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Photo by John Wagner

FAIRBANKS — A year after buying a 60-acre spread in Delta Junction, Catherine Hadley and Mike Paschall turned into sheep farmers.

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. The couple planned on raising dogs and tending to a few horses while maintaining day jobs.

But Catherine just had to have border collies, and content border collies just have to have sheep. So three weeks after closing on the farm, the couple started collecting a flock.

“I think a lot of people with border collies, that’s how they end up with sheep,” Catherine surmised. “They get the dog first.”

Border collies are driven by instincts passed on through centuries. They are intense workers, and the job of choice is herding.

During a tour of Delta farm businesses in July, Catherine and Mike put three border collies to work demonstrating their skills with a hodgepodge flock of 31 head.

At 3 1/2-years-old, Aurora has developed her own herding style. She keeps low, running in a crouch, almost hidden in the tall grass, save for a waving white tail and on-alert ears sticking straight up.

Following Catherine’s verbal commands, Aurora runs the sheep through panels in a “drive,” then into pens. A cool day triggered friskiness in the sheep, complicating the canine’s task.

Border collies move sheep with their eyes, Catherine and Mike explained. The more yellow in a dog’s eyes, the better. An ages-old survival instinct links those yellow orbs to predatory wolves, and sheep intuitively edge away.

Mike narrated as Catherine and Aurora worked in tandem.

“As a handler, you have to train based on the dog,” Mike said. “There’s an instinct in the dog.”

There’s a fine line between herding and becoming predatory, he explained. A handler can spend months working on commands — called “flanks.” “Come-by” is an order to move clockwise; “away to me” reverses the route.

The canines occasionally get so immersed in their work and fixated on the sheep that they forget their flanks.

That’s when a strong handler must break the animal’s concentration and regain control, often with a firm command such as “go to ground” that gives the dog pause, he said.

Aurora cuts sweeping, curved paths through the grass, prodding sheep from a distance with a rock-solid stare. Nearly the entire flock bends its route to her will, save for Rambo, an aptly named Dorper ram with chunky curls, on loan from a North Pole owner. He’s a bit of a problem, a loner who refuses to stay with the herd. Instead, he sticks like glue to Catherine, then Mike, shunning the flock for human companionship. In the vernacular of sheep herders, Rambo, who was bottle-fed as a bum lamb, is “sticky,” Mike explained.

After Aurora’s task is complete, she races back to her handler in graceful, long leaps. She lays in the cool grass, eyes intent on Catherine for fresh orders.

“She’s a pretty good farm dog,” Catherine assessed. “She doesn’t do stuff in a pretty way, but she gets the job done.”

That drive to work is part of the intensity Mike and Catherine love about border collies — which have in turn become part of the family’s glue.

The couple took a chance on Alaska four years ago, moving north from Illinois.

A job opening for the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service caught Catherine’s eye in 2004. Alaska sounded exciting, a door to new opportunities. She applied figuring the chances were slim they’d want a resource manager from corn and soybean country.

But they did.

Catherine moved up quickly, with Mike following six months later. As soon as the couple signed on as homeowners, Catherine turned her energy to locating a puppy.

“I really wanted an agility dog, and I wanted a border collie because I just love them,” she said. “I like the intensity and their high activity level. They have a lot of drive and they always want to please.”

Examining a litter of two-week-old pups in Fairbanks, Catherine bonded to a sweet little female. In a serendipitous stroke, the pup was the only one not spoken for.

That puppy grew into Aurora, a blue-merle beauty with an overriding desire to please. She soon cemented her position as an integral part of the family, earning a role in the her owners’ nuptials.

Aurora bore the wedding rings down the aisle at a July 2005 ceremony, carrying a symbol of unity and serving as one herself.

Catherine said Mike didn’t need much convincing to allow the pooch a wedding job.

“He doesn’t have a choice. They come with me,” she laughed.

But in all seriousness, the family isn’t complete without the canines.

“Mike enjoys the dogs. He complains about them every once in a while, but when you’re not watching, he’s petting them, playing with them.”

Now Mike and Catherine are breeding border collies — a new litter should be ready by Christmas. Catherine is cautious, though, about assessing the breed as good pets.

“They can make good pets if they go to the right families that are willing to work with them and maybe give them a job to do,” she said.

They’ve also added Koyuk, an Estrela Mountain Dog, as a guardian for the sheep flock. Now a cuddly, gentle four-month-old ball of thick fur, Koyuk should develop the breed’s inherent ability to assess threats and drive off dangerous interlopers like wolves, bear and moose, even stray wild dogs.

Along with puppies, Alpenglow offers obedience and herding training as well as board-in troubleshooting.

And of course, there are the sheep.

Mike and Catherine quickly found that Alaska isn’t the easiest place to build a flock.

“We’ve just been picking up whatever we can find for sale,” Catherine said. Sheep can’t be imported through Canada because of concerns about scrapies, a central nervous system disease. “Right now with the border being closed to Canada, unless you fly or barge them up, which is really expensive, you’re kind of stuck with what’s here. Eventually we want to start a more serious, purebred herd,” she added.

They’ve found a decent market exists for sheep meat and wool.

Shearing netted some reasonable wool that Catherine turned over to friends who spin. For high-quality, salable wool, sheep should be covered with blankets through the winter to keep out stray straw, food and dirt. They’ll blanket the animals this year and should have good fleeces in 2009.

“Next year, they’re for sale,” Catherine said.

To build a herd, Catherine and Mike are holding back female lambs to breed and selling most of the male lambs for slaughter. Already, they have a waiting list for meat.

“I wanted the sheep to herd, but I enjoy just having them around, too,” Catherine said. “If they can pay for their upkeep and actually make a little bit of money, that’s great.”