Woody’s award-winning novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available (signed copies) here on my home page and also (unsigned) at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Ross Millar, a New Zealand sheep farmer, for fifty years has lived the song “Whistle While You Work.”
“I am the Elton John of whistling,” he told me not long ago, with a wink, for he is as humbly down-to-earth as his dirty work boots.
Watching Sir Ross in concert is both sight and sound to behold as he guides his working dogs with a sundry of whistled notes that carry a country mile, even piercing through wind, and create a lovely melody.
Racing up a mountainside, Scottie, a star border collie, looked like a black-and-white-drone-with-a-tail skimming just above the grass and shrub. Instead of a handheld radio controller, Ross steered Scottie with short and long whistle blasts, and combinations, the tone and inflection varying in a precise musical language.
“The dog’s job is to do what I tell him to do,” Ross the boss noted frankly. “And I will keep telling him all day long if I need to until he does it.”
Scottie only needed about seven minutes to silently herd a lone sheep from half a mile away up in the foothills back down down to Ross’s side.
“The sheep thinks ‘this is a wolf and I’m breakfast, lunch, or dinner,’ ” Ross explained as to why Scottie need not bark to do his job.
During the demonstration, Ross did his job like a pool shark calling shots. He would tell a dozen spectators precisely what he wanted Scottie to do: “Turn left – right – stop – come – go above – go around – go down – that’ll do.”
And then: Tweet! – Tooooooot! – TWEETtweeeetTOOT! – or some other shrill melody and Scottie would “muster” the sheep into the side pocket via a bank shot, so to speak. It was nothing shy of amazing.
Here is something else amazing: a working dog on a sheep farm routinely runs ten miles, sometimes as far as a half-marathon, in a single day.
With Scottie’s short work for the moment done, Ross bent to task in the shearing barn. He began by pinning a sheep as a wrestler does an opponent, a feat accomplished with ease for at age sixty-something and standing six-foot-something, topped by thinning grey hair, Ross appears fit enough for competitive rugby.
Next, quick as an Army barber giving a recruit a buzz cut, he sheared the cloud-fluffy-animal as bare-skinned as the day it was born without a single nick and drop of blood or even a patch of razor rash.
Ross said an “expert” can shear a sheep in one and a half minutes – about half the time he had just taken – and tally more than 300 in a working day. Prodded slightly, Ross said that while he was a bit rusty now, he had indeed once been an expert.
Prodded further, privately, Ross told me in his heyday he could shear a sheep in a few ticks under a minute-flat – the equivalent, I guessed, to New Zealander Peter Snell setting the mile world record of 3:54.4 in 1962.
“I love all animals,” Ross said, smiling, as he reassuringly caressed the freshly sheared sheep. “And some humans, too.”
Speaking of humans, I playfully asked if he trained his two children when they were young with whistle commands – to which Ross answered seriously and succinctly, “No.”
When I in turn asked his wife Mary if she did so with her husband, she wryly said with a twinkle, “Oh, yes, but it didn’t take!”
And did he ever try to train her by similar whistling fashion?
Mary, after a short laugh loud as a shepherd’s whistle: “He’s a little smarter than that.”
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.