For those who don't know, the Silver Bullet is a stockdog trial put on by Boyce and Sherry Baker every April since the dawn of recorded time. I have managed to miss it somehow every year until now, and even then, my nephew's Bar Mitzvah was on the Saturday, so I could only come on Sunday. Yes, I'm still Catholic, it's a long story. I have a Pagan Wicca sister too. But hey, it's my family.

Not to drag out the suspense, I sucked at the Bullet. It was not my dog's fault. Bonnie did what I told her.

First of all, it was supposed to rain. It was raining at four a.m. when I was feeding by flashlight and packing my car. It was raining in big misty swathes as I crossed the summit of the coast range in the dark, but by the time I came down the Altamont Pass it was full light and there were only puddles. When I pulled in to the trial field it was a glorious cold morning with great pink cumulus clouds wheeling overhead. It never did rain again.

Perusing the run order, I could see that my chances of being called simultaneously for my duck run and my sheep run were pretty good. That made my stomach hurt even worse. I had not signed up for cattle, which was probably good, since the advanced cattle were wised up from the day before, and if a dog wasn't totally confident, they would sull up in the corner or even chase the dog off the field. If the started cattle were better, I never saw it, since by that time I was nervously hanging around for the sheep and duck arenas.

Remember this is the third trial I've ever entered. The previous two, I was able to see my runs coming up, and take my dog aside for some quiet time, to get centered. Somehow I couldn't figure out how to do this, there was a lot of switching of run order, and before I quite knew what was happening my sheep run was called.

I watched the sheep being pushed out of the pen. They didn't want to go. That was about when I got a bad feeling. I sent my dog, but she wasn't veering out, she was going straight for them. I dropped her. That was good, about the last good thing I did. She was too close to send her again, so I should have just called her back and started over. But instead I told her to walk up. I should have waited to reposition myself so the sheep would have an obvious opening to head toward, but I forgot to do that.

The sheep were already pressed against the fence, and Bonnie, walking up, split them. She chased one down and I dropped her again. Nothing was going right. Now the sheep were really tweaked. Bonnie got them headed toward me but they were not going to slow down, so I sent her ahead to head them. She stopped them on the fence and I walked ahead and they pelted past me. She headed them on the fence again, and so around the fence we went. We did the whole course that way, without a describable fetch. In three minutes we were through. We ended up with all the course points and about half the control points; I had never let my dog really work. If I had made only a couple fewer stupid errors I would have qualified, but I don't know that I would have felt so great about it. We didn't deserve to qualify.

I hadn't really recovered from this experience when someone yelled "Started Ducks! Any Started Ducks!" and we were in the duck arena. I had been watching the duck runs and there were a lot of messy ones. These were not forgiving ducks, that is, they were about like ducks usually are. Bonnie did her take pen perfectly. She had them headed up and through the first panel without much problem, but then one duck broke back. I remembered the last time this had happened, so instead of trying to fetch the lone duck to the rest, I took them all to the single and started back up again. This time we managed a successful cross drive. Once through the second panel they just about took wing heading home, and Bonnie automatically faded out wide to head them, which should have worked. By now they were in the far corner of the line of take pens, whereas my pen was at the other end. Bonnie pulled them out of the corner nicely, but as she was bringing them to me, one scooted into a gap at the bottom of one of the other pens and disappeared. I had no idea what to do about that, so I just put the rest away.

This turned out to be a qualifying run, just barely. However, it seemed to me that about half of the nearly twenty started runs didn't qualify at all, so I didn't feel so bad.

It is a strange feeling, out there trying to act competent. When things went south I didn't think to stop and reassess, I just bumbled through in a way I doubt I would ever do all alone with no one watching. My dog was frustrated with me and I didn't understand why the sheep were so upset, even though it was all about how I was keeping everyone tense and confused. I forgot pretty much everything I'd been taught.

One thing I forgot was how long ten minutes is. There's plenty of time to change your strategy, if you have the presence of mind to do so. Which I didn't. It's odd, I feel very calm when I'm out there, in a sort of eternal now that seems set apart from the rest of time. But I'm not calm, in reality I'm only half there. I wasn't reading my sheep or my dog the way I do at home.

I guess you call these "learning experiences." I came away from the Bullet with a duck leg and a determination to do right by my dog in future trials, if ever I could learn how to do so.

I had a hard time watching the other runs, because I was too nervous, but I did observe that the many Border Collies there did neither better nor worse than the Aussies. But they were very distinguishable by their style. They did HUGE circles, totally unnecessary circles often. Aussies lay down, Border Collies flattened into coiled springs. However, both green Aussies and green Border Collies had a propensity to go haywire and crash their sheep. The worst wrecks were all Border Collie wrecks, I don't know why. There were also beautiful runs by both breeds, although the crowning sheep run of the day was by the lone Kelpie, just a textbook run of clarity and control. This was the very same dog who ignored the geese and was afraid of the goats at the AHBA ranch trial. Here she was in her glory. That was nice to see.