Our Dogs Would Not Go Past The Fence Line For Eight Days

Working dogs are not pets. They are colleagues with poor conversation. Ours would go through a hedge, a stream and a bad mood to do their job.

For eight days in September they would not cross the fence line at the top field.

They would go to it, and stop, and stand, and shake. Not bark. Shake. And then they would look back at me with an expression I have never seen on an animal that I did not immediately want to fix.

I walked it. Of course I walked it. There is nothing there. It is a fence, a gate, and thirty acres of nothing, and then the trees.

The sheep would not go up there either. Sheep are stupid, but stupid in a way that is honest about danger.

On the third day I found a smell. That is the only word I have and it is not good enough. It was not carrion — I know carrion, I live with carrion. It was closer to a hot electric motor, and under it something like a wet dog left in a car.

On the fifth day, along the fence, five posts were pushed. Not broken. Pushed, so that they leaned, and the wire was slack, and there was one post that had turned in the ground so that the staples faced the wrong way. Whatever did that came from the tree side and pushed toward the field.

On the sixth day my neighbour rang, which he does about twice a year, and he asked, in a very careful voice, whether my dogs had been "off". He did not tell me why he asked. I did not ask him why he asked. That is how we do things.

On the ninth day the dogs went through the gate like it was nothing, and they have been fine ever since, and it has been three years.

I have never seen anything. I want that on the record. I am not a man who has seen anything.

But I have thirty acres, two dogs, and eight days that I cannot explain, and every time somebody laughs at this sort of story I think about the way those dogs looked back at me.