I told my herding friends, “I want to be really prepared for my first trial, so I'll feel confident when I go out there.” (they replied, puzzled, “Why? Nobody else does.”) I had been working on my panels for some months. Bonnie could put reasonable sheep through the A or B course very easily now, with with a nice controlled parallel drive along the fence throughout. Sherry told me Bonnie was well beyond the ASCA Started level . . . but I wasn't. Well, tell me something I don't know.

When I finally did, with great trepidation, enter my first trial, I decided to only do sheep, which we knew the best. After all, I didn't know whether I would even like trialing. The sheep, however, were going to be run, not on course A, or B, but . . . C. Unlike the more common A and B, C was a straight run up the middle of the arena, and a figure eight loop around two sets of free-standing panels. In other words, no fences.

Knowing this would be a whole new thing for Bonnie and I, I enlisted Gwen's help, and we decided to build a Course C out in the middle of the open horse pasture at her place, so we could practice for the trial. The only caveat would be, the course would have to be completely assembled before each practice and then completely disassembled afterwards, because the horses would otherwise rub against, knock down, walk on, and destroy the panels while we weren't there, probably injuring themselves in the process, horses being horses.

We picked a lovely big flat area on the top of a hill overlooking the sheep corral and practice arena. I bought four 4 x 8 sheets of white plastic lattice at Home Depot and my ever-forebearing and useful husband stiffened them with specially ripped and grooved boards along the edges. Then, once I had driven them the fifty miles to Gwen's sheep place, we had to get them to the top of the hill. Luckily it was a semi-dry lull in our horribly wet spring weather. Crossing our fingers, we tied them on top of Gwen's game little Subaru, and she climbed straight up the steep grassy hill to the top. Yippee! Now we only had to lay out two forty-five degree angles thirty-five feet apart, sink lengths of pipe in the ground to hold the T posts to which the panels were fastened, and presto!

It took us about four hours. However, at last it was up, and I took Bonnie and sorted out a handful of sheep to give it a baptismal try. Up we climbed, a hundred feet if it was an inch, again, and gave it a shot. My main thought was, boy am I glad I went to this effort, because it's going to take a month of practicing to figure this out. Gwen and I had tried to set up the course to mimic the draw of a trial arena. But the sheep seemed to feel that the first set of panels was the only place where they wanted to light out for home. The second set was, for some reason, much easier.

Bonnie and I fumbled through the course more or less a few times, and then I called it a day. We took the sheep back down the hill, put them away, went back up the hill, again, disassembled the whole shebang, and drove home. It rained for ten days and nothing could be done, but eventually I got out again to my Course C. Climbed the hill, put it all together, climbed down, got the sheep, climbed up again, practiced this time for twenty minutes. It was the same problem, I couldn't figure out how to get Bonnie to gracefully collect the sheep at the exit of the first set of panels. Instead she would race after them, sure they were going to get away, split them, and have to gather them up for the second panel. Ugly, messy, bad. I put the sheep away, climbed back up the hill, disassembled the course as the wind got up and the rain began again, and drove home along the coast with the wind driving horizontal rain across the road.

I came back the next day, determined to solve the problem. A wise stockman once said, “never train your stockdog while carrying a gun.” This, I believe, is to save you from the temptation of cold-cocking yourself with frustration. After the seventh or eighth split-and-chase, when I was reduced to screaming and jumping up and down like a three year old, Bonnie felt so harassed that she let a sheep completely go. That wicked Number Six ewe took off straight downhill with her afterburners on.

I became wholly professional, and screamed no no no Bonnie Bonnie Bonnie and many other pointless things, while Bonnie, stonedeaf, dogged the sheep down the hill to the pen where the rest of the flock was stored. Number Six tried to jump the fence, failed, and then got stuck in the vee between the pen and the arena. Bonnie sniggled her out of there, and harrassed her back and forth along the fence, unable to turn her back to me, all accompanied by my helpful screams from atop the hill, while my four remaining practice sheep stood behind me peering dubiously over the edge.

It finally dawned upon me that Bonnie was not going to call off unless I went all the way down there. She had decided Number Six was coming back with her, and she was a very determined dog. So I gave up trying to stop her, and began shouting “get around, Bonnie! Good Dog!” Thus encouraged, she determinedly peeled the ewe off the fence, blocking her every attempt to get back to the herd, and in the end mastered her, driving her slowly straight up the hill toward my voice. When Number Six finally caught sight of my little band, Bonnie's hard job was over; she ran to join her compatriots. I let her and Bonnie gasp for awhile, they were both utterly blown.

While they were catching their breath, I suddenly remembered how Sherry had started us on panels—for the first few lessons, we had just fetched through them, concentrating on moving with control and rate, before we moved on to Bonnie putting them through the panels without me. I tried it. With me walking through the panels first, Bonnie had no trouble at all with the exit. We walked through a half dozen times like that, without me saying a word. Then I just stepped out of the way and told her “there”, and she drove them through and quietly turned them at the exit, perfectly. Perfectly. Over and over, perfectly, at a walk.

And then I got bronchitis, and spent the trial weekend in bed watching videos. Oh well.