I was exhausted when I got home. I had been in my car for seven hours that day, much of it on eight-lane freeways filled with double trailer trucks going eighty. Although I had been collecting cool names for dogs for years, by the time we got home her name was Bonnie–a plain, sensible Out West name for an unglamorous ranch dog. Bonnie hopped out of my car, fell in the goldfish pond—all dogs, without exception, fall into my goldfish pond immediately upon arrival at my house—fished herself out without upset, and launched an attack on my sprinkler.

I have raised a few puppies. Bonnie was no different from my corgi puppies in that she learned her basic commands very rapidly, was housebroken in a few intensive days, and spent most of her time sleeping, eating, and getting into trouble. Where she diverged was in her quantity of what stockdog breeders call sand. Or grit. Or heart. Nothing seemed to faze her.

When a pot fell on the floor, or people yelled at each other, situations where all my other puppies—heck, all my other dogs—fled for safety, Bonnie rushed in, hoping she was needed in the crisis. Not long after her arrival, my husband was using the chopsaw in the shop and looked up to see Bonnie helpfully holding the other end of the board. Being “drawn to conflict” is standard equipment on these working dogs, but I had never encountered it before.

And then, there was a distinct division in her ideas about corrections–if I told her to leave something alone, like my shoes, once was enough. If I told her to leave the chickens or the cat alone, she knew in her heart I didn’t mean it seriously. Nothing, nothing, convinced her otherwise about what she classified as Livestock, and she’d be back with her nose up the cat’s butt, or pressed against the coop fence, a minute after I turned my back. No matter that the hens pecked her through the wire, or my irascible cat, used to being Queen Of The Animals, drew blood time and again. It just got her excited.

I had been worried about how Luke, my Corgi, would react to a new puppy. He was aggressive with some male dogs and bullied timid dogs and puppies. In one agility class he chased a dog down and pinned it, snarling; that dog never liked agility again. He snarled at Bonnie too. But she didn’t care. She made appeasing gestures, rolled on her back, licked his nose, crept closer. She didn’t give up and she wasn’t afraid of him, and within a few days, he loved her.

When she was about six months old we were out walking, and the enormous Golden Retriever who had been feuding with Luke for years came bounding out of the underbrush, bent on destroying Luke, whom he outweighed by some seventy pounds. My sweet, deferential puppy swelled up to twice her natural size and tore into him like a demon. She and Luke chased him all the way home.

I started feeling like I had a pretty good dog. She was still leggy and homely, and, for an Aussie, slight. She wasn’t a merle and didn’t have the showy markings, heavy coat, or stocky build of a recognizable Aussie. When we went out in public, people would coo over Luke, who is a beautiful show-type corgi, and ignore Bonnie. She would wiggle and grin until they finally noticed her. “Is that a Border Collie mix?” they would always say.

She’s a stock dog, I would tell them.

“What do you mean . . . stock?” one man asked me. He had been trying to make some associations, like stock car racing, stocking shelves, but “farm animals” wasn’t in the vocabulary list. I stopped calling her a stock dog. I started saying she was an old-fashioned type Aussie. Nobody had heard of it.