In the fall, Sherry held another weekend clinic. Bonnie and I were in quite a different place than at our first clinic the previous spring. Instead of a wild sheep ride with the most dogbroke sheep, Bonnie managed the lighter sheep easily and quietly. When the cattle were needed, Sherry asked for a volunteer to go out and bring them in from the field. When she didn’t get one, she cast a considering eye over the assembly and said, “Kay and Bonnie.” We gathered them at the other end of the ranch, brought them in, and gate-sorted them as required. Bonnie hadn’t seen cattle for months, but completed her job without fuss.
On sheep, we began working on getting the hang of the actual ASCA Started course. This is a pathetically easy little enterprise, in which you and your dog remove the four or five head of stock from a pen on one side of the arena (or lift them from that end) and walk them to the far corner, where the stock are supposed to go through an opening between two pieces of fence which are parallel with the back fence of the arena. These are the dread Panels. Then they are supposed to move along the back fence of the arena, hang a right (or left, depending on the version of the course), go through another set of panels a great deal like the first set, and then go back to be repenned. An experienced handler could probably ace this course after working a nicely-bred young stockdog a few weeks. But this is me we’re talking about.
Bonnie knew how to gather, fetch, and how to pen and unpen. She knew left and right, slow down, stop, walk in, hold ‘em, and quit. That was her basic repertoire. You can do a lot just with those skills, but at this point, they all involved me as her focus and balance point. The panels in the Started course are the very beginning of changing the focus to the stock alone—the first baby steps of the Drive.
Although you can qualify in Started just by backing up around the course with the dog holding the stock to you, it looks considerably classier if your dog can move off-balance to you and push the stock through the panels without you going through them—and even better, if your dog can do a decent parallel drive down the fenceline. That would be a loose sandwich: first the fence, then the stock, then the dog, then you, all moving in more or less parallel (except the fence, which normally stays where it is).
I would hate to have a video of me trying to learn to do the panels.
The first thing, once you’ve got your stock out of the take pen, is to aim the lead sheep’s head toward the space between the panels as you progress toward them. I was taught to do this by directing Bonnie Go Bye or Way t’Me, and saying There when the sheep were pointed in the right direction, whereupon she would turn in and push the stock in that direction. I would be watching my dog to see if she was taking the flank correctly, and my sheep would end up against the panel, where they would stop and look blank (sheep always look pretty blank). Or, I would carefully watch the sheep and finally look down to see my dog behind my knees, looking apologetic and confused. Or, I would with great dexterity and concentration keep both dog and sheep in view and walk smack into the panel myself. Occasionally the sheep would actually go through correctly, but I had the strong feeling that this could be attributed to Sherry, from her vantage point atop a post, yelling Go Bye! Way t’Me!, or Bonnie’s taking matters into her own paws, or perhaps, just coincidence.
After a few more lessons on panels, I got to the point where the sheep would go through most of the time, but it was a graceless exhibition on my part. I still didn’t know how to get away from my sheep quickly enough and far enough that my dog had a place to move to, between me and the sheep. The sheep would naturally try to hide in my shadow, and my dog would fade farther and farther out and ahead of me, trying to see them, until finally she turned them in to me and we had to start all over again.
It took me a very long time to figure out how to follow Sherry's directions, which were, when things got out of balance, to let my dog flank around me and stop the sheep while I moved out of the way, instead of trying to juggle the positions of the dog and the sheep. When I remembered to just let Bonnie deal with the sheep herself, everything fell into place naturally. She was so, so much better at it than I was.
Bonnie had very early completely grasped the idea of sheep-are-to-be-put-through-panels, and it was frustrating for her how much I just plain got in her way. One of her least loveable traits is her fingernails-on-a-chalkboard bark when she is thwarted in some way; I was hearing it a lot. I longed for a breakthrough, when all the pieces would fall into place for me and I could simply be in the right place at the right time. I mean, how hard could it be?