I have to get Red a nice steak bone today. We were out in the pasture, the storm was intense, the wind blowing, the sheep were rushing back and forth from the Pole Barn to the feeder, perhaps rattled by the wind. I heard an intense creaking and rumbling and looked up to see a ton or more of snow cutting loose – starting to slide – from the roof of the Pole Barn roof and beginning to slide right over me, and over the sheep running beneath.

It was one of those farm moments that are small and dramatic, not the stuff of a movie, not perhaps of life and death, but quite a thrill if you are there. There was a roof rake nearby.  I yelled out for Red to come and help – the command (there is no time) is “Hey Red! Come Here!”, and he vanished in the four foot drifts, I wondered where he was going, and then in seconds I saw that he had circled around the feeder,  tunneled under and through the drift, and then popped up right in front of the oncoming sheep.

I told him to stay, grabbed the rake, poked the snow and triggered an impressive avalanche off of the roof, I could easily jump out of the way. The sheep froze where Red told them to, and then turned and ran the other way. It was a huge amount of snow and ice, it could have hurt me, it could have harmed the sheep. My heart was surely racing after that. Red is impervious to weather, it is all work for him, and we have worked together so long and so closely that communication is almost completely silent and instinctive.

We came inside, I wiped the snow and ice off of Red, went to warm my hands, when I turned around he was waiting at the door, eager to get back to work. And this, of course, is what is missing in the debate over the New York Carriage Horses and all working animals: complete ignorance about the need and drive of working animals to work. This is Red’s life, I am  honored to help him live it.

I often thing about what such a dog would have meant to a farmer in Ireland a hundred years ago, and I think of what such a dog means to me right now here on my small farm, and I am not even a farmer, but a writer with a farm.