I don’t like driving, or so I always thought. To be more specific, I loathe driving. Yet, I quickly got used to driving a five to six hour round trip. At first it was an intermittent event, but when I realized I couldn’t make any progress that way, I began a weekly commute. It was surprisingly peaceful, once I got through Silicon Valley, which I live south of, and passed through mostly rural landscapes. This was the country of my childhood, these endless rolling grassy hills and plains dotted with graygreen oaks. Now the freeways are lined with the soulless new mushroom cities which were sleepy cow towns only thirty years ago. But between and behind them is still range land, green in winter, pale yellow in summer, dotted with beef cattle.

Bonnie would sit outside the Starbucks in the spanking new bigbox shopping center in whatever town, and wait for me to come out with my coffee. On the way there, we were odd and scruffy; on the way back, we were also filthy with dust or mud, depending on the season. In Starbucks they always wished me a great day anyway. And their wishes were usually granted. It was the best day of the week for us.

For I had the strangest feeling when I was working with Bonnie. It was like living something which I had heretofore only watched and yearned for, without knowing it. There was something that happened between me and this dog which, for all the various kinds of training I had done, with so many animals, I had never quite experienced before. But I cannot really explain it. It is elemental. I had a superfluity of leisure, on these solitary road trips, to reflect upon why it felt so different to me, and why it made me feel so oddly estranged from my hobby-herder friends and acquaintances who thought of herding as just another fun doggie sport to try.

Some divergences were obvious. To begin with, unlike agility, obedience, or flyball, controlling livestock is a native activity for Aussies. Stockdogs do not work for tug toys or hotdogs. The work is their reward, and you couldn't provide them with a better one. Further, you cannot teach a dog to herd. They already know how—all you can do is teach them to herd stock in the manner and direction you prefer. Like coonhounds and sled dogs, a stockdog is born, far more than made. My Bonnie knew she was a stockdog long before I did.

Secondly, herding livestock is not, fundamentally, recreational. Stockdog trialing, while an end in itself for some people, is meant to be a test of how useful the dog is to a stockman. Not was, but is. The hobby herder is a very recent and somewhat uneasy addition to this practical agricultural endeavour. Save hunting, herding is more ancient than almost anything else we do with dogs. Pastoralists have always depended upon on their dogs, into the mists of prehistory. I was dipping my toes into the living current of one of the deepest partnerships of humans and dogs, that of shared responsibility for the care of groups of edible animals.

Modern society has achieved an almost total divorce from the production of one's own food. An abiding affinity for sentient beings which you fully intend to murder, dissect, and ingest, seems horrifying to present-day sensibilities, which have divided the domestic animal world into cherished pets and plastic-wrapped boneless chicken breasts. But this horror is a luxury, based on the assumption that as long as we put enough distance between ourselves and how our food comes to us, any suffering inflicted can safely be ignored. And, it presupposes that eating someone is the worst thing that one can do to them. The first is obviously not true, the second is surprisingly ambiguous.

This farmerly feeling of responsibility and affection for sentient food is foreign to one half of me, the urban literate intellectual side, and absolutely native to the other half, attributable to my dairy-farmer maternal grandparents who partly raised me. When I was twenty and living on an experimental organic farm, milking the goats every morning, my grandmother visited the day we butchered the pig, to show us how to make sausage casings out of fresh intestines, washing them out with a garden hose, and stripping off the fat by pulling them through clamped steel knitting needles. Then she helped us make soap from the rendered lard.

My budding stockdog enthusiasm had become an unforeseen link to my childhood, of which the most memorable parts were picking and cutting ‘cots in summer, riding horses along chapparal hillsides, wandering in hayfields with my dog. The hayfields and apricot orchards of the Santa Clara Valley were all covered in asphalt and buildings now. I thought I had finally managed to close the door on that ache. But when I first heard the meadowlarks at Sherry and Audrey’s ranch, a sound I hadn’t heard since I was nine years old, it brought tears to my eyes.