Nop's Hope

Donald McCaig is an excellent writer. He just contributed a new introduction to "Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name," by Vicki Hearne. The whole book is worth reading, but the intro is the icing on the cake. If you are an animal trainer, an animal lover, or just a Donald McCaig fan, it's definitely worth checking out.

This is a must read but an emotional ride. Be prepared. A fine and exhausting story. I was up all night with it and loved it. Not a dissapointment. You become so tied to this dog that you can't put the book down. Very engaging and throroughly enjoyable.

Mr. McCaig's writing evokes the hardscrabble lot of the book's characters, human and canine, and it grips the reader's attention until the end. Through descriptions of farm life and sheepherding trials, the author traverses excruciating pain, redeemed finally by the love a man has for his daughter and her Border Collie. Mr. McCaig thoroughly understands Border Collies, sheepherding trials, and people. He is personally active in the sheepherd trial community; his experience imbues his story with realism.

I found this book very touching. I felt an enormous sense of compassion for Penny and understood her frantic efforts to escape from her overwhelming grief. Although her choices seemed very foreign to me, I felt that I could empathize with her. She often seemed blind to others and their needs, and their efforts to help her, because her own hurts were so enormous. But, her wonderful dog, Hope, was marvelous and, like dogs tend to be, nonjudgemental. Penny's mistakes were realistic, and I think she finally learned from them. The dawning of her ability to move on and begin a new life at the end of the book was sensitively done in the author's easy-reading and unpretentious style. I found this a book for reading over and over again. It did not leave me with the disturbing images that Nop's Trials did.

This is a book that will tap deep into the feelings of anyone who has ever really loved a dog, which is most of us. Donald McCaig knows about border collies, their drive to do their work, their reservations about functioning as pets, and he knows quite a bit about human nature as well. The thing I liked best about this book was his translation of what the dogs were saying and thinking; the thing I liked least was the dreadful tension of hoping nothing terrible was going to happen to the aging dog, Nop, as he competed with his son. I saw McCaig work his own dog in a demonstration in Madison County, Va., before he wrote Nop's Trials, and I felt then that he had reached some truth about what he wanted to do with his life. Obviously he had, and the reality Nop and Hope have for readers is clear evidence.