Nop's Hope Quotes

“Somewhere the help don’t quit as soon as the boss walks out the door. I’m gonna need a dozen clean pens.”
The lambing barn had four rows of pens against the long walls and back-to-back in the middle. At any one time the pens could hold eighty ewes and their lambs. When things went well, a ewe came into the barn on Monday and left on Thursday, and after her apartment was renovated the shepherd could install a newcomer. When a ewe had trouble – mastitis, milk fever, pneumonia, blue bag – the pens filled with sick sheep and the sheep housing stock shrank. Penny spent a couple hours examining the ewes in the barn, medicating those that needed it, turning others with their lambs out into the sunshine. She slipped bands on lambs’ tails, checked new mothers for milk supply, milked out ewes for their colostrum, ear notched bad mothers so they could be culled.”
― Donald McCaig, Nop's Hope

“Dogs are notorious for hope. Dogs believe that this morning, this very morning, may begin a day of fascination, easily grander than any day in the past. Perhaps the work did go badly yesterday, perhaps the humans are wild with sulks and rages, but this morning can yet be saved: don't humans understand anything?

Every morning, in dog pounds all over America, hundreds of dogs awake to their last day with gladness in their hearts.”
― Donald McCaig, Nop's Hope

“Men trial sheepdogs for the usual metaphysical reasons. Some men seek justice in their own lifetime. Others, a type of immortality. Bill Crowe of Virginia once explained that he trialed, "For the pure intellectual achievement of it." Some men hope that love is proof against adversity. Some trial sheepdogs to forget - bad marriages can make good sheepdog handlers - and others trial to remember: that single moment, the flash of light on a dog's coat, the dog dead now twenty years. A few men trail because that's the only way they can reduce the world to their size; others trial for the raw information trialing provides, a flux they can puzzle over for a lifetime.”
― Donald McCaig, Nop's Hope

“Bob Brennan went on to become a fair dog handler, and he and Shep won several open trials, but he never forgot the slight woman working his dog, better than he could, out in the middle of nowhere; woman, dog, sheep moving with great precision, and she never repeated a request (Bob Brennan couldn't call them commands), and she spoke so soft - just Penny and Shep and the sky, stretching from Canada to Mexico, lighter blue at the rim than in the bowl overhead. Shep never forgot it either.”
― Donald McCaig, Nop's Hope

“The sheepdog is shown its possibilities, he learns what life is like for a good dog and is invited to walk in a rational world whose further boundaries are defined by grace.”
― Donald McCaig, Nop's Hope