways for several relatives. “Jon has got to be in trouble, buried in all this,” he told her, then headed over to save my life.

  The gift was more meaningful than he knew. It was great to walk on the path without falling or twisting my leg, but it was the morale boost that meant the most. There was somebody out there who cared about me enough to do this.

  I laughed and whistled. Even the dogs picked up on my mood, tearing up and down the newly dug paths. I thought that even with so much winter still ahead, I’d turned a corner. With a friend like that nearby, I would be all right.

  I WOULDN’T HAVE MISSED A DAY OF THIS WINTER’S EERIE AND demanding beauty, but I also couldn’t wait to say I’d gotten through it, although there were times I wasn’t so sure I would.

  People needed one another in the winter, and they knew it. They seemed to go out of their way to wave to a passing driver, to chat at the market or the gas pump. Nobody could really make it entirely alone, so community seemed to flourish. People kept an eye on their elderly neighbors, shoveled their walks, made sure they were warm, asked if they needed a ride to market.

  When I got what was left of my hair trimmed at one of my favorite Washington County places—Janet’s Beauty Salon in tiny Shushan—the little shop was usually filled with elderly women sitting under big blue dryers.

  One of the women was Miriam, who was ninety-four, mostly deaf and blind, but still went to Grange and town meetings. It took the entire town of Shushan to get Miriam to the beauty parlor, although she didn’t know it.

  Miriam lived alone in a small house on the edge of town, refusing all offers of help. So when she had her weekly appointment, everyone mobilized discreetly. Somebody stopped traffic on one side of the road when she was ready to cross, and somebody was waiting on the other. Janet held the door open and guided Miriam to her seat.

  After her steely hair was done up in waves that were probably very chic in 1948, she crossed the street again. (“Thank you, young man,” she told me when I asked if I might accompany her, “but I’ve been crossing this street longer than you’ve been alive.”) She stopped at Yushak’s Market for a cup of coffee and a chat with Dennis or Debbie Yushak, and then somebody walked her home with her groceries for the week. There were probably similar stories to be told in every hamlet nearby.

  As Carr predicted, I was not the same at the end of the winter, not even in the middle of it. Even as my appreciation for my dogs grew, so did my sense of human community. Each drop of the thermometer seemed a reminder that people and dogs work best when mixed together. Sometimes, dogs can lead you to the people you need.

  While I truly doubt I could have endured winter without my two canine oddballs, I also couldn’t have made it without the dozen telephone conversations I had each day with my wife, my sister, friends new and old, and the encouragement and sympathy of this new community. We were in it together, all of us, those with fur and those without.

  In early February, I came out of the house as the sun came up to hear Carol’s hee-haw. It was nearly thirty degrees, balmy by recent standards, even though another snow-and-ice barrage was due that evening. Carol sounded stronger, and she looked better, too—up on her feet, out of the barn, eating hay in the pasture, Fanny placidly following along.

  It didn’t quite register that we had saved Carol until a few days later at the variety store. “Good to see your donkey up and around,” said one of the townspeople, a woman who looked up at the farm each morning when she got into her car to go to work and loved the sight of the donkeys at the feeder. For a few miserable weeks she hadn’t seen them at all as they hunkered in the barn, and of course, like everyone else in town, she’d heard of Carol’s illness. Now Carol and Fanny had emerged, like large, fuzzy robins.

  “It helped me get through the winter,” she said. “Some people would have put her down or let it go.”

  I allowed myself a little ripple of pride. I had spent many cold hours giving Carol her oats, petting and soothing her, plying her with medications, playing her favorite tunes, bandaging her hooves. Taking her temperature, too. And she had come through it. We had all come through it.

  Chapter Nine

  DOG DAYS II

  IT TOOK ME A LONG TIME—YEARS OF LIVING WITH DOGS—TO understand how many of the problems that often mark human relationships with these remarkable animals have more to do with the people than the dogs. Only recently have I really gr
asped that when I complain about something my dog is doing, I’m often speaking about my own behavior.

  Training a dog is something of a spiritual experience when done properly, a meshing of the instincts and traits of two very different species trying to live together harmoniously. But the spiritual stuff tends to get subsumed in all the yelling, tugging, even electro-shocking that passes for dog training in much of America.

  Dogs are born knowing exactly what they want to do: eat, scratch, roll in disgusting stuff, sniff and squabble with other dogs, roam, sleep, have sex. Little of this is what we want them to do, of course. We ask them to sit, stay, smell pleasant, practice abstinence, and be accommodating.

  The manner in which we breach this great divide—a chasm often overlooked in all the happy talk about dogs—defines our relationships with these creatures. We love to share our warm and fuzzy stories, but we sometimes don’t want to acknowledge just how alien a mind like Orson’s is.

  So we scold them, bribe them, at times even beat them, to change them, adapt them to our needs and expectations. Yet they have powerful, stubborn, sometimes immovable instincts of their own.

  When there’s conflict, people tend to blame the dog. “I want him to sit; why won’t he?” “He’s defiant,” we say. “She’s so independent.” We never say, “I don’t know how to train him” or “I lose my temper” or “I say too many confusing things.”

  If it’s true that having a better dog requires that we be better humans—and I believe it—the daily drama of Orson and the donkey droppings reminded me of how far he had come, and how far I have to go.

  Orson herding sheep is a spectacular sight. He can herd trucks, buses, and kids on skateboards with Discovery Channel grace. But he herds sheep by charging full speed into the fray, wreaking havoc. He is an excitable kind of dog; any voice command results in his spinning, barking, and racing pell-mell across the pasture. The first time I entered him in a herding trial, beginner’s division, he knocked a judge down and the sheep leaped over the fence and ran for their lives.

  Things are calmer now, but not by as much as I’d hoped. I thought that by spring, after months of practice, Orson might begin grasping the fundamental principle of herding—that the idea is to go around, not through, the flock and bring the sheep to me, or to wherever I tell him.

  I understand that this is an ideal, a goal; it may happen and it may not, and I will love him just as much either way. I also understand that for this to happen, the creature who has to change is the one without the fur.

  One February day, Orson rushed up to the pasture gate, barking and spinning as always. When I unlatched it, the donkeys prudently headed for the barn.

  I always said the same thing at this point: “Let’s go get the sheep.”

  Rose would have raced out to wherever the sheep were to begin circling and collecting them.

  But Orson, marching as usual to the beat of his own odd drummer, invariably raced to the apple tree fifty yards away where the donkeys like to take their dumps and began scarfing down chunks of donkey poop. This was just as disgusting as it sounds.

  Every day I told myself I would pay no attention to this behavior. Every day I ended up screaming at him to leave it, drop it, or come now.

  “Forget about it,” Carolyn had advised me back when we first began herding in Pennsylvania and the attraction was sheep poop. “It’s perfectly normal, it won’t hurt him, and the sooner you shut up about it, the sooner he’ll stop doing it.” So I had no excuses. I knew from the first that this was a behavior that had to be ignored to be eliminated.

  Orson is a genius at attracting my attention; it’s his true sport. He doesn’t do tricks, and his sheepherding is, to say the least, spotty. But he never tires of seeking my attention and rarely fails to get it, nor does he care much about the consequences.

  He barks when the crowd applauds at readings. He muscles other dogs aside if they come within ear-scratching distance. He insists on staying within a twenty-foot radius of me, even if it means leaving sheep behind or letting them run off.

  I understand, and have for years, that the proper way to train a dog is to make commands simple, clear, and positive. Perhaps the most common mistake owners make is that they only pay attention when their dogs are misbehaving. Thus the dog learns that to get his human to talk to or look at him, he has to do whatever provokes a reaction. The proper response, however, is to avoid reinforcing unwanted behaviors by ignoring them, to notice and praise behaviors that are wanted.

  I also know that it’s quite common for dogs—especially predatory ones like border collies—to eat other animals’ droppings. They were bred to spend days out on the moors with their charges, not to enjoy organic food from clean bowls. To lap at a mud puddle or scarf up calorie-rich poop is actually sensible. But because we see dogs as quasi-human, we react as we would if human members of our family were doing it. Yelling at dogs to stop just makes them anxious—thus more likely to eat the stuff—and calls attention to the behavior.

  Almost any experienced dog trainer on Earth would offer the same advice: ignore it and it will go away. Don’t scold when your dog’s screwing up; praise him when he isn’t. I get this idea; I embrace it fully. I try to incorporate it into my training.

  Yet I doubt there’s been a day in my relationship with Orson when I haven’t grumbled, muttered, or yelled at him, even as my love for him has grown.

  For example: because he doesn’t want to be out of my sight, when we go for walks, he trots fifteen feet ahead, then turns around to wait. If I stop walking, he sits down. This bugs me, not because it matters, but because Orson isn’t living up to my expectations of a happy dog. I want him off running and romping and looking joyous, not clinging neurotically to me. So I snarl—“Get away!”—and urge him to run, go, be free. I know better, but sometimes the more we love the dog, the more we mess up.

  Similarly, in the three years that we’ve been around sheep, there’s hardly been a time when we enter the pasture that I haven’t made a mental note to be quiet when he eats sheep poop. I can count the times I’ve managed to do it.

  At the farm, this issue escalated. Orson had developed a taste for donkey dung.

  Why did I care?

  I found the sight repulsive. I found it infuriating, believing (wrongly) that he was challenging my authority. It impeded our herding lessons since while he snacked, the sheep were heading rapidly up the hill. He was a sheepdog. I’d gone to great trouble to put him together with sheep. Why would he rather eat poop?

  It was also embarrassing. I’d been training this dog for nearly four years. Shouldn’t this issue be resolved?

  It hadn’t been, not because there was something wrong with him, but because there were things wrong with me. Orson couldn’t reason all this out the way I supposedly could. His instincts guided him to an action; but my intellect should prevail over my reflexes. It hadn’t.

  There were, of course, certain practical issues. Trainers can talk all they want about ignoring the dog while he gobbles this stuff, but they’re not around when the dog later vomits in your truck or has diarrhea on the living-room carpet. Dog lovers know that what comes in goes out, often in explosive fashion. I didn’t care how natural the behavior was. I didn’t like it; I didn’t want him to do it.

  Yet he truly couldn’t help it.

  So knowing all this, why couldn’t I stop? Why couldn’t I reinforce him for something else, like not eating poop? Why did he get my goat every time, despite my Churchillian resolve? Every day I failed, until this February day in the middle of the winter from hell. It was a freezing morning. We were slogging through the still-deep snow, augmented by a few fresh inches from a squall overnight. I had decided that morning to calm Orson down by saying nothing for most of our lesson.

  Because of the new snow, most of the sheep and donkey droppings were covered. But up by the apple tree, there was a fresh pile. As we entered the pasture, Orson veered off and made a beeline for it.

  I stopped, closed m
y eyes, took a deep breath. This was going to be the day I made some progress.

  As Orson veered right, straight toward the pile, I headed left, straight toward the sheep. I didn’t turn to see what he was doing, just quickened my steps. Moving steadily, silently toward the sheep, I muttered a little mantra: “Keep walking, say nothing. Keep walking, say nothing.” I felt something shift within me. Like an alcoholic walking away from booze, I felt a higher power at work, and it was an exhilarating sensation. Maybe I could change.

  As I neared the sheep in the training pen, I tossed a few handfuls of corn over the fence and yelled, “Hey, sheep! Yo sheep!” I heard paws thundering behind me and Orson came racing past, circling the pen and barking.

  We finished our lesson, then turned and left the pasture. Keep walking. Say nothing. Keep walking. Say nothing. All the way to the gate and out.

  Victory! I had done it. I dropped to my knees and shouted for joy. Orson came rushing over, alarmed, and I gave him a giant bear hug. How strange he must have thought me, praising him effusively for what he hadn’t done.

  After years of trying, including more than four months at the farm, I was finally able to look the other way.

  I did the same thing the next day.

  The day after, I forgot and yelled at Orson. But then the next time, I got back on track.

  It was a small thing, but it felt great; I was proud of us both. I was allowing Orson to change his behavior naturally, without tension or shouting. I was getting some reinforcement, too. Day by day, the intervals between my heading for the sheep and his appearing at my side grew shorter.

  On the seventh or eighth day, he loped right past the pile and headed for the sheep. I raised my arms to the sky and danced a small jig. When Orson came running over, exuberant but confused, I showered him with hugs and treats. “Thank you, thank you,” I told him. “You have helped me to be a slightly better human than I was last week.” Forgetting for a second where it had so recently been, I kissed his nose.