Buff: A Collie, and Other Dog-Stories

by Albert Payson Terhune

This morning he had undertaken to pasture the three groups together in a single paddock-field while he should assort from the full flock a detachment of forty which he planned to drive to Boone Lake the following morning for the rural metropolis’ monthly market day.

It had seemed a simple thing, this opening of the gates from two fields and driving into a third field the occupants of the other two. So simple had it appeared that Trent had not even enlisted the services of his beautiful collie Buff in the petty task.

Buff had been sent, a half-hour earlier, to drive the farm’s little bunch of cattle to the “forest pasture,” a mile to the east; and he was not yet back. Trent had not bothered to wait for the collie’s return before herding the three flocks of sheep into one. He had merely opened the gates leading into the central field where were pastured his original flock, and had driven the newer occupants of those two fields into the middle one.

Then trouble had set in—as trouble is forever waiting to do, where sheep are concerned.

One of the two new flocks had stampeded at sight and scent of the strange flocks, and of the still more strange man. The stampeding flock had ploughed straight into and through the thick of the others, jostling and shoving them roughly, and communicating to them the stampede impulse.

That had been quite enough, and all at once there were a hundred and twenty-five crazy sheep surging around Trent and radiating away in every direction. Their fear-driven bodies had found a weak panel in the hurdle fence that bordered the road. Down flapped the hurdle, and through the gap the nearest sheep began to dribble. The remainder were in great and ever-increasing danger of injury from the mad plungings of their companions.

Another accidental shove had loosed the half-fastened latch on the centre field’s gate, which Trent had neglected to clamp when he came into the paddock; and another leakage seeped out through that opening.

Helpless, wrathful, Trent waded through the turmoil, trying in vain to restore quiet, and to make his way to one or both of the apertures before a wholesale stampede should empty the field through gate or hurdle, bruising and perhaps killing some of the weaker sheep against the sides of the gap.

In his extremity, the farmer put his fingers to his lips and sent forth a whistle agonisingly piercing and shrill. Then he turned back to his futile labours of calming the stampede. Because he turned back thus, he missed a sight really worth seeing.