Brian has a pup. The fell has not seen one in a while, and the fell has opinions, and so does the pup, and almost none of them are correct yet.
His name is Moss. He is a Border Collie, fourteen weeks old, black and white and entirely convinced, and he has arrived on a Cumbrian hill to learn the oldest job a dog has in this country, which is to move sheep without harming a hair on them, using nothing but position, patience, and the strange ancient power that a collie carries in its eyes.
Because that is the thing about a collie, the intricacy that makes the breed what it is. A collie does not herd by chasing or biting. It herds by "the eye," a fixed, crouching, predatory stare inherited straight from the wolf, the look that says to a sheep "I am a hunter and you will move," delivered by a dog that has been bred for a century and a half to feel the entire predatory sequence right up to the final pounce and then stop, and hold, and never complete it. A working sheepdog is a wolf that has been taught to do everything except the last thing. The control is the whole art.
Moss has the eye. He does not yet have the control. He has, this week, "gathered" a watering can, a wheelbarrow, three hens belonging to the neighbour, and Brian's wife's washing, dropping into the crouch and giving each of them the full ancestral stare before attempting to move it somewhere it did not wish to go.
Brian is not worried. Brian has done this before, more times than he will say, and he knows that the instinct arriving wrong and early is exactly how it is meant to arrive, and that the job now is years of patient shaping, the pup working beside an older dog and an older man until the wolf in him learns the one rule that makes him useful instead of dangerous: everything except the last thing.
Moss gave Doris the eye on Tuesday.
Doris, who has been stared at by better, carried on grazing.
Moss sat down, confused. The first lesson on the fell, delivered free, by a ewe: the look only works on something that believes it. He has a great deal to learn. He is exactly where he should be.