page fifty-five

The Trial

Yesterday's room stood still on a rise and let the wind do the work. This one is out on the hill above it, where the wind is something that gets between you and your dog. Five ewes are let out three hundred yards and more up a field. You stand at the post with a whistle and a borrowed collie, and you may not move: send her round them, bring them down through the gates, drive them round the triangle and pen them, inside the time, while a judge with a notebook watches every yard they stray off the line.

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Phase—
Clock—
The dog—
Your whistle—
Sheep pace—
Spread—
In the pen—
Points—

The faint red ring is how close the dog can come before the sheep move off; inside it they move faster the closer she is. Your whistle travels at the speed of sound and the wind carries it or loses it: downwind it reaches the top of the field, upwind and far off it may never arrive. On a flank the dog keeps circling until you stop her; walking on, she drifts towards the far side of the sheep from you unless you flank her back.

Day
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Every day is a different year, venue, breed of sheep, dog, wind and course.

What is real here and what is not

The course, the commands and the way a dog works sheep are real. The venues are real trial country; the runs, the handlers on the card and the dogs are the day's number.

  1. 01

    The first trials

    The first public sheepdog trial was held at Bala in Merioneth in October 1873, and was won by a Scottish shepherd working in Wales. Within a few years there were trials across Wales, the Lake District, the Dales, the Borders and Northumberland, and by the 1890s the classic course had settled down: a long outrun, a lift, a fetch through a pair of gates to the handler, a drive round a triangle of gates, and a small pen, all against the clock and in front of a judge who took points off for every fault.

  2. 02

    Words and whistles

    Come bye sends the dog clockwise round the sheep and away to me anticlockwise; walk up sends her straight in, lie down stops her, and that'll do calls her off. At a few hundred yards a voice is no use, so each command has its own whistle, and on a windy hill the handler at the bottom of the field can watch a dog stand puzzled at the top, waiting for a whistle the wind took somewhere else.

  3. 03

    Flight and balance

    Sheep have a flight distance: a dog outside it is watched, a dog inside it is moved away from, and the closer she comes the faster they go. A good outrun ends just outside it, behind the sheep, so they lift quietly. A collie's instinct is to get to the far side of the sheep and bring them to her shepherd, which makes the fetch natural and the drive, pushing them away from the handler, the part that shows a trained dog.

  4. 04

    What the page simplifies

    The field is flat and open, there is no shed or single, and the dog never disobeys, only fails to hear. The sheep run from the dog in a straight line, keep together and drift towards the gate they came in by; the dog circles at a set distance and walks on at a set pace. The judge's card is the page's own: twenty points for the outrun, ten for the lift, twenty for the fetch, forty for the drive and ten for the pen, with points taken off by the yard off line, for missed gates, running sheep and split flocks. Time runs three times as fast as yours.

Fifty-five rooms, and one number doing all the work. Today it lets five sheep out at the top of a field and decides which way the wind blows your whistle.