Sometimes things just go backwards, I guess. At least that's how they seem at the moment.

It is the time of year, late summer to early fall, that the yellowjacket wasps begin to get starved for food and therefore aggressive. I always get rather nervous walking in the woods about now. The wasps all die once it starts to rain, come October. Bonnie gets nervous too, since she has been stung badly any number of times. Whenever anything lands on her back, even if it's a leaf, she bites madly at it. For some reason Luke never gets stung, it is only Bonnie and, sometimes, me.

So, last week, when Bonnie came sprinting down the trail back to me pursued by small flying objects, I didn't wait to determine what exactly they could be, I just turned tail and fled too, making remarkable time until I tripped over a branch and fell smack on the knee with the bone bruise from falling with the duck crate on the pavement, six weeks before. Wow, it really hurt, but there is nothing like angry wasps for incentive, and I just bounced up and kept running until they stopped chasing us.

Then I limped the rest of the way home, got in the car, and drove out to Gwen's for a practice. I was taking her the last lonely duck, and I was so anxious to be rid of it, and to practice, that I decided to ignore that knee. This was a mistake.

The next day was my Sherry lesson. My knee had swollen quite a bit, and I had to take a few aspirin to get to sleep that night. Between injuries and family vacations, I had already cancelled a lot of lessons this summer. I wasn't getting a handle on this driving thing, and my lack of progress was bothering me. I would ice my knee when I got home, I figured.

I didn't feel my knee much at Sherry's, but that could have been because I was absorbed in being extremely frustrated. Bonnie was doing something she never did anywhere else: she was simply not getting to head. She would neither go fast enough nor far enough out to turn the sheep in, she just cantered slowly along around a circle just big enough to keep the sheep walking slowly in a smaller circle around me. I could not push her out or speed her up, no matter what I did.

If she wouldn't get to head, she certainly couldn't be set up for a drive. Finally Sherry had me back slowly over to the fence, where the sheep could be stopped, and then had me flank Bonnie between the fence and me, in a kind of forced getting-to-head. It was pretty hot, and we gave Bonnie a water break and brought her back, after which she did get all the way around on the go-bye side a few times. End on a good note.

I drove off feeling completely discouraged. Sherry had told me I had created this with my handling, but I was still puzzled since I had never seen this behavior anywhere else. Was my handling so different there? I wasn't at all clear how to fix it. Boy, did my knee hurt now. In fact my whole leg ached from heel to hip. I stopped at a supermarket and bought bags of frozen corn and packed my leg in them for the three hour drive home.

A week later, my knee was still swollen and black and blue. I hardly had been able to walk, much less work my dog, except a few minutes a day with my goats in their little wilderness, where it is not practical to do anything much except fetch along the trails they have made through the brambles. The doctor told me I pulled a ligament and I should expect to be nursing my knee for at least another couple of weeks.

Maybe it was just bad luck. Or a sign. Of what, I wondered. I felt good and stuck, stymied in all directions. What is that saying, "when one door closes, another opens?" I am still waiting for that other door.