Mr. and Mrs. Dog: Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies

The Parade of Flags and Dogs

156 TheParadeof FlagsandDogs D inefwr Country Park is an eight­hundred­acre estate with a grand manor house and the ruins of Dinefwr Castle looming over what would be June’s qualifying field. I never visited either building. I buzzed right past hundreds of Welsh historic sites. Wales is famous for trout streams, craggy hills, and sublime vistas. I cursed the narrow bridges over the streams and wished I could work the sheep I spotted on the hills. Sheepdog trialing fills up the brain. There’s only enough room left for laughter. When British sheepdoggers come to the States to judge, they get to see: (1) their host’s home, (2) his favorite restaurant, and (3) one tourist attrac­ tion if it’s not more than thirty minutes from the trial grounds. Their pay? Expenses. They do see sheepdogs they wouldn’t have seen. It’s about the dogs. Always the dogs. As soon as the World Trials grounds opened, 210 international handlers traversed every foot of the qualifying courses, trying to guess what this par­ ticular topography would mean to the sheep and the dogs working them. Pre­trial preparation is only somewhat useful—the real thing starts when the sheep are spotted and Mister or Missus Dog leave my feet—but I’d feel a fool if I didn’t study the course. In ten runs since we came to Wales Luke and June had each run well five times and Luke was brilliant once. My handling had been iffy. I’d misread sheep, miscommanded twice, and generally failed to master the flowing gestalt of sheep, course, and sheepdog. Excepting Luke at Hafod Bridge, I hadn’t done right by my dogs, and even at Hafod Bridge I should have The Parade of Flags and Dogs 157 anticipated Luke’s decision to run up the wrong side of the Maltese. We were lucky my lapse didn’t cost us the trophy. Sometimes pressure narrows my focus and I’m free to take chances I usually don’t dare. Usually I need a GPS to find my buttocks with both hands. At the Llandeilo Rugby Club’s makeshift RV camp, the Italian woman I’d met at Hafod Bridge told me her camper was full of water and offered me a glass of grappa. Upstairs in the club I collected my goody bag with of­ ficial vests, car passes, badges, program, rule books, gimmee cap, and other tchotchkes too numerous to mention. We Americans sat at a long table swapping adventure yarns and devouring Welsh cakes. In the late afternoon, we migrated into the tiny village’s central car park: two hundred handlers, half again that many dogs, and Llandeilo’s rush­ hour commuters trying to start home without running over a sheepdog. For a surprise, it started to rain. After we milled around the car park for an hour, trial officials sent us down Prince Street, a twenty­foot thoroughfare with cars squeezing through in both directions while spectators overflowed the narrow side­ walks. “Oh, what a handsome Collie. Can I pet him?” It rained harder. Some spectators had been waiting here for hours. Not much excitement in Llandeilo, I guess. With excuses in many languages, we handlers eased our dogs along. Mustered into a cobblestoned square, we formed national teams. We Yanks wore bright red World Team jackets. (Team Germany had the cool­ est team jackets, though Sweden’s were a close second.) It rained harder. Television cameras eyed us glassily. Sound men got tangled in dog leashes. Cameramen lay belly­flat on wet cobbles for close­ups of drenched Collies licking their fur. At long last, the drum major bellowed and the bass drum thumped and we were, in a rag­tag and intensely doggy fashion, parading. We marched alphabetically—Austria, Australia, then Fiona Robert­ son, Canada’s sole representative, carrying her maple leaf flag. The United 158 mr. and mrs. dog States and Welsh teams brought up the rear. Clots of handlers and sheep­ dogs proceeded down Prince Street as spectators cheered and applauded each national team. More television, more cameras. More rain. Llandeilo is no metropolis, but I swear there were five thousand people on balconies or spilling off the sidewalks into the street, cheering louder than the drumming rain. Our team captain, Alasdair MacRae, waved the American flag. Alasdair had removed his rain slicker in honor of the occa­ sion and...