Once, hanging around Sherry’s ranch as usual, not wanting to get back in my car for the long trek home, I saw a little trail of dust coming down the road. It was an old guy in a funny old golfcart or something, toodling in with a skinny slickhaired little whip of a dog leaning against him. The dog’s name was Fan, I forget the man’s name (standard procedure for me). He had come out to Sherry’s from his place, just to hang out and watch the dogs work, like me.

Fan was an international sheepdog trial champion Border Collie he had recently imported from England for some thousands of dollars. She had no collar on and never offered to do anything but lie at her new master’s feet, from which vantage point she did not once, in the hour I talked with him, take her eyes off the sheep in the distant pens. She was but the latest, he gave me to understand, in a series of similar dogs he imported, trialed for a while in the States, and sold when they bored him. I was impressed by his strange hobby, and his loneliness.

I told him I had seen the sheepdog trials at the Cal Expo Polo Grounds, long ago. I had been astonished and moved at how the sent dogs would flash away over the vast greensward and disappear over the horizon, to reappear a minute later with the sheep. “Polo Grounds,” he sneered. “That’s a tiny course. That outrun would be nothing to Fan here. She can do a mile.”

Months later, invited by a friend, I drove some hours south and east, across two ranges and the San Joaquin Valley, to watch an Aussie trial. Once again I had much leisure to reflect upon the millions of people living in coastal suburbia, knowing nothing about the alfalfa, beans, cherries, corn, cotton, cucumbers, figs, eggplant, cut flowers, garlic, grapes, guavas, kale, lavender, leeks, lettuce, melons, peaches, okra, olives, onions, peas, pecans, peppers, plums, potatoes, prickly pears, oranges, parsley, rice, sugarbeets, tomatoes and walnuts (among about 300 other crops) being produced in such overwhelming quantities just over the hill. Not to mention all the milk, eggs, and meat. May as well be in a whole ‘nother state; it is surely another state of mind.

I pulled into a small ranch’s bumpy driveway, following the directions I’d been given. There was no marker, even as crude as a garage sale sign. Boer meat goats grazed in the front pasture. Behind the house, a few dozen pick-ups and SUV’s were parked on the grass, with people and dogs wandering about. Since the dogs were all Aussies and Border Collies, I guessed I had found the place.

Adjacent to the parking pasture was a runty-sized rodeo arena with some derelict roped-off bleachers. Fan’s outrun would have taken her two ranches away. The judges sat in the bed of a pick-up truck pulled up to the gate. They were already well into the advanced sheep runs. I was hailed by various people I knew and was introduced to others. I felt the presence of separate groups--here was a group of Sherry students, with their Sherry-bred dogs, and over there was a clump of people who seemed to have mostly show-type Aussies, from Southern California, talking about agility and conformation wins.

Then there were the ranchers, who mostly had cattle-bred Border Collies. They didn’t mix with any other group, just leaned against their oversized muddy pick-ups and chewed toothpicks. Maybe I imagined the toothpicks. I could sense various other shadows and factions but tried to concentrate on the dogs in the arena, which was, after all, what I had come to see.

Many of the performances were easy to criticize, even with a novice's eye. A sizeable minority of the dogs just ran the sheep around until told Thank You, which, in case you don’t know, is not an expression of gratitude, in stockdog trial judges. Only a few people did nicely with the sheep. I could see that the smallness of the arena was a drawback with these light sheep, as they got away from dog after dog before they could be set up for the center pen. This trialing business looked awfully difficult.

The next order of events were ducks. Duck herding is sort of comic, although not to the ducks. Problems with ducks seemed mainly caused by two things. The first was, the ducks had a strong tendency to plaster themselves into a corner, close their eyes, and give themselves up to death. This was understandable, but frustrating for the dog and handler, who required them to move. Only a very delicate, skillful team could circumvent this altogether. The second was, ducks are so small, so slow, and the distances so short, it was hard for some handlers to keep from lending their dog a hand, or worse, guarding the fragile ducks from their overeager dog. These strategies never worked.

Then came the cows. They were fresh off the range, and apparently felt pretty disgruntled about it. In fact, they hardly seemed to be dogbroke at all. Cattle hardly ever work as pretty as sheep. Instead of moving in a neat little school, they tend to amble jerkily in an aimless fashion, until they are startled into bolting in random directions, or angered, in which case they stop dead, lower their heads, and look impenetrably stupid. Even when they are moved correctly through the course it is rarely a work of poetry like an excellent sheepdog can produce with sheep.

A cow can cripple a dog for life in a split second. It takes a gritty and smart dog to move cows, which must be intimidated by force of will backed up, if necessary, with lightning-fast bites. I watched this part of the trial with great attention, because, while I was accumulating my little experience with sheep, I did not understand this cow thing at all.

None of the working-bred Aussies had the slightest trouble intimidating cows. When they erred, it was in the biddability department, a few reducing their handlers to futile shouting and even tears of frustration, before being retired in humiliation. This was my first experience of what I came to privately call "over-dogged" handlers. Some of these dogs, obviously tough, enthusiastic, athletic, and bred to be self-thinking and resourceful, with a nervous, less-than-completely-authoritative handler, apparently decided they had a much better idea about where the stock should go, and how fast. I felt a sympathetic humiliation for these handlers. This was nothing like the obedience or agility competitions I had been involved with, where the worst that ever happened was your dog making some error, or leaving the field.

The show-bred dogs were quite different. In general they were obedient but often appeared unfocused. Some were hesitant to get too close to such big dangerous animals. These made valiant feints from a distance, which the cattle found of little interest. A few were brave enough, but lacked some crucial cowdog instinct for self-preservation. One pretty dog launched herself at a stubborn heifer, fastened her teeth in the cow’s nose, and was unsurprisingly flung against the plywood fence. She did not want to play with cows after that.

Some of the best performances were, sigh, from those ranchers’ cattle-bred Border Collies. It was clear that these dogs worked for a living, and knew their cattle. In contrast, the dog which had gotten flung against the fence had been on cattle twice in her life. Few of even the working-bred Aussies lived on cattle ranches. I was sad for the brave and joyous working-bred Aussies whose handlers didn’t know much about cattle, who hadn’t the opportunity to move cattle on a daily basis. That would be Bonnie’s idea of heaven—endless cows.