The Sheepdog Trial

Lucia Moreno had been in the valley for less than a month when Gwyn Pritchard, chairman of the local farmers' association, appeared at the surgery door with a request that sounded, at first, like a compliment. The judge for Saturday's sheepdog trial had broken his ankle. Would the new vet, who presumably knew a thing or two about dogs, be kind enough to step in?

Lucia knew a great deal about dogs. She could set a fractured leg, spot the early signs of kidney disease and calm a terrified spaniel in under a minute. What she knew about sheepdog trials, on the other hand, would have fitted comfortably on the back of a vaccination card. Still, there is a particular kind of politeness that makes saying no impossible, and Gwyn had it in abundance.

She spent the next three evenings with a rulebook and a pot of strong coffee. The basics were simple enough. Each dog had a set time to run out in a wide arc, approach a small group of sheep without frightening them, bring them back to the handler, drive them through two sets of gates and finally coax them into a pen. Points were deducted for every wobble, every hesitation, every sheep that wandered off to consider the view.

The rulebook, however, said nothing about the rules that mattered. These she learned on the morning of the trial, from Mrs. Bevan, who ran the tea tent and, as far as Lucia could tell, most of the village. "You'll want to be careful with Dafydd Jones," Mrs. Bevan murmured, handing her a cup so strong it was nearly solid. "Won the trophy eleven years running. His dog's getting on now, mind. But nobody's told him."

There were other things nobody had told anybody. Lucia gathered that the Hughes brothers had not spoken since a dispute over a fence in 1998, that the handler from the next valley was to be treated with suspicion on principle, and that a judge who checked her phone during a run would never be forgiven. Above all, she learned that in a community this small, fairness was not an abstract ideal. It was a matter of who would still say good morning to her on Monday.

Dafydd's run came just after lunch. His old collie, Fly, set off beautifully, but halfway through the drive she hesitated, then stopped altogether, looking back at her master with an expression Lucia recognized at once. It was not disobedience. It was pain. Fly was limping, very slightly, on her left foreleg, and she had been hiding it with the stubborn dignity of a dog who has never once let her handler down.

Lucia faced a choice that no rulebook could have prepared her for. She could score the run as it stood and say nothing, or she could walk onto the field in front of the entire valley and tell its champion that his dog should not be competing. She put down her clipboard and went.

Dafydd listened in silence while she examined the leg. The crowd, which had been chatting a moment before, fell so quiet that Lucia could hear the sheep tearing at the grass. "Arthritis," she said at last. "It isn't serious yet, but she shouldn't be running like this. I'm sorry." For a long moment the old man said nothing. Then he bent down, rubbed the dog's ears and said, "That'll do, Fly. That'll do."

The trophy went to a young woman from the next valley, which caused a certain amount of muttering in the tea tent. But on Monday morning Dafydd Jones was waiting outside the surgery when Lucia arrived, with Fly at his side and a dozen eggs in a paper bag. "You'll be judging again next year, I expect," he said. It was not a question. Mrs. Bevan, Lucia later discovered, regarded the eggs as the highest honor the valley could bestow.