I had been occasionally emailing Bonnie’s breeder Audrey about what I was doing with Bonnie. She had never replied much. But this time, when I wrote her my experiences with the Hobby Herders, she called me on the phone. “Don’t go to those people any more,” she said. “They’re going to ruin your dog.”

Ruin my dog?

“They’re just AKC people. They don’t know anything about training real working dogs. You handle a real stockdog like what you have, the way they do, obediencing them around, she’ll sour on you—she’ll either quit on you, or get mad and take it out on the sheep. You’ll ruin her. You going to drive that far, may as well come out here and get lessons from Sherry. She’ll help you.”

So, back I went, almost exactly a year later, through the ranch lands and vineyards. Sherry is Audrey’s daughter. She is the one with the two ASCA Supreme Working Trial Champions. She is a slight, tanned, unexcitable woman who looks like she could, regretfully, punch somebody in the nose if she had to. She has that country-western twang in her voice, and answers the phone “Yeah?” which can take you aback until you get used to it. She lived on the ranch too, with her family, in an old doublewide trailer. Outside the trailer was a long line of concrete floored dog kennels, filled with Bonnie’s relatives. When they caught sight of me, they all started barking with deafening enthusiasm. Sherry whistled once through her teeth and they all fell silent, instantly.

“Gotta sort some sheep first,” Sherry said. She let a dog out of a kennel, a plain-looking blackish Aussie. There were various pens of sheep along the short side of a vast arena. She would open a gate, the dog would slip in, remove the sheep from the pen, and hold them in a clump at the gate while Sherry let a few back in. Eventually she had all the sheep in a different configuration than in the beginning, and a large flock in the arena. She hardly had spoken to the dog. Now she turned and walked all the way across the arena, a distance which looked like a quarter mile.

She didn’t look back or say a thing, but the dog had the sheep all gathered up and quietly following her. It was like watching a couple of old carpenters roll joists. She turned them all loose in the pasture, came back, and the dog moved another small bunch into the round training pen. “That’ll do, Jig,” she said, and Jig ran off, leaped into a water trough, sank down until she was completely wet, jumped out, and went back to her kennel.

“How tough are Bonnie’s feet?” Sherry asked.

I said, “Gee, pretty tough, she spends most of the time outside . . .”

Sherry said, “Well, we’ll just have to see.”

In Sherry’s round pen, Bonnie acted exactly the same as before. She circled the sheep madly. Sherry was utterly calm. Apparently this is what green Aussies do. She had a long bamboo pole, and whenever Bonnie came in too close to the sheep she would reach over and give her a good poke with it and say ‘Get Out!’ Bonnie would veer out and Sherry would say, ‘Good girl!’ Bonnie never stopped running the whole time. “Look at that, she heads just like her daddy,” Sherry said. “And she’s grouping well. She’s on ‘em all the time.”

I couldn’t tell what was going on at all. Heading? Grouping? It was very hot, the sun beat down on us remorselessly.

Sherry said Bonnie rolled back on her hocks nicely on her turns, and seemed quite biddable. “Cute little girl,” she commented. “Here, you try it.” She handed me her bamboo pole. “Back up straight. That’s it. Step left. LEFT! Back up straight! Keep moving, step right. . . make her get out! Hold your pole up. UP!” It was like being in a washing machine with sheep, except more difficult. I quickly lost my always-tenuous grip on the difference between left and right, but no matter, if I didn’t go the right way Sherry just shoved me there. In ten minutes I was completely exhausted. And my dog had run the surface of her pads right off her feet.

I stayed for hours, watching Sherry methodically train dog after dog. They were all boarders, there for job training. None were as good as Jig (Sherry considers Jig the best dog she has ever had). One was afraid to get into the holding pen and move the sheep out. She was gentle and coaxing with this dog, although she was tough on the others. “He’s a show dog, but his owner wants him to get some working titles, so . . .” she shrugged. There was one little Border Collie who Sherry was “putting sixty days on”, headed for a job working a stockyard, but the rest were all Aussies, Bonnie’s kind of Aussie, plain dogs with short coats and serious expressions.