Fate was cut loose at the Open House and I spent a good chunk of weekend calling her out of one mess or another. I like to list the adventures of Fate whenever we have a public gathering. Fate was a huge hit, we did herding lessons about a dozen times over the weekend, one of them in front of a well-known herding instructor, Jim McRae of Rutland, Vt. Fate did very well.
She personally greeted every single child. We all teach our children not to scream and run in front of puppies or dogs, but of course, children are children, and they forget this. As a dog owner, I expect them to forget it and they all did. Fate found great pleasure in running down screaming children, jumping on them and licking them on the nose.
She can outrun any child, and does, happily. She barked at the big horses, then tried to rush into their enclosures to get to know them and greet them, as she does Chloe. She was obsessed with a young German Shepherd puppy at the Blue Star table, barking and growing at him for a day and half before she settled in.
Fate tried to sneak into the back of the horse enclosure and eat some fresh manure, and she succeeded a few times.
She vanished behind the portable toilets and couldn’t be found, I tracked her there and found her gorging on some old rotting sandwich in tin foil. She stuck her noses in various purses and backpacks and bags looking for food. After working, she was in a border collie trance, running here, there, back to the gate, ignoring me sometimes, not others. Everyone loved her (not me, sometimes.) Every time I looked up, she had found something to steal, something disgusting to eat.
But I have to say, she did us proud with the sheep, getting more responsive every day, moving well around them, testing them with her eye. She is a great dog. She is just a puppy, people kept telling me. Yes, I know. She had perhaps the most grueling day of her life, chasing the sheep all over the place in front of huge crowds four or five different times, racing back and forth amidst hundreds of people, trying to jump up on every one.
But you know what? I accept this dog and her great enthusiasm for life. I will surely not allow her to keep jumping on children, but I see her great enthusiasm and love of life as something to be preserved and cherished. The more we see Fate, the more we love her, she is an incredibly sweet, trainable and exciting dog to have.