The Dogs of Bedlam Farm Read online

  This was a bad move. Border collie puppies can be unnerved for life if they’re challenged by aggressive sheep before they’ve developed confidence and experience. And suddenly a 350-pound Tunis ram was heading right for Rose. She backed away and hid between my legs, then regrouped and went into a rope-a-dope, bobbing and weaving, circling and barking.

  Nesbitt edged away—he wanted no part of this intense little dog—then focused once more on me, a much bigger and easier target. I had meanwhile forgotten about Carol, until three ewes fleeing Homer plowed into her and she began braying and kicking.

  Dogs, ram, and ewes were all converging around me; the sheep were turning to me for safety from the dogs, the dogs impervious to my shouted commands, Nesbitt pawing the ground and contemplating another attack. Things were out of control.

  This had become a case for Orson, still yapping frantically down in the pen. For all his eccentricities, he was a dog you could call on in a pinch, especially if the pinch involved chasing something large.

  Without my glasses, I couldn’t see very far, but I hobbled down the hill to free the Helldog. As I rushed toward the gate—bucking donkey and charging ram close behind—I noticed a few cars and trucks pulled over on the road, their occupants transfixed by the spectacle.

  Great, I thought. I’ve been here three weeks and already I’m an object of ridicule. They’d be having a few good laughs at the variety store the next morning, chuckling over the sorry Flatlander and his out-of-control menagerie.

  I slammed the gate closed behind me, rushed to the pen and freed Orson, who began pinwheeling with excitement. “Let’s go, boy,” I gasped. “I need your help.”

  Opening the gate, I released him with his three favorite words in the universe: “Go get ’em.”

  He certainly seemed to grasp the spirit of the moment—my desperation, the chaos before us. He lit up at the sight of Nesbitt, raced up the hill at blinding speed, and plowed right into him. Then he circled around for another charge. But Nesbitt turned and fled downhill in my general direction. As he neared me, I brained him with the bucket again.

  “You want a piece of me?” I yelled. “Come on! Come on!”

  Had I had a spare moment, I might have reconsidered the wisdom of a fistfight with a ram. But with Orson about to torpedo him once more, Rose circling from the other side, and me screaming and waving a pail, Nesbitt ran up the white flag. He turned and raced through the open barn door into the back paddock.

  Orson then intercepted the zooming Homer, who stopped, startled, and seemed suddenly to notice my commands to lie down. Once Homer cooled off, I was stunned to see, Rose smartly veered in a wide outrun around the sheep, collected the fifteen ewes in a tight clump, and held them together with calm authority.

  It was an impressive display, at least until Orson plowed into the group—his herding style resembles a bowling ball scattering pins—and the ewes also broke for the rear paddock. Carol quieted and found some grass to munch. At least the field was clear, and Orson had cleared it.

  I limped down the hill, holding my smeared glasses in one hand, my cap and the bucket in the other. My clothes were muddy and fragrant from sheep droppings, and my suspenders were hanging down from my pants. As I staggered to the gate, a man and his family got out of their pickup and came up to me, applauding.

  “That was amazing,” he said admiringly. “How do you train dogs to do that? It’s like on TV.”

  I wiped my hand on my shirt and shook his hand. “Thanks,” I said. “It just takes a few years of training.”

  Chapter Four

  TEAM BEDLAM

  I HEARD A ROAR AND FELT A RUMBLE; THE DOGS WENT NUTS the way they do back in New Jersey when a garbage truck thunders by. Adam Matthews, my closest neighbor, went roaring past the house on his shiny yellow and green John Deere. An auto mechanic by trade, with a repair shop in nearby Rupert, Vermont, Adam had agreed to do some “caretaking” for me. It was an increasingly popular job in places like Hebron, where city people were buying property they needed help with.

  To guys like Adam, trucks and tractors aren’t weekend toys. They’re almost extensions of their bodies, a part of their beings. These guys—who talk bolts, gears, and trannies (transmissions) all day—live by a different set of natural laws; they have a way with machines that sometimes seems to border on recklessness. Over time, though, I came to see they aren’t careless, just confident.

  Hills, trees, snowdrifts—these aren’t fixed objects, but things to be rearranged, taken down, or pushed back (except during hunting season, when the machines get a breather). Landscapes are transient. If runoff rainwater is overflowing a drainage ditch, you just dig a deeper ditch. If underbrush blocks the path to the well, you rip it out and haul it elsewhere. If mountains of snow barricade the barn, you move them.

  In fifteen minutes, as I watched, Adam cleared away an incipient forest behind the barn, gouging out weeds and bushes and saplings, clearing a path so that the sheep and I could walk easily to the artesian well. Under his hand, the tractor danced around the barnyard like a skilled boxer. Adam offered me a turn at the wheel, so I could put the tractor in gear and drive forward and backward. I was tickled to move the huge thing, but also wary of pushing my luck. After a few minutes I hopped down and Adam finished up.

  IT SOMETIMES DOES, IN FACT, TAKE A VILLAGE. LITERALLY.

  I needed assistance from a lot of people these days, more than I’d imagined or required in the past. I was still incredulous at how many wonderful helpers mysteriously appeared.

  Adam was first, the grandson of the couple that had owned my farm for more than a generation, brought up four children there, chose the multicolored floral wallpaper in the living room, raised crops and animals. When Adam’s grandmother, who now lived in a nursing home in Glens Falls, sold the farm, she reserved a ten-acre plot on the top of the hill for him. It was a gift to me, too. When you’re living alone on a windswept farm, Adam is the person you want living nearby.

  Like many Vermonters, he is a man of much action but few words. He’d grown up, in part, in this very farmhouse and knew the property well. Discussions were brief. If Adam said he’d handle something, that was the last you spoke about it, no elaboration required.

  We didn’t actually speak in person for weeks. I simply left messages on his cell phone: I need to get the barn ready for sheep, I need to take down a dead tree, I need someone with a snowplow. Adam loved doing things, but wasn’t especially fond of kicking the details around with people from New Jersey. Even if, like many skilled craftsmen, he was partly earning his living from Flatlanders, that didn’t mean he had to take their guff. He told me in one message that he would do things cheap and right, and so he did.

  When I finally met Adam, he was much as I had pictured him: in his early thirties, handsome, built like a boulder. He was legendary for death-defying snowmobile runs, disdained overcoats and gloves.

  I learned—not from him—that he’d built the lovely, nearly completed house up the hill virtually with his own hands. He was reputed to be a hell of a shot, too. Like many men in Hebron, he was already talking about hunting season—the one time he couldn’t handle things, even if the farm burned down.

  ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS ADAM DID WAS HIRE ANTHONY Armstrong. It was a great move. Anthony was Natty Bumpo and John Wayne all rolled into one. Adam was a friend of Anthony’s father, another hardy Vermonter, and the two had known each other all their lives.

  The first time he pulled up the driveway in his black Toyota Tacoma, Anthony wore a snug Saratoga Raceway cap, a pencil lodged behind his ear, a vest over a cotton shirt. He was skinny, all muscle and sinew. The truck bed was stacked with ladders, plywood, and an arsenal of tools and hardware. He set a boom box on the hood to provide a country music sound track as he set to work.

  He gave me a discreet but appraising stare, taking in my Yankees cap, L. L. Bean walking shoes, and polo shirt. I suspect he was considering several labels that were not compliments: “Flatlander” was the most politi
c, “yuppie” was worse. Although I had only come from an adjacent state I might as well have journeyed from Neptune. I’d never hunted, driven a snowplow, replaced a tile, or raced a snowmobile.

  But then Anthony’s eyes went right to Homer, Orson, and Rose, and he sunk to his knees to greet them, wanting to hear all about them. “I love my kid, but I could not live without a dog,” he told me.

  Soon, in the way of dog people, we were chatting about our dogs, their habits and foibles. We hung around talking dogs for an hour while he sawed and planed a sliding door for the barn and told me about his Cleo, an English mastiff the size of a small pony.

  The things that hit you first about Anthony are his watchful gaze, his quick smile, always close to the surface, and his electric energy. He carries a piece of paper in his wallet that he got from an Air Force sergeant: “Integrity is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking.” He lives by it. Yet there’s an elfin quality about him; he exudes mischief, and is fearless about speaking his mind.

  It was good to have Anthony around. The laws of gravity were different for him. I never felt older than when watching Anthony, twenty-seven, bound over a gate I struggled to unlatch, toss hay bales around effortlessly while I huffed and puffed, or tote heavy armloads of firewood like matchsticks.

  Anthony could fix almost anything—leaky faucets, cracked windowpanes, dangling doorknobs, stalled engines. For now, he liked to work on the “small stuff,” the tasks people couldn’t get contractors to do. But the big stuff didn’t seem to phase him, either.

  Even before I’d moved in, he’d put in Plexiglas to cover the gaping windows in the barn, hauled out tons of moldy hay and farm debris, fixed a balky electrical outlet, shored up sagging walls and floors. His work ethic was simple but rare: attack continuously and ferociously until the job is properly done. I soon nicknamed him “Rocket Man,” because minutes after I’d leave a message on his machine, or with his wife, Holly, his pickup would come flying up the driveway.

  He doted on his fourteen-month-old daughter, Ida, whom he brought along on jobs whenever he could. In fact, one reason he’d become a handyman, he said, was so that he could spend more time with her. Descended from many generations of farmers, Ida toddled all over the farm, passing fearlessly through the barn, among the sheep. She had already logged many hours on snowmobiles.

  “Ida, honey,” I heard Anthony warn one night on the phone, “please don’t eat the shotgun shells. The gunpowder isn’t good for you.” Anthony’s rule for injuries was: “If it’s not bleeding, don’t bother me.” But that was just tough talk. If Ida got too close to a donkey’s rear legs, Anthony would zoom over to pluck her out of harm’s way.

  Like many gifted kids who couldn’t quite fit into the conventional educational system, Anthony was a born teacher. He loved inducting a Flatlander into some country ways—how to read animal tracks or stir the hay feeder, how to shoot safely.

  Like my other neighbors, he shared the conviction that I would need a rifle at some point. “You better have a gun,” the Agway driver told me. “Believe me, there are things that go bump in the night out here, and when one comes after you, your dogs, or your sheep, you don’t want to be standing there with just a flashlight and your bedroom slippers.” He got my attention, since I could hear such things almost nightly, and they weren’t far away.

  Although I was reluctant, the presence of some aggressive feral cats, and those coyotes, convinced me to buy a .22 rifle, just in case. A .22 is a small-caliber gun, used mostly for target practice. Still, it was a gun. In New Jersey, only the bad guys had guns. In Hebron, everybody I liked had one, or several.

  In a former life I’d been a police reporter; I had seen what bullets could do. And I’d promised Paula—no firearms. But it was odd, the difference between herding sheep and owning them. I felt an enormous responsibility for these animals. They faced real dangers here, and there was no one to protect them but me. I told myself nothing was going to hurt them, not on my watch.

  Anthony gave me several lessons, showing me how to hold the rifle and sight it, to always assume it was loaded, to check for unseen buildings or people behind any shot, to use the safety each time and to check the chamber whenever I was done. The seriousness with which he took safety stuck. We drove to a remote junkyard where he set up some targets about a hundred feet away. To my amazement, I shot well.

  I had no intention of using the gun, and no desire to hunt. But I found I also had no qualms about using it if I had to, and I practiced on empty cans at the top of the pasture. Shockingly, considering that the last time I’d used a gun was in basic training with the National Guard, thirty-odd years ago, I hit almost all the targets. Afterward, I put the rifle in its holder and hid it in a closet, stashing the ammo in a cupboard elsewhere in the house.

  WHO KNOWS WHY PEOPLE BECOME FRIENDS? ANTHONY AND I could hardly be more different; yet the friendship we struck up that first afternoon—another gift from my dogs—is one of the most important things that’s befallen me in Hebron.

  Like me, he’s never had a lot of friends, relying on his family and dogs for companionship. Unlike me—and I’m amazed, maybe even envious at his clarity—he sees his life quite accurately, even at so young an age. “I need to work for myself and stay close to my family,” he told me one warm afternoon in early fall. It had taken me a couple of decades to figure that out.

  He’s figured out other things, too. “I’ve got three rules when trouble comes,” he advised me one day when I was, in his words, “freaking out” about some farm crisis or another. He had learned to ignore me when I got excited.

  Anthony Armstrong’s Three Steps:

  Number One: Take your head out of your ass.

  Number Two: Calm down!

  Number Three: Pay attention.

  As somebody who’d spent much of a lifetime with his head up his ass, this seemed like promising counsel. I typed up the rules and taped them to my computer.

  We talked for an hour or two that first afternoon, a rare thing among men. As he realized how late it was and began to pack up the truck, Anthony turned to me. He had heard, he said, that I knew a lot about dogs. He was thinking about getting a “ride-along dog.” His family didn’t think he needed another dog, but seeing the look in his eyes when he talked about Cleo, I knew it would be only a matter of time.

  I hadn’t heard the term before, but I would hear it a lot upstate. “Ride-along dogs” accompany the men in trucks everywhere, as they go to work, go hunting, plow snow, stop for coffee with other men in trucks.

  You see them around Hebron, these proud and lucky dogs, dozing in truck beds or sticking their heads out open windows, working dogs in the most literal sense. They accompany busy but sometimes lonely men and women on tasks that make the world run. Because they are with their human companions so much, they are usually calm and well-trained dogs. They couldn’t be ride-along dogs otherwise, exposed as they are to strangers, tools and noise, new places.

  Anthony was thinking of adopting a dog he’d seen at the Shaftsbury, Vermont, animal shelter, a mixed-breed husky-shepherd puppy. Would I consider driving with him to take a look? In the past few years, I’ve spent endless hours researching, thinking about, and talking with people about their dog choices. It’s an endlessly fascinating topic—why people select the dogs they do, why they love the ones they love—and one with enormous consequences.

  In my experience, dogs get into more trouble because the wrong dog was chosen for the wrong person at the wrong time than for any other reason. These are the dogs left untrained, grown neurotic and aggressive, returned to shelters. Dogs chosen out of impulse, because a kid saw one at the mall or an adult saw one in a movie. Or because parents didn’t realize their cute little Christmas gift would soon become a rambunctious, furniture-devouring sixty-pounder.

  A shepherd-husky mix didn’t necessarily strike me as the best ride-along dog, I told Anthony. Possessed of an independent streak, Anthony bristled a bit. Like many locals, he didn’t believe i
n paying money for a dog. Almost everyone he knew had gotten a dog from a shelter or a neighbor’s litter. He didn’t particularly cotton to purebreds; he thought they were goofy and obnoxious, prone to health problems like allergies and hip troubles, likely to pile up big vet bills. Still . . .

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I told him. “We ought to talk about it first.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s probably a great dog that deserves a home, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right dog for you.”

  The last thing I wanted was to deprive a shelter dog of a good owner, but the dog Anthony wanted would need to possess some very particular traits. This was probably the most important decision in the life of any dog and human, and Anthony, I feared, was on the verge of a common mistake.

  For all the noblest reasons, he wanted to save a spirited puppy—one, the shelter said, that didn’t get along well with other dogs. But a shepherd-husky mix combined two very active, restless breeds, while its future job required, instead, a dog that was patient, genial, and trainable.

  A ride-along dog has to wait quietly for hours in the truck while his human works. He’ll encounter all sorts of strangers every day—people old and young, other dogs and pets, farm animals. He has to stay where he’s supposed to stay, ignoring temptations and intrusions. Dogs love routine, and for Anthony’s ride-along dog, the routine would be constant change and stimulation.

  Give me a couple of weeks, I asked. This could be a great home for the right dog, complete with a devoted owner, a dog-crazy family (Anthony’s wife, Holly, loved dogs as much as he did), and the thing so many dogs crave, company 24/7.

  I started calling shelters and vets, explaining what I needed, describing Anthony. The vets and I all had the same thought: a Labrador, or a Lab mix. Bred to hang out quietly with hunters in forests, hour after hour.

  Because Labs have gotten so popular—and so many are inbred and poorly trained—it’s easy to forget the extraordinary temperament of this working breed. Properly bred and trained, they are good-natured with people, accepting of other dogs, eager to please, capable of great calm. They wouldn’t be much help with my sheep, but I greatly missed my yellow Labs, Julius and Stanley.