My Son-In-Law Laughed At My Late Husband’s Dented Brass Whistle And Said My Old Border Collie Was “Done.” So I Entered Her In The County Fair Trial Against His $4,000 Dog, And The Judge Asked To See That Whistle

The whistle hangs on a nail by my kitchen door, the same nail it has hung on since 1979. It is brass, about the length of my thumb, shaped like a little half moon, and it has a dent on one side where my husband Gunnar dropped it on the rocks at the Northwest Finals in 1988. He always said the dent made it sound better. Nobody believed him, but nobody could prove him wrong, either.

My son-in-law picked it up off the nail on a Sunday in July and blew into it like a kazoo.

It made a sad little squawk. He laughed.

“Ingrid, that thing is a toy,” Shane said. “Did you know they make electronic ones now? You can set the pitch. My trainer in Yakima says the old brass ones go flat after twenty years.”

“It’s not flat,” I said. “You’re blowing it wrong.”

“Sure.” He hung it back on the nail, crooked. “Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about.”

I knew what he wanted to talk about. He had wanted to talk about it since Easter.

My name is Ingrid Lindqvist. I am seventy-one years old, and I have lived on the same hundred and sixty acres outside Ellensburg, Washington, since I was twenty-three. Gunnar and I ran sheep here for forty-four years. Suffolk crosses, mostly, and a few Rambouillet for the wool. We raised one daughter, Kristin, who grew up chasing lambs and then grew up and moved to Seattle and married a man named Shane Mercer who sells commercial real estate and owns three different pairs of boots that have never touched manure.

Gunnar died two winters ago. A stroke, in the barn, in the middle of lambing. I found him there with the ewes. I won’t say more about that than I have to.

Since then it has been me, sixty-two ewes, two rams, a part-time high school boy named Caleb who comes after football practice, and Tess.

Tess is a border collie. Black and white, with a white blaze down her face that goes a little crooked over her left eye, as if someone painted it in a hurry. She is nine years old. Gunnar raised her from a pup out of his last good bitch, and she is the finest dog I have ever seen work, and I have seen a great many.

Shane sat down at my kitchen table without being asked and folded his hands like he was about to sell me a strip mall.

“Kristin and I have been talking,” he said. “And we think it’s time.”

The Offer on the Table

What they thought it was time for was this.

A man named Brannock, who builds what he calls “ranchette estates,” had made an offer on my land. He wanted to put twenty-two houses on it, each one sitting on its own seven acres with a split-rail fence and a view of the Stuart Range. The offer was a good one. I won’t pretend it wasn’t. Shane had brought the paperwork in a leather folder.

“You’d never have to worry about money again,” he said. “You could get a nice place in town. Near the hospital. Kristin wouldn’t have to lie awake at night wondering if you’d fallen in the barn.”

“Kristin doesn’t lie awake at night,” I said. “Kristin calls me every Thursday and asks how the lambs are.”

“She worries more than she tells you.”

That might have been true. I didn’t know. My daughter and I had gotten quieter with each other since her father died, the way people do when they’re both trying not to cry on the phone.

“And what happens to the flock?” I asked.

“There’s a guy in Moses Lake who’ll take them all.”

“And Tess?”

Shane looked out the window. Tess was lying in the shade of the pump house, chin on her paws, watching the ewes in the near pasture the way she always does, as though one of them might try something.

“Ingrid,” he said gently, in the voice people use with old women and children, “I don’t want to be the bad guy here. But that dog is done. She’s slow. I watched her last month. She took three tries to get the ewes through the gate. My dog would’ve done it in one.”

His dog.

I should explain about his dog.

Ryder

The spring after Gunnar died, Shane decided he was going to get into sheepdog trialing. I think he saw a video online. I think he imagined himself in a waxed cotton jacket standing at a post with a crook, being admired. He paid four thousand dollars for a two-year-old border collie out of Oregon, a big handsome red-and-white male named Ryder with a pedigree as long as my arm, and he paid a trainer in Yakima another two hundred dollars a week to work him.

Ryder was a good dog. I want to be fair. He was fast and keen and he had a lovely outrun. But Shane handled him the way he drove his truck, which is to say too fast and with a great deal of shouting, and Ryder had learned that when Shane started shouting, it was best to run very hard in some direction and hope for the best.

They had placed fourth at a small trial in Wenatchee. Shane had the ribbon framed.

“You know the county fair has a trial over Labor Day,” Shane said. “Open class. I’m running Ryder in it. You should come watch. See what a young dog can do.”

He meant it kindly, I think. Or he meant it the way men like Shane mean things kindly, which is to say he wanted me to watch and be convinced.

I looked at the whistle hanging crooked on its nail.

“I think I’ll run Tess,” I said.

He laughed again. Not meanly. Just surprised, the way you’d laugh at a cat that announced it was going to drive the car.

“Ingrid. Come on.”

“Gunnar ran the Kittitas County trial every year for thirty years,” I said. “He won it eleven times. I’ve walked that field more times than you’ve had haircuts. I’d like to run my dog in it.”

“You haven’t handled a dog at a trial in your life.”

That was true. Gunnar did the trials. I did the lambing and the books and the fence and the shearing crew’s lunches. But I had stood at the edge of every one of those fields with a thermos of coffee, and I had watched, and I had listened, and every night for forty-four years I had heard my husband whistle to his dogs in the dark.

“Then I suppose we’ll find out,” I said.

Learning the Whistle

Here is the thing about a whistle like Gunnar’s. It isn’t one sound. It’s a language.

A long rising note followed by a short falling one means go left, which handlers call “come bye.” The opposite pattern means go right, “away to me.” A sharp single blast means lie down, stop, freeze. A string of quick chirps means walk up, push them, keep coming. And every handler has his own accent, his own way of shaping the notes, and the dog learns that accent the way a baby learns its mother’s voice.

Tess had learned Gunnar’s accent. She had worked to that dented brass whistle every day of her life until he died.

And since then, I had been working her by voice. “Come bye. Away. Lie down. Walk up.” She did it, because she is a good dog and because she loves me. But she was slower to my voice than she had ever been to his whistle. Shane wasn’t wrong about that. He was just wrong about why.

So that July, every evening after Caleb went home, I took the whistle down off its nail and I went out to the far pasture where nobody could hear me and I practiced.

I was terrible at first. The whistle squeaked. It wheezed. Once it made a noise like a goose being stepped on, and Tess looked at me with what I can only describe as pity. My lips went numb. My cheeks ached. I sat on an overturned water trough one night and cried, because I could hear in my head exactly how Gunnar sounded, and I couldn’t make it come out of the brass.

Then, about the second week of August, it came out.

I don’t know how else to say it. I put the whistle to my lips and blew the long rising note and the short falling one, and Tess, who had been lying beside me with her eyes half shut, came up off the ground like she’d been stung. She looked at me. Then she looked past me, toward the barn, toward the house, toward the place where the sound had always come from.

Then she looked back at me, and she understood.

She went out wide to the left in a perfect pear-shaped arc, three hundred yards, without a single other word from me, and came in behind the ewes so softly that half of them didn’t lift their heads.

I sat down in the grass and laughed until I couldn’t breathe.

The Kittitas County Fair

My daughter came to the trial. That surprised me. She drove over from Seattle with Shane on the Saturday morning, and she found me in the competitors’ area by the stock trailers, and she hugged me harder than she had in two years.

“Mom,” she said. “Are you sure about this?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m doing it.”

She looked down at Tess, who was sitting at my left knee in the exact spot Gunnar had trained her to sit. Kristin crouched down and put her hand out, and Tess licked it once and then went back to watching the sheep in the holding pens.

“She remembers me,” Kristin said.

“She remembers everything.”

Shane was already warming Ryder up on the practice field, shouting. “Away! AWAY! Ryder, AWAY TO ME!” The dog was flying around in circles like a red-and-white comet. A couple of the old handlers sitting on hay bales near me exchanged a look.

The course that year was a standard open course. The dog has to run out about four hundred yards to collect five sheep at the top of the field, bring them straight down to the handler, take them around the post, drive them away through a set of panels on one side, across the field through another set of panels, back toward the handler, into a marked ring where the handler and dog together separate two sheep from the other three, which is called the shed, and then pen all five in a little gated pen. The whole thing has a time limit of thirteen minutes. Points come off for every wobble, every stop, every time the sheep break into a run.

It sounds simple. It is the hardest thing I know of that a dog and a person can do together.

There were twenty-three dogs in the open class. Ryder ran eleventh. Tess ran nineteenth.

The judge was a man named Malcolm Reid, who’d come down from British Columbia. He was in his late sixties, tall, with a white beard trimmed close and a tweed cap. He sat in a pickup bed at the top of the course with a clipboard and a pair of binoculars and he didn’t say a word to anyone.

I didn’t know him. Or I didn’t think I did.

Ryder had a beautiful outrun. I’ll give him that. He went out wide and fast and landed behind the sheep at the top of the field like a hawk. The crowd made a little murmur.

Then Shane started shouting, and it went downhill, literally. Ryder came on too hard and the sheep broke into a run and came down the field in a wild clump. They overshot the post. Ryder had to race around to turn them. On the drive, Shane kept yelling “Walk up! Walk UP!” and then “Lie down! LIE DOWN!” one after the other, and Ryder, poor thing, was trying to do both at once. They missed the first panels. They made the cross-drive panels on the second try. They got the shed, barely, on the third attempt. And they penned with nine seconds left on the clock.

The crowd clapped politely. Shane walked off the course pumping his fist like he’d won the Super Bowl.

“Seventy-one points,” he told Kristin, loud enough for me to hear. “Out of a hundred and ten. That’ll hold. Nobody’s going to beat that with these sheep. These sheep are wild.”

Kristin looked at me.

I didn’t say anything. I was holding the whistle in my fist inside my jacket pocket, and my fist was shaking.

The next seven dogs ran. Two retired, which means the handler gave up partway. One got disqualified for gripping, which means the dog bit a sheep, which is the end of your day. The others scored in the fifties and sixties.

Then the announcer read out, “Number nineteen. Ingrid Lindqvist, Ellensburg, with Tess.”

Tess’s Run

I walked to the post.

I have never in my life been so frightened. Not in labor with Kristin. Not when the barn roof came down in the snow of ’96. Not when I found Gunnar. I walked to that post on legs that didn’t feel like mine, with three hundred people watching from the bleachers and a man in a pickup bed with binoculars, and I put the brass whistle to my mouth.

Tess was sitting at my left knee, quivering.

I looked up the field. Four hundred yards away, five white dots stood in the grass.

I whispered, “Gunnar, if you’re anywhere, now would be a good time.”

Then I blew the come-bye whistle, the long rising note and the short falling one, and the dented brass sang out across that field exactly the way it used to, clear and bright and a little bit flat in the middle, the way he always said made it sound better.

And Tess went.

She didn’t run like Ryder. She ran like water. Wide and smooth and quiet, in a curve so even you could have drawn it with a compass. She came in behind those sheep and stopped dead at the exact moment I gave the lie-down blast, and the sheep lifted their heads and looked at her and decided, all five of them at once, that they would very much like to go wherever she wanted them to go.

They walked down the field to me in a straight line. Walked. Not ran.

Around the post. Away down the drive. Through the first panels without touching them. Across the field. Through the second panels. Back to the ring.

I could hear the crowd now. Not cheering. That’s not how trials work. It was quieter than that. It was the sound of three hundred people who know sheep, holding their breath.

The shed took us two tries. That cost us a few points. On the second try Tess came through the gap between the sheep like a knife through butter and held the two she’d cut off while the other three wandered away, and I heard an old man in the front row say, “Oh, that’s a dog.”

Then the pen. I swung the little gate open. Tess brought them in. The last ewe stopped at the mouth of the pen and stamped her foot at Tess, which is a sheep’s way of saying “make me.” Tess dropped flat on her belly and looked at her. The ewe walked in.

I shut the gate.

Eight minutes and forty seconds.

The bleachers came up off their seats.

The Judge

I didn’t hear the score. I was on my knees in the grass with my arms around my dog, crying into the fur on her neck, and she was licking my ear the way she used to lick Gunnar’s when he came in from the cold.

When I finally looked up, Kristin was standing at the edge of the field with her hands over her mouth. Shane was standing beside her looking like someone had let the air out of him.

Ninety-six points. That was the score.

But that wasn’t the part that changed everything. The part that changed everything came twenty minutes later.

The judge, Malcolm Reid, climbed down out of his pickup bed after the last dog ran and walked straight across the field toward the trailers. People stepped out of his way. He stopped in front of me.

“Mrs. Lindqvist,” he said. He had a Scottish accent that forty years in Canada had softened but not erased. “Might I see that whistle?”

I handed it to him.

He turned it over in his long fingers. He ran his thumb over the dent. And then he put it to his lips and blew, very softly, the come-bye pattern, and Tess’s head snapped toward him.

His eyes were wet.

“I was nineteen,” he said. “Just come over from Dumfries with one dog and no money. My first trial in America was at Ellensburg. My dog was a disgrace. Ran off the field and into the parking lot. Your husband caught her for me. Then he took me back to his trailer and gave me a cup of coffee and asked if I wanted to learn how to whistle properly.” He held up the brass half moon. “He let me practice on this. I’d know this dent anywhere. I watched him drop it.”

“On the rocks at the Finals,” I whispered. “In 1988.”

“He swore it made it sound better.”

“It does,” I said.

Malcolm Reid laughed and handed the whistle back to me, folding my fingers around it with both hands.

Then his face changed. He glanced over my shoulder, toward the place where Shane and Kristin were standing.

“I should tell you something, Mrs. Lindqvist,” he said, quieter. “I wasn’t going to. It’s none of my business. But I watched your dog run today, and I think it may be my business after all.”

What Shane Had Asked For

“Your son-in-law telephoned me in July,” Malcolm said. “He’d seen my name on the judges list. He wanted to know if I’d be willing, as a judge and a breeder, to write a letter.”

“A letter about what?”

“About your dog. He said you were elderly and struggling and your family was trying to help you make some hard decisions. He said your dog was past working age, and if a judge put that in writing, it would help your daughter understand that the farm couldn’t go on.” Malcolm’s jaw tightened under the beard. “He offered to pay me for my time. Five hundred dollars.”

I couldn’t speak.

“I told him I don’t write letters about dogs I haven’t seen,” Malcolm said. “And then I told him I’d see her at the trial. And now I’ve seen her.”

Behind me, someone made a small sound.

I turned. Kristin was standing three feet away. I don’t know how long she’d been there. Long enough. Her face had gone white, and then red.

“Shane,” she said. Not loudly. She didn’t need to be loud.

Shane came over with his hands already up, already explaining. “Babe. Okay. I can explain that. I was trying to help. You said yourself you were worried about her.”

“I said I missed my dad,” Kristin said. “I said I missed the farm. I said I felt guilty I wasn’t there. I never said I wanted it sold.”

“Brannock’s offer expires October first. If we don’t move…”

“If we don’t move, what?”

He stopped. And in the pause, Malcolm Reid said, very mildly, “You told me on the phone there was a finder’s fee in it. For you. If the family signed by October.”

The silence after that was long enough that I could hear the sheep in the holding pens.

Kristin looked at her husband the way I’ve seen ewes look at a coyote.

The Whistle on the Nail

The sale didn’t happen. Kristin called Mr. Brannock herself the following Monday and told him the land was not for sale and wouldn’t be for the foreseeable future. I don’t know everything that was said between her and Shane after that. I know they’re in counseling. I know he sold Ryder back to the breeder in Oregon, and I was sorry about that, because Ryder was a fine young dog who just needed someone to stop shouting at him. I know Shane hasn’t been to the farm since.

That’s between the two of them. I’ve stayed out of it, mostly.

What I know is that the third weekend in September, Kristin drove over from Seattle by herself, and she put on a pair of her father’s old coveralls, and she followed me out to the far pasture at dusk.

“Teach me,” she said.

“Teach you what?”

She pointed at the whistle in my hand.

So I did. She was terrible at first. It squeaked and wheezed. Once it made the goose noise, and Tess gave her the same look of pity she’d given me, and Kristin laughed so hard she had to sit down on the water trough.

Then, on the fourth night, it came out.

The long rising note and the short falling one. Clear and bright and a little flat in the middle. Tess came up off the grass like she’d been stung, and she looked at my daughter, and then she went.

Kristin watched her run with tears streaming down her face. “That’s Dad,” she said. “That’s what Dad sounded like.”

“I know, honey.”

Tess is ten now. She’s slower on the hills. Malcolm Reid sent me a pup from his own line in the spring, a little black tri female with one white sock, and Tess has been teaching her the way Gunnar taught Tess, which is mostly by giving her looks. Kristin comes every other weekend. She’s talking about going part-time in Seattle. She’s talking about a lot of things.

The whistle still hangs on the nail by the kitchen door. I keep it straight now.

And every evening at dusk, one of us takes it down.

If this one made you think of someone who was written off too soon, a person or a dog, share it. Some of the best ones just need the right voice calling them.

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