Regular readers of our blog were treated a few weeks back to the story of Fly, a seven-year-old sheepdog “owned” by Donald McCaig. McCaig, the author A Useful Dog and the soon-to-be-released Mrs. and Mrs. Dog: Our Trials, Travels, Adventures, and Epiphanies, continues the story of Fly in this new piece.

Noticing many sheepdog handlers wear shooting glasses to eliminate glare, a novice asked top handler Scott Glenn, what color glasses she should order. “Rose-colored,” Scott deadpanned.

I ask a lot of my dogs: I want an intimate working partnership. I want them to handle any breed of sheep on any terrain in blowing snow, scorching heat, or moonless night. I want them to be politely indifferent to other dogs and mannerly in airports, office buildings, packed elevators, other people’s homes, and public places. I can only ask this much if I can see my dogs; if I’ve put those rose-colored glasses aside. Seeing them is easier said than done.

I was making progress with Fly. She was getting around the trial course and she was more mannerly (not a high bar: she’d been a biting, hysterical, gyp who didn’t know where she lived or where she belonged, clinging desperately to a mistaken image of who she just might be). If she’d gone to a pet home she would have been put down.

Welshman Aled Owens won the World Trial I describe in Mr & Mrs Dog, and he would teach a sheepdog clinic in sunny Georgia. T’weren’t sunny. After hypothermia twice at dog trials, you’d think I’d have learned: PACK FOR THE WORST. It rained cold rain.

Aled trained in a 20-acre field. Novice dogs dragged parachute cord so they could be caught, but he and their handlers did lot of running until each young dog settled. At my age, I admire those who can run. At all.

At my turn, I told Aled, “She’s a seven-year-old open-trial dog who has soured. She’s come partway back but isn’t there yet. Tell me what you see.” At seven years old, trained sheepdogs are well settled into their method and by eight, you won’t be able to change it much. But Fly had had a method at one time. She’d won difficult trials. So I wasn’t so much teaching something new as I was summoning up and rephrasing old skills in a new context.

In our first month Fly wouldn’t work at all. When she started, tentatively, I sent her after the ewes every morning, wherever they were on 160 rumpled acres. No commands. I let Fly figure it out. Her pleasure in the work reawakened, I started adding commands. For nearly a year she’d take commands at home but when they came hot and heavy at a trial, she’d quit. She couldn’t take the pressure. Fly’s theory: I’ve done everything I can and it hasn’t been enough so why break my heart trying?

I had to build her up to take more pressure, while reducing pressure where practicable. Last fall, at the Virginia trials, I’d leave home in the morning, drive 3 hours, run Fly and drive three hours home so she’d be back in her own bed every night—just so that trialing would seem more like “doing a little farm work”. At trials, I gave as few commands as possible—if she was wildly off line for a panel, I didn’t use the deluge of hard commands she needed to hit it. If she was ready to quit, I retired while she was still trying. I set up panels at home and insisted she make them. If she quit at 200 yards, we tried again at 100. Six days a week.

I took her out into the big world of people, dogs, airports, unfamiliar scents, sights and sounds. I trusted her a little more
than I was comfortable with and she’s repaying me. The issue isn’t “can I control her?” but “Must I watch her every moment?”

When we returned to the farm after a week in Seattle, Fly jumped out of the car. I swear I could see her realization: “Oh, so this is my HOME! I will always come back HERE.” Can’t blame her for being slow to figure that out. This home is her sixth.

So I work her. Aled watches. “Do you see how she’s makes that little move, after she’s downed, to hold the pressure?” The sheep are heavy to the exhaust and Fly doesn’t want to go off balance (holding them to me). She trusts HER more than she trusts US. Aled says I’m putting too much energy in my DOWN, that I need to make it more neutral. That one’ll go in the brainbox for later consideration. Lifetime habit, different use of the down. But Aled Owens did win that World Trial and I sure as hell didn’t.

Getting the best out of what the sheepdog coach has to offer is hard because I (and perhaps you) ask our question with an answer already in mind.

I had expected magical advice about de-souring. “Hmmm, better train this gyp in the last quarter of the new moon”.

What I got was useful practical how-to’s. “Flank her around you, turning so you face her. . . . She’s reluctant to be pulled off balance on her comebye side. . . . She needs a better ‘down’. . . . She doesn’t like downing on the drive.” Practical observations from a Master. “Pick up the jacket. Drop the Jacket. Pick up the jacket…”

Advanced sheepdog clinics and dog trials are dog safe: the dogs are mannerly, handlers are dog-savvy. In thirty years I’ve never seen a dogfight at a sheepdog trial. When Fly came to me, she bit people, and if she was loose she’d flee back to the house or the familiar car. Today while I watched other instructions, Fly wandered around exploring until she got bored and came back to sit beside me.

Just like all the other ordinary sheepdogs. When we think about our dogs we picture their quirks, their endearing traits, and their exceptionalisms, both good and bad. No sheepdog can ever replace another; each is unique and uniquely beloved.

But in another sense, all good sheepdogs are the same. They get the work done. While not working, they are mannerly. Fly is becoming ordinary.

Mrs. and Mrs. Dog: Our Trials, Travels, Adventures, and Epiphanies will be published in late March and is available now for pre-order.

The Louvre’s collection includes still-life paintings by the Dutch masters that render sumptuous foods—oysters in particular—with spectacular realism. One of the advantages of living in Paris is that you can simply stroll over to the Louvre and consult these works with your own eyes, in this case in the Richelieu Wing where rooms are dedicated to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch painting. There is no time better to visit a European art museum than in the “r” month of January, and I wanted to see for myself exactly what was going on with the Dutch artists and their singular obsession with oysters.

I wrote to my Dutch friend Geron de Leeuw, a food writer and chef, asking what the oyster represented to his country’s Golden Age still-life painters. He said that people believed oysters possessed aphrodisiac powers, and symbolically represented fertility and prosperity. “Rendering oysters was a bit naughty,” he added, “since they stood for sexual freedom in a time when Calvinism swept the Netherlands.”

Of course, the suggestive form of oysters adds to their sexual insinuations. In Jan Steen’s Girl Eating Oysters, an attractive young woman looks coquettishly at the viewer with an alluring smile while offering an opened oyster.

Oysters possessed other symbolic meanings, representing taste, sensuality, and the temporary pleasures of earthly existence. They are often featured in still lifes known as vanitas, lush cornucopias of foods (some barely eaten), half-finished glasses of wine, lemons with rinds peeled in a spiral signifying the unraveling of time, all caught in hyper-real stillness and masterful rendering of light as it glints off silver, glass, and perfect pools of oyster liquor.

While these paintings are stunning, I studied them for another reason: the oysters don’t look anything like the ones my father, brother, and I collected and ate during the years I grew up in New England, nor do they look like the most common oysters in France, a country famed since Roman times as Europe’s greatest oyster producer. Clearly, the seventeenh-century oysters in the paintings were rounder and flatter than the typical creuses, oysters with a cupped shell that are consumed worldwide.

Through the ages, oysters have reliably served humans. Even Neanderthals ate the original flat European oysters, probably more as “last-chance foods” rather than to bolster sexual prowess. Oyster shells have been fashioned into tools, jewelry, and false teeth; ground up for mortar; and pulverized for biomineralization to relieve osteoporosis. The oysters themselves provide zinc, iron, selenium, and vitamin B12, making them nature’s depression-fighting food. They contain the whole alphabet of vitamins as well as iodine, calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, and copper—all contributing to general nutrition and bolstering the immune system. Their omega-3 fatty acids are good for the heart. Now, what the Dutch and just about everyone else claims about oysters being an aphrodisiac is supported by scientific studies on amino acids, specifically D-aspartic acid and N-methyl-D-aspartate. It’s hardly a wonder that Henry VII held oyster orgies, Napoleon consumed them before battles, Voltaire and Rousseau ate them for inspiration, and Casanova enjoyed passing one between his lips and those of his lovers. Oysters even figure prominently in the “Party Girl Diet.”

It must be obvious that I’ve always been passionate about oysters, and now I find myself living in a true oyster-crazed country. Oysters come in all sizes and from a variety of locales—most notably, going from Normandy to the Aquitaine, Isigny, Cancale, Belon, Bourneuf, Marennes-Oléron, and Arcachon, all boasting perfect conditions for the most delectable produce. The French devour tons of oysters over Christmas and New Year’s, when 70 percent of the annual harvest is eaten. Of course, a good number of oyster lovers spend the holidays with gastroenteritis, but they don’t seem to consider it true cause-and-effect—a bad oyster—but just a bit of holiday bad luck.

I wanted to know more about the genuine European oysters, the ones in the vanitas paintings urging us to indulge earthly sensual pleasures while we still have the chance. I visited most of the major oyster-growing areas in France, including the mucky tidal estuary of the Balon River on the southern side of Brittany’s Finistere, literally land’s end, where Paul Gauguin once painted land- and seascapes. Gauguin also produced still lifes with oysters, and again the oysters resemble the original flat European variety, which many connoisseurs consider the ultimate oyster. These are now raised in the States, where they are prized for their meaty texture and the savor of sea and minerals.

While researching huîtres plates (Ostrea edulis), also known as Belons, I discovered a shocking relative, the wildest of all wild oysters, called a pied de cheval, or literally “horse’s foot.” While they share an uncanny round appearance, the oysters grow wider than a horse’s hoof. Pied de cheval can weigh as much as three pounds and live for thirty years or more, with one equivalent to six good-sized oysters. This enormous rare oyster, found in Normandy’s Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, is a specialty of certain restaurants.  Most people, including the French, have never heard of them.

I watched an interview with a French chef who, rather than describing the overall sensation of eating the oysters, focused instead on three parts of the anatomy of the pied de cheval as if each were a wine. This oyster is perfectly equilibrated for flavor. The liver is soft, creamy, and sweet; the foot is muscular, musty, and chewy with fine, long-lasting taste; and the mantle, the tissue at the lip, is pleasantly bitter. The chef prepared the enormous oyster by cooking it very delicately until tepid and then adding a little cabbage and cream curry sauce.

These record-sized oysters, which have been found in the Chesapeake Bay and close to Humbolt, California, weighing in at more than eight pounds, seem almost large enough for Aphrodite, the love goddess and root of aphrodisiac, to have been conceived in. My favorite oysters are large but not huge, just a perfect mouthful. But the pied de cheval being a delicacy and an oddity intrigued me so much that I planned a trip the Bay of Saint-Michel just to see if I could find one.

I had no idea what I was doing. It’s not like you can dig these up or find them stuck to a rock, as they live in the middle of the English Channel. I hiked the shores above Grandville, a major port, and found shells from pied de cheval everywhere, along with an enormous array of wild edibles. Clam diggers were more than a mile out on the surreal stretches of sand, their dogs running free in long elliptical orbits. No one from the fishing fleet from Granville was selling pied de cheval, so I drove past Mont Saint-Michel to Cancale on the western shore of the bay. Cancale is one of France’s most famous producers of oysters, and sure enough on the north side of the port there were at least eight stands selling and opening oysters for whole families, who sat along the boat ramp and ate dozens for lunch. It was as if we were transported to the nineteenth century, when families strolled to the port and snacked on oysters. The shore was covered with lemons.

On the farthest corner on the left was an uncommonly large, ruggedly handsome vendor with black hair who displayed a crate of pied de cheval. I couldn’t believe my luck and asked, “How much are these?”

“Four euros.”

“Each?” Even if it equaled a half-dozen oysters, this rare oyster seemed expensive. “Okay, I’ll take one. How should I cook it?”

“Cook it? Oh no, you don’t cook these. That’s criminal. Here, I’ll open it for you,” he offered. “Don’t put even a drop of lemon on it. It must be eaten just as is. Nothing is better,” he assured me.

A big man like him might be able to eat a pound of oyster in a gulp, but I was taken aback. I stopped him from opening it. “I will take it with me. I want my wife to taste it too.” I walked with the oyster in hand, feeling like a Greek discus-thrower. In the afternoon, I picked up my wife, Mary, at St. Malo train station, and we headed for Brittany to enjoy the weekend by the sea. Once in the car, I introduced her to my oyster and she was suitably shocked. “He’s huge! And so beautiful. Where did you find him?”

Author M. F. K. Fisher points out in Consider the Oyster that oysters have a peculiar habit of switching sexes, so one can never be sure of the gender. I settle on “it” instead of “him.” “I didn’t find it. I bought it,” I confessed, knowing this would be a bit of a letdown.

Meanwhile, Mary was more than happy just to admire the oyster with me, but had no intention of putting any of it in her mouth. I debated whether I should put it back in the sea or eat it raw to understand the savors and textures of the different parts. It traveled with me for three days, refrigerator-hopping, until we arrived in Paris; there I knew the oyster’s fate was sealed. I set it on the counter, and each time I walked into the room it would clamp shut, making the prospect of butchering it all the more painful. Mary was appalled by the thought that the oyster had become a kind of companion.

I downed a glass of Muscadet for nerve, reflected on the Dutch paintings and vanitas, while guessing at how old the oyster was. Maybe thirty? Certainly, neither Henry VIII nor Napoleon would hesitate to eat this oyster, though “Party Girls” might. I quickly cut the abductor muscle, and the oyster soon lay open, a veritable quarry: liver, gills, and mantle along with the rest of its nutritious anatomy. I honored the rare oyster and ate the sumptuous creature raw.

Check our blog regularly for future reports from Jeffrey Greene on his search for wild edibles. His book The Golden-Bristled Boar will be available in paperback in April.

Q: Apparently most of the Concordia‘s lifeboats could not even be launched, due to the way the ship listed. Nonetheless the captain managed to escape in one of the lifeboats, claiming he tripped into it and was somehow unable to get out. Is there no “women and children first” rule—or at least “passengers first” rule—during such an evacuation? And what constitutes abandoning one’s ship?

A: Merchant seamen have followed the unwritten law of the sea for well more than a century: passengers go first into the lifeboats, usually women and children and the infirm and injured first, in part because it is easier to board lifeboats before a ship begins to list, in part because if there are not lifeboats for all (if some have been damaged by fire or collision, for example), physically fit men have the best chance of surviving atop floating wreckage.  ”Abandoning ship” means everyone leaves the ship in lifeboats:  the master leaves only after making certain everyone else is off.

Q: If a listing ship cannot launch many of its lifeboats, are they much use outside of those situations where the sinking ship remains relatively upright as it goes down?

A: Typically merchant-ship masters order lifeboats boarded and lowered before lists become so severe as to prevent launching:  in extreme cases lifeboats can be launched empty and people can swim to them.  But lifeboats can be launched efficiently even from listing ships:  those on the lower side are kept close to the deck with lines until filled and once filled those on the upper side are skidded down the hull slowly.  Lifeboats and related safety systems are designed to work in emergency situations, most of which involve ships on less than even keels.

Q: What is one likely to encounter in the 21st century lifeboat?

A: A modern lifeboat often carries more than a hundred passengers, is enclosed, provisioned with food, water, medical, and other supplies, and nowadays fitted with a diesel engine:  it has seats and open, flat spaces in which injured people may lie down.  Unlike the old open boats fitted with sails and oars, it is not expected to go very far, but instead stay near the site of the sinking and await rescue forces.

Q: Passengers climbing into lifeboats and fleeing a sinking ship has a distinctly 19th-century (or, at best, early 20th-century) ring to it. Is today’s lifeboat a mandated but never-used ornament (like the airline seat that is a “flotation device”)?

A: Modern lifeboats are used more than contemporary Americans suspect.  Recent cruise-ship disasters off Alaska (the Prinsendam), the horn of Africa (Achille Lauro), and other places I describe in Lifeboat involved everyone abandoning ship in lifeboats and awaiting rescue. The freighter Hawaiian King rescued the thousand Achille Lauro castaways after they spent twenty-four hours in lifeboats. While it will take a Court of Inquiry to explain what happened to the Costa Concordia, it appears that a 150-foot-long gash sank the ship. Consider a similar ship striking, say, a nearly submerged derelict ship floating upside down, which is a very real hazard in the mid-ocean: if it were to sink as quickly, you would have all those passengers boarding lifeboats and requiring long-distance rescue.

The cloth edition of John Stilgoe’s Lifeboat is available for a limited time at its paperback price of $18.95. This large-format (7 x 9 1/4) book with 21 period illustrations is an engrossing read or a great gift. Grab one by emailing or by calling or faxing to our toll-free numbers and mentioning this special offer.

The wild boar appears to us as something straight out of a myth. But as Jeffrey Greene learned, these creatures are very real, living by night and, despite shrinking habitats and hordes of hunters, thriving on six continents.

Greene purchased an eighteenth-century presbytery in a region of ponds and forests in northern Burgundy between the Loire and Seine Rivers of France. He soon discovered he’d moved to one of the most densely populated boar areas in Europe. Following the gift of a side of boar from a neighbor, and a dramatic early-morning encounter with a boar-hunting party and its prey, Greene became fascinated with the animal and immersed himself in the legend and the reality of the wild boar.

Although it has no natural enemies, the boar is in constant conflict with humans. Most societies consider it a pest, not only wreaking havoc on crops and livestock, but destroying golf-course greens in search of worms, even creating a hazard for drivers (hogs on the roads cause over 14,000 car accidents a year in France). It has also been the object of highly ritualized hunts, dating back to classical times.

The animal’s remarkable appearance—it can grow larger than a person, and the males sport prominent tusks, called “whetters” and “cutters”—has inspired artists for centuries; its depictions range from primitive masks to works of high art such as Pietro Tacca’s Porcellino and paintings by Velázquez and Frans Snyders. The boar also plays a unique role in myth, appearing in the stories of Hercules and Adonis as well as in the folktale Beauty and the Beast.

The author’s search for the elusive animal takes him to Sardinia, Corsica, and Tuscany; he even casts an eye to the American South, where he explores the boar’s feral-pig counterparts and descendents. He introduces us to a fascinating cast of experts, from museum curators and scientists to hunters and chefs (who share their recipes) to the inhabitants of chateaux who have lived in the same ancient countryside with generations of boars. They are all part of a journey filled with wonders and discoveries about these majestic animals the poet Robinson Jeffers called “beautiful monsters.”

“The Golden-Bristled Boar is an elegant book that looks at the landscape and ecology of what would seem to be our most inelegant natural neighbor—the star of dark paintings and angry fables, as well as, by family connection, the food of colonial America. Jeffrey Greene leads you deep in the forests of Burgundy—befriending hunters and biologists, and, along the way, bedazzling with stories of wild boar invasions throughout the swine-filled world. When you come out the other side, you are changed, not just in how you think about boars as a creature, but in how you think of them as the centerpiece of an ancient and wonderful country feast.”—Robert Sullivan Jr., author of Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants