Free My Life in Dog Years by Gary Paulsen

side ditch, one after the other, to clear it out carefully and make certain the water was running correctly, then on to the next ditch. I stood leaning on the rake, my mouth hanging open. Josh had actually figured it out quicker than I had the first time. And when the last ditch was running and too much water was coming—flooding out over the end—Josh studied the situation for a moment, then dug a cross ditch that made the water circle back into the ditch.
    So many similar things happened that I thought maybe he was some kind of odd case—not normal even for a Border collie. When we had people to the house he would try to get them all in one room, gently pushing them into a group with his shoulder—itwould take him thirty minutes to move a small child from one room to another—and I thought it might be some perversion of the herding instinct. But it wasn’t that so much as it was the fact that he simply wanted to see them all, watch over them. When somebody went to the kitchen or the bathroom he would accompany them if possible and watch over them until they came back, and then when it was time to leave he would escort each of them to their car, wait until they were gone and then escort the next one. He was, I believe now, merely being polite— trying to be a good host. Understand that I’ve had hundreds of dogs and loved them and, I hope, been loved by them, and I’ve been in God knows how many different kinds of situations with them, but I had never, ever seen anything like Josh. I half expected him to come out of the kitchen with a tray saying, “Canapés, anyone?”
    I thought I should learn if he really wasunique and so one summer four years ago I went to the international Border collie field trials in Sheridan, Wyoming.
    It was absolutely astonishing. Had I not seen it myself, had somebody written of it in a book, as I am trying to do now, I do not think I would have believed it.
    A man would stand in one place and send a dog out half a mile to where some sheep stood, and following whistles, and sometimes gestures, the dog would bring the sheep back through gates, around in a circle by the man, then into a small holding pen—all without making a sound and without ever biting (called “gripping”) or touching a sheep, using only eye contact and body language. That was incredible enough, but another thing was in some ways more incredible, and that was the behavior of the dogs themselves.
    I have been to sled dog races where there were hundreds of dogs and if two or three ofthem got loose—which inevitably happened— there would be an uproar—barking and snarling and most often fights or attempted fights. The dogs had to be kept tethered and watched closely.
    All the collies were loose. There were hundreds of them, and I never saw a leash or a pen. Nor did I ever see a fight or even hear a bark. It was a hot summer day and a large stock tank had been brought in and filled with water. As each dog finished his work he (or she) would go to the tank, jump in, submerge until only eyes and nose showed, and stay that way for a few minutes, until he had cooled down. Then he would jump out and catch up with his master, who was by then a hundred yards off drinking lemonade and talking with other dog owners, and he would stop and sit by his owner’s leg and look up and listen to the conversation.
    And they do listen. All the time. To
all
talk.Josh has come to know dozens of individual words. To name just a few:
horse, mare, cow, truck, car, walk, run, bike, Dairy Queen
(also the initials
DQ), deer, cat, dog, sub sandwich, turkey sandwich, hamburger, pancake
(he
loves
blueberry pancakes),
gun
(he hates guns),
thunder
(the only thing I’ve ever seen truly terrify him—he comes to sit in my lap when it thunders),
fence, elk, moose, bear, blabber
(a kind of candy I sometimes share with him),
telephone, bug
(he sometimes studies bugs as they crawl along the ground—never bothers them, just walks along studying