Mike

I think my Mike, my best dog, my main man, is having small strokes. Last night he got up from where he was sleeping beside my chair and couldn't walk straight. He had a hard time getting to the kitchen...and a hard time getting back in from the yard. He listed to one side and just had problems. Now Liz tells me he did the same thing yesterday. I petted him for a while and put him in his crate, where he sleeps....and waited for morning.

Now he is back to what passes for fine in his life. He can walk and eat and sleep.

He is, or was, the most brilliant dog I have ever had. I ended up with him through a bit of serendipity for which I will be thankful all my life. Knowing next to nothing about border collies I bought a pup from a breeder who trialed dogs at the national level. I picked out a little half black and white pup and waited for him to be ready to bring home. When I went to pick him up I was informed that he had already been chosen by a trainer...mistakes made etc...and I had to take a different pup. Later, more indoctrinated into the BC world, I learned that our Mikie had a gay tail, which is considered to signify the wrong attitude, and was probably rejected and my pup suibstituted. Thus I ended up with him rather than the pup I picked, as I was an amateur and probably not going to do much with him anyhow.

Lucky me. Lucky, lucky me. I accidentally got the best pup of the litter. Probably the best pup his father ever sired. Because I knew nothing about training I took him to a professional. I wanted to train him myself, but I wanted her to teach me how. I will tell you teaching a border collie to work with me is the hardest thing I have ever done. They come out of the box crammed with instinct and brains, but they don't necessarily want to do it your way. You have to learn to read stock, read the dog, figure out where you have to place one to move the other. They know more than you do. It is just hard.

Mike lived up to his gay tail too and had an attitude. He also was what is called a "line dog" with more instinct than you can imagine for stock. He wanted to work when he was just a tiny puppy. He worked anything and everything we pointed him at until he went blind about three years ago.

I could go on and on about what a dog he has been and not be bragging. ,he was simply great. The bad things he did, and there were certainly those, were my screw ups. Not that I didn't try, but it was like giving a kindergartener a Maserati and expecting them to drive it. The professional trainer who gave me and him lessons liked him so much she bought his father in hopes of getting another pup like him. No such luck. Because of a prostate infection as a young dog I had to neuter him. So no pups from him. Gael is his half sister by a different dog. Nick is her son, by Mike's father. Both fine dogs. Neither of them with that extra whatever it is that made Mike such a stock dog. Before we knew he was going blind he was so darned smart that he would work cows in the barnyard for me without ever coming out from under the tractors and wagons....he knew in his compromised state they could get him, so he kept himself safe from them. Once we figured out what was going on we let him gracefully retire.

Now he is almost entirely blind and profoundly deaf. He loves me dearly as I do him...follows me as best he can whenever I am in reach. He has to be in his crate when I am outside as he isn't safe in the barns and he frets and paces and drools if he can't find me. It is absolutely heartbreaking to watch such a brilliant dog try to function with hardly any of his senses. For a few years after he retired I used to let him stare and snap at the heifers through the fence...a no no for a stock dog, but it gave him pleasure and didn't hurt them any...just to keep his hand in so to speak. Now he can't even do that any more. He can't see them, and is afraid when he senses them.

I know the end is near. (My family kindly keeps pointing it out to me, as if I couldn't see.) Maybe it will be better for him. Maybe he will get to be somewhere where there are hundreds of compliant sheep with sweeping outruns and pearly fetch gates. Maybe there will be snorty heifers just begging for him to hang off their noses and shake a little sense into them. Maybe he can bust bulls and chew on steak bones every night. I hope so.

It won't be better for me though and I am just selfish enough to want him to stay.