Bonnie and I survived our first stockdog trial. After having to bail on my first trial because of bronchitis, I thought pretty hard about trialing at all. I've learned that I often get sick because my body is trying to assist me in making a decision my mind is unable to. In the end, I entered again, despite my ambivalence, but I tried to hedge my bets as much as possible. I only signed up for one class in each of the the four trials held that weekend, three sheep and one ducks, and did them all For Exhibition Only, which means that I would get a score sheet but my runs would not count toward an ASCA title or merit points. They were "just practicing" runs. I hoped these measures would contribute toward a positive experience.

Being in Started means you exert a tremendous effort to get to an early morning handlers' meeting (I left my house at 4:30 a.m.), after which you sit around for hours doing nothing, because the beginning dogs are normally run last. It was all working-bred Aussies and Border Collies, and almost everyone there had been trialing for at least a decade; there were two or three greenies like me. I felt strangely sad and distant, although I couldn't eat anything. I sat with my dog and breathed, and remembered a sentence from one of Dana Mackenzie's articles (she happened to be judging sheep that day): "your training attitude should always be, 'it's you and me, dog, against the world.'" That's what I went into the arena with.

People say they get very nervous but I wasn't nervous. I had no sense of an audience, I was too focused on my sheep. We walked them around the panels like we always practiced, and put them away like we always practiced. I made the same mistakes I make in practice too, sometimes letting myself get between my dog and the sheep while doing a parallel drive, and not always letting my dog head them when they got too far away. The sheep were plenty light, but Bonnie had them. In three minutes I was done, it was all over. I thought, maybe I could eat breakfast now. It was one-thirty.

After that first run, I saw it was possible to trial without disaster, and began to look about me and feel more normal. I watched the Post-Advanced dogs, working so far out in the field that whistles would have been pretty handy. California being one of the most formidable ASCA stockdog trialing areas, I saw some truly exemplary runs. I had to keep steering my mind away from comparing myself to people who had been training and trialing for many years. But everyone was kind, everyone wished me luck, and the atmosphere throughout was one of camaraderie, genuinely congratulatory when anyone did well, genuinely commiserating when things went differently.

Which was good, because, in my afternoon sheep run, we lost a sheep after the second panel. Bonnie panicked and went after it at a flat-out sprint. I ran after her screaming No, Lie Down! and before the poor sheep hit the fence at the other end, she did, thank God. I looked back but the judge hadn't excused me, so I went ahead, gathered up the sheep again, and completed my run. Sherry was setting sheep for Started and she looked over the fence at me as I put my sheep away and commented, "you went back and cleaned up the problem you made, that's the right thing to do." I felt marginally better.

I had packed all sorts of miscellaneous food, not knowing what I would want to eat, but I was glad that instead of any of it (tapioca pudding!) I bought the steak barbecue dinner, cooked by Boyce Baker. I'm not much of a carnivore, but that steak made me reconsider. I sat down next to Dana and she asked me how my first trial was going. I recounted my awful second run. "But you probably didn't see it," I said. She smiled. "I videotaped it. Want to see?"

"No!" But she told me that she had found that people can't remember how their runs really happened, and it probably wasn't anything like as bad as I thought it was. So I watched it, and she was right, it wasn't the kind of run that makes you want to cover your eyes, it just had a bad spot.

Because I am both idiosyncratic and not rich, I slept that night in my backpacking tent in a field on the ranch. It was noisy—I was next to the duck pond and while the ducks weren't there, the frogs were. And the coyotes sang. And something like a midnight mockingbird wouldn't shut up either. Whenever I opened my eyes, I could see Bonnie's silhouette, lying across the threshold watching vigilantly through the netting, occasionally growling under her breath, at what, I have no idea. It wasn't restful for either of us.

At dawn, it began to rain. Slow and warm at first, but getting seriously windy and wet as the day progressed. The E-Z-Ups flapped dangerously, the sheep got lighter (how could they get any lighter?) the ducks felt refreshed and full of new ideas for thwarting dogs, and the cattle did not seem to care. They were sweet, calm cattle; I timed most of the cattle runs and only the dogs who couldn't bear a walking cow had problems with them.

My single duck run was about the last run of the whole weekend. Bonnie had worked ducks exactly three times previously, but she seemed pretty handy at it, so I thought I'd give it a try. We got the batch of ducks with the lone ranger in it, the one who dove for the Y chute after the first panel, practically running under the dog, and then played hide and seek there until time ran out. Bonnie tried her damndest to pry him out. Once, inside the chute, she was so frustrated she pinned his neck with her paw and seemed likely to pick him up and just carry him to the other ducks. I think the judge missed this little incident, but right then I realized that we were going nowhere, the duck was going to win. So I called her off and finished the run with four ducks, picking up the rogue duck at the repen. The comment on my score sheet was essentially "you should have done that earlier." Still, it was a qualifying, even a placing score.

I had gone to the trial with three goals: to control our stock, to not be horribly humilated, and to get to the end of the weekend. I thought, all in all, Bonnie and I had been a success, our first time out. Three of our runs had been decently qualifying, and something I had not expected happened as well: I had a great time.