After the Silver Bullet I felt lousy. I had let down my dog by my inability to think of my feet and re-strategize, by my lack of a plan. I was already feeling blue because of George harping on how I should change dogs in order to progress. I decided to go back to Sherry's for a lesson and see if I could create a better program for myself.

Sherry is a far, far drive, an all-day venture, but she has at least three big advantages over George, in terms of what I needed right then. One, she is a very structured trainer. One masters skills one at a time in a very specific way. Second, she is an enormously experienced trialer, the most successful ASCA trialer of all time. Third, she is never, in a million years, going to tell me I need to go buy a Border Collie. I needed structure, I needed trialing advice, and I needed support. So off I went.

I realized that the days of fagging out to Sherry's every week were over. I could not afford it, the planet couldn't afford all that gasoline burned up either. I had to make every lesson count for as much as ever I could, because I was not going to be able to get out there more than once a month. Therefore I took a notebook with me, determined to write down as much as possible, and then (more difficult) remember to read it over and over, and take notes on my progress at each practice. In other words, focus.

Just as I supposed, Sherry did have a quite exact plan for me to follow at home. Although Bonnie had improved some on her short flanks, it wasn't nearly enough. And her deficits in gathering and fetching were long over-due to be firmly addressed. Too, her ability to hold stock properly in front of me, essential to setting up a drive, had deteriorated.

Because I only have one practice place with a substantial flock of sheep, and Sherry told me I should work with a big group to make sure Bonnie had reason to flank correctly each way, it took a few days to get there, but when I did, I took my notebook with me. After each break I sat down and wrote about how each bit of practice went. It was surprisingly helpful.

I saw how I would get distracted by fooling around doing obstacles instead of sticking to the basics. I saw that if I overworked my dog in the heat — it was a beautiful but muggy spring day — she stopped thinking well under the pressure of me trying to push her past her bad habits. After a soak in the horse trough and rest in the shade, she did much better. And re-reading my notes from my lesson kept refreshing my memory about my own bad habits, such as trying to stop the sheep myself instead of making Bonnie rate properly, and cueing my dog with my stick instead of my voice.

I decided to actually set a goal for myself: to get Bonnie's ASCA Started titles in sheep and ducks this summer. Not a terribly ambitious goal, considering she has already qualified in started sheep twice and ducks twice, which is all you need. The reason I didn't have those titles yet was only that I signed up For Exhibition Only at her first trial. In a way it was a good thing, because now I would get to practice simply trialing, without the pressure of reaching for Open yet. That's certainly another thing I need: practice in just going out into the trial arena and continuing to think, at the same time.

Meanwhile, I am shopping for a milk goat, a few more meat goat does, a buck for the does I have . . . and a puppy. Which I might have found.