“If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.”

Mark Twain was right. There is knowlege you can't acquire from reading, watching videos, or even from a teacher walking you through the steps and explaining everything personally. Nope. Painful as this truth is, it applies in spades to stock work. Most of what little I know about the subject has been acquired, not by fagging out to lessons week after week, but all by myself with the sheep and the dog, doing things the stupid way over and over until finally, finally, I learned what I needed to.

I am in the holding-the-cat-by-the-tail phase with driving. Having passed through a number of clinics and lessons on the subject without apparently acquiring any more wisdom than I could have more cheaply by staying home, I realized finally that I just wasn't going to learn to drive that way. The only thing left was to go out and be stupid with my dog until I figured it out. I went off to Gwen's and put a bunch of what I imagined were her best, i.e. quietest, driving sheep together.

They might have been, at that. But they were not very. Every time I managed to pull Bonnie "off the top" (bring her from fetch position on the other side of the stock from me to the point where she was pushing the stock away from me), they would light out and run, in whatever direction they were pointing, even if I made Bonnie lie down and watch them go. But most of the time, we never stayed in a driving position, because Bonnie would let them fade back over to me.

Gwen pointed out that one of my biggest problems she could see was that Bonnie deeply resisted going between the sheep and me, on the Go Bye side, and her hesitation gave the sheep the opening to swing back to me, putting them back into fetch mode and me into exactly the wrong place. We weren't going anywhere good until this issue was fixed. While she was telling me this, Bonnie was watching the sheep. They wouldn't settle and stay, and she had to bring them back to us (we were in an open field) over and over.

Once, they managed to get all the way away and fled downhill to the horse water troughs, where the two wiliest ewes hid between the horses' legs, dodging Bonnie's efforts to get them bunched back up again. I watched Bonnie work, without direction, far from me. She solved the problem, got the sheep together and moving back toward me. The two ewes were beginning to split off with the plain idea of veering back toward the horses again, and I cupped my hands and shouted GO BYE GO BYE and Bonnie went bye and cut the ewes off, brought all the sheep up to me. No big deal.

The next day I was bringing my goats down to their pasture when we met a propane truck, very large and very loud, just in the place where there are fences on both sides of the road. Bonnie tried, but couldn't get the goats to pass the truck -- hard to blame them, really -- and we finally turned and took them back to a fork where we could get well away. A typical day's typical challenge to solve.

I had just trimmed all the goats' hoofs, with Ty "helping" push the goats out of the stall to where they could be tied up. A little too enthusiastic -- okay, WAY too enthusiastic -- but it was nice to see his heart was in the right place.

I keep hoping I know what I'm doing and where I'm going. My sister wants to buy a few sheep to graze down her orchard, and I might go in with her on some Navajo-Churros. I've been carding and spinning the beautiful silver fleece I was given, and someday I'll be weaving it into something usable. Right now I just am enjoying picking up the gloriously-colored skeins and breathing in that wooly smell. I'm going to a trial next weekend, probably the last this year. I think about those working Aussies and what I can contribute to keeping them on the planet. I hold on to that stupid cat's tail and wonder when and if I'm going to let go.