Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 3, 1991 TAG: 9103060024
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN SCHROEDER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Donald McCaig's new book defies categorization. It is at once about Border collies, sheep dog trialing, traveling abroad, Scottish agriculture and history, and personal history. It is non-fiction yet rich with plot, character, tension and resolution. As did his well-received novel "Nop's Trials" seven years ago, "Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men" reveals McCaig's wondrous perception about dogs.
McCaig, a Highland County writer/sheep farmer, recounts finding himself middle-aged and regretful, certain that he'd failed his Border collie. "I'd made stupid, willful mistakes training Pip and my blunders showed every time Pip ran out on the trial field. Because I'd urgently wanted control of a keen young dog I'd downed him each time I was unsure and destroyed his natural rhythm . . . The miracle is that Pip worked at all - that we had any instants of clarity."
Reversing the migratory patterns of his Scottish grandparents, McCaig set out on a three-month pilgrimage to Scotland. He wanted to find a young Border collie, to watch the master sheep dog trialers at work, to learn their tricks, "I would," he writes, "begin again."
Setting out from Heathrow Airport in a rented Ford Fiesta with a dog kennel and high hopes, McCaig traveled about Scotland staying with dog-trialing friends and casting his eye about. He learned a few things about Scots and their dogs: that Border collies are dear to Scottish hearts as well as their purses; that Scots don't speak freely of their dogs' faults or of their communion with their animals; that they don't welcome the idea of their best dogs going stateside. He began to doubt himself. "I had to believe that the right bitch would call out to me. But I felt a babe in the woods, depending on the Scots' restraint, their unflagging courtesy. That was what woke me in the middle of the night, worrying."
Along the way McCaig offers up nicely drawn scenes of the Scottish countryside: hills furrowed "like a giant child had dragged his fingers down them"; sea locks and firths; heather and gorse and mist, which, he writes, imparted a dreamy quality to all his photographs.
He ponders the relationship between dog and human, refines for his reader just how working dogs and working men must connect. "Learning a dog's world view, altering it [within bounds], accepting a dog's understanding as sometimes more reliable than a man's . . . [the] rare dog handlers who, by gift or necessity, become truly dangerous inhabit a reality most of us can scarcely imagine - every day they share the thoughts, habits, tics and inspirations of a genuinely alien mind . . . "
And the eminence? An honest soul that shines clearly in the dog's eyes. The right ancestry. The communion of mutual understanding and respect. McCaig found the potential for it in Gael at the Dalrymple trial. His account of watching her work sheep and his ensuing purchase assumes the best qualities of fiction.
But the finest writing in the book occurs at its center, in McCaig's dream-vision account of Sirrah, the Border collie immortalized by the 18th-century Scottish writer/farmer, James Hogg. After reading Hogg's poignant telling of Sirrah's life, McCaig imagines an interview in Heaven with the eminent black dog. Working sheep with a "ferlie" shepherd, Sirrah waits for Master Hogg to fetch him. "I don't know that I have been happier since I met Mr. Hogg, but it was he who gave me my soul," Sirrah states.
If McCaig commits any sins here they are minor stylistic ones. Faced with the task of providing a potentially diverse readership with the technical dog-trialing information it needs, McCaig occasionally does so awkwardly. He is unafraid of stopping his narrative dead in its tracks - launching headlong into a general description of, say, televised sheep dog trials - then returning to the scene at hand. Such quick starts and stops can leave the reader a bit dazed. Also, his most lucid, analogy-laden discussion of sending a dog out to face sheep is saved for the last quarter of the book in his account of the International Sheepdog Trials - information that would have served the reader better earlier on.
As he started it, McCaig winds down his narrative with homage to Pip: "In other hands, Pip might have become eminent; he good enough to teach an ignorant man how to work a sheepdog. Gael, and every other new, young dog I'll ever train will owe him that debt. Pip, a 45-pound, black-and-white dog, changed my life."
For that, readers of "Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men" will be grateful.
by CNB