Darryl and Glenn

Darryl and Glenn

Darryl sat down and rolled himself a cigarette before turning to his mate, Glenn, and offering him a drink.
“Long day, eh?” Darryl said sitting back in his chair and trying to stuff his pouch back into the pocket of his old khaki green jacket.
Glenn shook his head to the drink but gave a soft grunt in agreement about the day, and he pushed a small pile of cards towards Darryl.
Darryl grabbed himself a beer, opened it and took a lengthy drink before burping respectfully, lighting his cigarette, and finally picking the cards up. There was a moment of silence between the two as he began putting his cards in order in the dim light of the fire which crackled away in a barrel outside of the old farmhouse.
Darryl and Glenn were now seven-time New Zealand Sheep Dog Trial winners who’d come out of nowhere a while back, and had suddenly started taking out competitions all over the place.
Before that, nobody had known them, and since they’d stopped nobody had been able to figure out exactly how they’d been able to do it.
Before their life as champions, all Darryl and Glenn had done together was muck around on small sheep farms and take odd contract jobs here and there. None of the sheep farmers or gumbooters around who’d hired them had ever given them much time or taken them too seriously. Disaster seemed to follow the pair where ever they went.
First, on a sheep farm in Temuka, they’d managed to get mixed up whilst herding fifty wethers from one paddock to another, and put them through the boss’s wife’s vegetable garden. A week later they’d moved North to a dairy farm where they had left the main gate open and one-hundred cattle had walked out onto the road and had started heading towards the main street of Cust. They’d fenced up the wrong parts of paddocks, rolled a four-wheel-drive (to avoid hitting a rabbit which hopped off in the other direction), over-fed five good mares who now wouldn’t work unless they had a three-course meal, and got a tractor stuck in a bog that “had looked sturdy enough from a distance.” Finally, a fence they had apparently repaired had fallen to bits, and a bull had chased them around the main house before finally stopping when it smashed into the boss’s new ute.
“Look at all this trouble we go to for these animals, mate,” Darryl had said suddenly as they pair surveyed the damage of their latest catastrophe, “I reckon they should just be left be and not have to worry about the stresses of life.”
It was on the way home from that last incident that Darryl and Glenn were listening to the radio highlights of the recent sheep dog trials. Darryl had turned to Glenn and said, “reckon we could do that sort-a thing.”
“Ay? Trials?” Glenn had replied.
“Yeah – you got the face for it n’ I’ve got the brains. Could probably make a few bucks too.”
“Where you gettin’ the dog from?” Glenn had asked as his instincts started to warn him about something.
“I’ve got my Huntaway, haven’t I?”
There had been a breath in the conversation before Darryl had turned to Glenn again smiling a plotted kind of smile.
“You can’t over-think things, Glenn,” Darryl stated matter-of-factly, and he was always strict on following his own advice.
Folks had done everything to try to not laugh when the pair had turned up at their maiden dog trial. Darryl had hopped out of his Land Cruiser in his straw “going out” hat which had seen better days. The brim was all but gone and it looked more like a small paper wastebasket with a few stray bits coming out of it sitting on his head than an actual hat. The colour matched his light-blonde stubble and made him look like he’d melt if he saw too much sun.
Glenn had followed up Darryl’s appearance by tripping as he’d hopped out of the other side, and he’d fallen face-first into a muddy puddle.
“That’s no-good mate, we don’t want to go making a bad impression,” Darryl had said grabbing an old tea towel from the back of the truck and flinging it into Glenn’s sopping face.
“Go n’ get a look at the sheep will ya? And remember what we talked about.”
“Yeah, alright,” Glenn said after he’d buried his face in the towel. And he’d turned slowly to walk towards the holding pens where a small herd of Romneys stood nervously waiting.
Glenn had returned about fifteen minutes later and flopped himself down by the car in the shade.
“We good to go?” Darryl asked.
“Yeah – we’re good, they’ll do it,” Glenn said.
Nobody had been expecting much, but when Darryl’s Huntaway had managed to get his three sheep to just about run straight through the course of the zig-zag hunt without stopping as he drove them up the hill, people had all but stopped their sniggering. They were so stunned in fact that once the trial had concluded, nobody had noticed that the herd of Romneys was three shy as it was loaded onto a truck and taken back to where they had come from.
Before long, Darryl and his Huntaway had taken out their first New Zealand trial and word had swept around the reporters. Before they’d even been able to have a celebratory brew, he and Glenn had found themselves surrounded with about ten journalists most of whom were called Mark Some-Thing-or-Other. They’d been from all sorts of publications including newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and one woman from a hippy commune who’d just wanted to ask if she could pat the dog.
“Yeah – please y’self,” Darryl said. Glenn had shot him a sideways look. They had agreed that no one should get too close.
What they’d really wanted to know was how they’d done it – how they’d managed to walk in off the street as it were and take out the competition. Darryl had looked at Glenn, and Glenn had looked back at Darryl and given a warning kind of shaking of his head.
“ – I sing the commands to ‘im when we’re training. ‘e likes music.”
Darryl couldn’t believe what had just come out of his mouth, and more to his astonishment, the reporters all started nodding and scribbling down notes. Without sticking around to see if anyone would wisen up, Darryl and Glenn decided to make a quick exit via the sheep pen where the three sheep that had been on their course stood waiting expectantly.
Next year’s crowd had all waited with great anticipation to see if Darryl would make another appearance. Curious faces had all turned and watched as his Land Cruiser had grunted and smoked its way over the gravel leading up to the site in Wanaka.
“Better to avoid this crowd, Darryl.”
“Right y’are there mate. What time we on?”
“Three o’clock. Where’s the sheep?”
“That way I reckon,” Darryl said gesturing towards a long strip of grass leading up to what looked like a shearing shed.
“I’ll see you in a bit.”
“Righto.”
Following their second win, the reporters had asked again, “how did you do it this year Darryl? That was the fastest time we’ve seen in a while and you’ve come away with a fair-perfect score.”
“You should only ever name your dog something that has less than two syllables in it. That way there’s more room in the head for thinking, I reckon.
“Take ‘im ‘ere,” he said nodding down at the black and caramel brown dog sitting wisely on his master’s foot, “if I’d named ‘im anything other than what I did, he’d be as slow as a fly in molasses.”
Again, the reporters took their notes. This time looking a little bewildered. Darryl and Glenn had left Wanaka that day with their prizes, and three more sheep.
The following years all flew by, and each came with its own victory. At the third trial, Darryl had claimed that he’d developed a special kind of whistle made out of a material that only he himself knew of – sorry, but he wouldn’t be sharing that information at this time.
After that, he’d told them all that he had trained his Huntaway on only two legs, and this made him faster by the time it got to him being able to use all four.
Next, he’d claimed it was all in the specific mix of breed.
Then his dog was on a special diet.
There was the monthly hair cut to keep excess weight down, the ear-cleaning so he could hear commands easier, contact lenses to assist his already stellar vision, not allowing him to toilet until after a trial so he’d be in a hurry to do his job, and finally acupuncture – something Darryl swore by.
Whatever they’d told them, reports had continued to circulate far and wide of Darryl and his dog that was able to complete a course a full two minutes faster than anyone else and always with scores that others could only ever get close to. Border Collies, Bearded Collies, Shelties – it didn’t matter. That dog and his owner had them all beat.
Darryl and Glenn collected every article that came out about it:
Darryl and Dog Top Team – Country Wide Sheep
Mystery Man and Mutt – The Farm Journal
Huntaway Take Away – The Modern Farmer
Better Dog Beats Down – Small Farm Today
All of them searching for an answer on how it was that Darryl and his Huntaway were cleaning up trial after trial. The truth was, nobody could be certain on exactly how they were having such success.
It went on this way until one year, Darryl’s Land Cruiser unexpectedly didn’t show up. In fact, Darryl hadn’t even registered for the trial.
Word had quickly spread that he wasn’t there, and speculations had arisen at record pace.
Mrs McArthur heard he’d fallen ill, Matt Stanley had seen him leave town in a hurry early that week, Joseph Brian swore that he’d gone to see his dying Aunty in Invercargill, and Lester McCain had read in the paper that he’d been found dead just outside of Motueka.
The whole company had held a minute’s silence out of respect, and the trials began that year by retelling of how Darryl and his Huntaway – Glenn, the dog with the one-syllable name, should forever be an example of teamwork if you were ever to become great at this sort of thing.
Glenn sat at the table and looked around to the paddock from which could be heard the bleating of a respectable number of Romneys, Halfbreds, Drysdales, Perendales, and Merinos – all fat and satisfied with as much feed as they could ever want.
“Wadda we do with ‘em now?” Glenn had asked Darryl as he licked the plate where a few minutes ago a large steak had sat.
“Just what we promised them,” Darryl said. “Let ‘em be.”
“Thank goodness for that, I was getting sick of chasing them up those hills.”
“Good boy,” said Darryl, and he patted Glenn on the head, “don’t s’pose you know how to knit do you?”
“Nar, no thumbs.”
“Mmm…I forget sometimes,” said Darryl.