All my initial lessons were in the round pen, which was maybe fifty feet across. In Sherry’s hands, a keen, instinctive dog like Bonnie would have been out of the round pen and on to more challenging work in ten lessons, max. But the combination of my absolute ignorance and awkwardness, and the fact that for the first months we only had a lesson every couple of weeks, with some big gaps for vacations and rain, meant that our stay in the round pen was interminable. We started in early fall, but winter was passing before we graduated to the arena.

During this time I got over being afraid of doing something hopelessly wrong, since I had pretty much covered that--including falling over backwards in the mud and having the sheep run over the top of me. I was finally starting to be able to see that when Bonnie got up to the lead sheep’s eye, and it turned its head toward me, this was what Sherry meant by the dog ‘getting to head’, and Bonnie would automatically spin and go the other way to turn the lead sheep on the other side. I began to be able to see the difference, in the sheep and the dog, between “square flanks” (a pivot and return on the same arc behind the stock) and “cutting in”, which pushed the sheep into me. When I could make her get out far enough, Bonnie would stop wearing back and forth restlessly and walk calmly behind the sheep. She too had relaxed some, and no longer moaned and shivered if she had to wait for another dog to work. Well, not as much.

I knew Sherry was waiting for Bonnie to reliably stop the sheep on the fence, lie down upon command, and let me come through the sheep and grab her, i.e. the first primitive ‘call off’. Without this, a dog could run amok in a large enclosure, and have no way of being stopped. It took a long time mainly because I didn’t know what Sherry was trying to teach me to teach Bonnie. But slowly, I became aware that I knew what I was doing, at least in the round pen, and I was getting a little bored. Bonnie had been getting bored a good while before that.
I arrived one day good and determined that Bonnie would hold her sheep calmly and lie down. And she did. Sherry opened the gate and said, “ready?”

Not really! Rainfall was 300% of normal that year, and much of the arena was a three inch deep lake. I waded out into it with my dog, heart beating hard. My horizons, so suddenly expanded, blurred, and I lost all sense of what I was doing. Bonnie caught my panic. She pushed the flock past me and one split off and headed back to the take pens. I didn’t even miss it until I saw my dog dashing away, fetching it back before I could even grasp what Sherry was yelling at me about. Everything felt terrifyingly boundaryless.

We slid around in the mud, and Bonnie settled and kept the sheep together, and I thought, gee, I’m actually herding! In the round pen, no matter what the dog does, the sheep cannot get away anyway. But out in this vast arena, nothing was keeping the sheep with me except the will and skill of my dog. I was astonished and proud, not of myself (all I was doing was walking backward, although this was something of an accomplishment of itself, in all the mud), but of Bonnie, who, I could finally see, was simply keeping the flock gathered and to me, without any effort or command on my part. And she was a happy dog.

Now that we were out in what I considered to be the real world (the arena), Sherry began teaching Bonnie and I, piece by systematic piece, to correctly pen and unpen sheep, how to “take a walk” with a group of sheep, how to make an outrun and pick up a small flock of loose sheep, and, most of all, how to trust each other. Stockwork is not obedience with sheep added. The goal is a dog which takes responsibility for managing your stock the way she knows you want her to. No one, not even a dog, learns responsibility without being given it.

“Trust and dare your dog”, Sherry would say. She meant, it is not you who controls the sheep. That’s your dog’s job. The captain gives the orders and the sailors sail the ship. You cannot guard the sheep from your dog, constantly criticize and pick at your dog, or move the sheep yourself, and expect your dog to take responsibility for his end of things. Just as you must trust that your dog knows how to control livestock better than you could ever do it yourself, he must also learn to trust that you won’t stupidly make him lose his stock by giving him the wrong orders and then yelling at him when the sheep get away. To dare your dog was to give him room to make mistakes and correct them himself, or get corrected if he didn’t.