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THE PASSING OF A FRIEND

He wasn’t exactly a ball of fluff as most collie pups are. I brought him home from town one night in a cardboard box. With the rest of the litter he had been put up for sale in the cattle market but no one seemed to want him. A friend who was there at the time knew I wanted a working dog and got him for nothing. In response to his phone call I went to collect the little fellow, all legs and tail as far as I could see. He was about ten weeks old and of somewhat mixed parentage. He’d bags of ‘heart’ and within a few weeks he would stand in a gateway and defy the sheep to pass him, no matter how much the old ewes stamped their feet and shook their heads at him.

He’d ‘joined the family’ in November and I called him Topper after a collie of my boyhood days. In the following February we were lambing the sheep at the back of the farm buildings and one afternoon, with sleet and rain coming down we shut him in the kitchen whilst we saw to the sheep. His feet had got so large that they collected loads of mud which wasn’t received too well indoors I can tell you. I popped back in to heat some milk for a weak lamb and was just in time to see him pulling at the table cloth. We’d had a cup of tea earlier and left a very nice cut-glass sugar bowl on the table. Down it went with a crash and Topper wagged his tail pleased as punch.

My wife and I felt dreadful about this as it had been given to us by my mother not long before. There wasn’t much we could do about it though and we put the pieces in a box meaning to stick them together but it never did get done..

When spring came along our oldest boy reached the stage of getting about on his bottom and spent hours playing on the concrete outside the back door. Topper would lie beside him in the sun and they became great friends. If Timothy had a biscuit that he wanted he would place a bone beside him and Tim would put the biscuit down and Topper would pick it up. They shared many bones at that time, taking it in turns to have a bite at it. Not very hygienic perhaps but it never did Topper any harm!

When Timothy was three he would take the dog to the garden fence and send him to round up the calves that spent the summer in the field beside the house. This wasn’t good for the dog really as Tim couldn’t control him. It taught him that the calves could be rounded up at any time and one Sunday afternoon my neighbour came to tell me that Topper was taking the calves up and down the road. He’d already done three trips! The trouble was, he would swing on their tails and, although it was many years ago, we still have an old cow with half a tail!

Topper didn’t like the car. At least, it made him car-sick, so that when I wanted to take him to the far end of the farm he would run in front of the car. I clocked him once and he was doing 38 m.p.h. It was wonderful to drive beside him at that speed and see the muscles rippling in his back as his legs moved fore and back like pistons. In thick fog he would bring the sheep from the farthest part of a forty acre field. I could stand on the top of Eggardon and he would rush down the steep side and across the bottom of the valley to where the sheep had got out on to the opposite slope. Eventually, when they saw him coming they would return to their home ground before he got to them. He worked to the whistle but was so fast that I had to whistle him down some thirty yards before I wanted him to stop, so that he had time to think and slow down.

Running in front of the car or tractor became an hypnosis and as long as the engine was running he was oblivious to all else. He insisted on keeping about three yards in front and on several occasions, whilst looking back to see if I was still behind him he was under the front wheel of the tractor before I could stop. The last time this happened he put the ball joint out and had to be put to sleep for the vet to put it back in place.

Only twice did I punish him and then he knew exactly what I was going to do and went into his kennel. He lay at the far end so that I had to get on my knees to grab his collar and pull him out. His eyes turned green and he snarled viciously but didn’t attempt to bite. I thrashed him soundly for he’d drawn blood on a sheep. In the end I muzzled him when he went to work but he refused to do anything for me till I’d taken it off so I was back where I’d started. Times I’ve gone in and said I’ll shoot that . . . dog but my wife only laughed because she knew I wouldn’t. Just like another person about the place he was. If stock were somewhere they shouldn’t be he would put them back without being told. When the cows got mixed with my neighbours he could sort them out without my help.

When he was about nine years old I thought I had better provide a replacement and mated him with a black and white bitch we’d had about two years. She had five pups with her long shaggy coat but they were the same colour as their father, brown and white. I kept one but when it was about six months old it got run over and had to be shot so I tried again. This time the pup, Rover, and his father became great friends and would go off hunting rabbits together. Up to this time Topper would never leave the farmyard unless one of the family was with him. I said that they became great friends but I’ve a feeling that the old dog knew that one day Rover would take his place. I think that is why, one day, I had a phone call to tell me that the pup had been run over by a train. To the best of my knowledge Topper never went near the railway line under ordinary circumstances. I reckon he took the pup that way on purpose.

One Sunday summer afternoon my wife came round to the yard where I was milking and asked me if I’d seen Topper. She said he wasn’t looking well and when I went to see he did look poorly. The sheen had gone out of his coat and he seemed to have a job to walk. We took him in to the kitchen and gave him warm milk. I thought he’d been poisoned and took him to the vet in the morning. He’d had a heart attack and drove home feeling very low. We carefully nursed him for a couple of days but it was a job to keep him in the house lying down. He slipped out on the Sunday afternoon and no one saw him go. We searched for hours, right up till dark but it was to no avail. I rang up our neighbours but they hadn’t seen him. About four days later young Nick was sent on an errand and found him lying dead in the long grass that was waiting for the mowing machine. He ran home and told us and I went and carried the old dog home for the last time.

In my dealing with people and animals I tend to show little sentiment - so my wife tells me - but I must confess that I could not keep back the tears on that last walk with Topper. The two boys came to meet me as I came through the gate and they followed me around the garden to the tree where I was going to bury him. I gruffly sent them away so that they shouldn’t see my tears. I got a spade and buried him there, under the tree overlooking the valley. There, where he used to lie sleeping in the shade or watching for the children to come out to play ball. There where he would wait to hear my whistle to call him for another job.

We’d had dogs before him and dogs since but I know in my heart that there will never be another Topper.

Footnote: Topper died in May 1965. Last week, just five years later I went over to Hooke to collect another pup, Topper’s grandson. I expect you can guess his name!
Postscript:
The pup, Topper II, grew into a beautiful dog and at twelve months of age began to show himself as a successor to his grandfather. It was not to be. After a couple of days of being off colour he went down and my wife rushed him into the Vet. George carried the dog from the car straight to the table where he died within a couple of minutes. The post mortem examination sh6wed that a thorn had pierced the breast bone. The subsequent gathering arose inside the body and carrying him from the car must have burst this and flooded the body with poison.

It has always seemed to me that the old dog was determined that there would be no replacement for him and indeed, there never was.