Long long ago, I spent part of 1977 and 1980 in Turkey collecting sheep guarding dogs.
I had lived in Turkey so I knew the language and the countryside and the customs. What I
didnt know anything about was dogs.
I wasnt collecting because I wanted to own an Anatolian Shepherd. I was
collecting because two colleagues at Hampshire College and I wanted to start a sheep
research station, and we had decided that our first project would be testing Old World
sheep guarding dogs on American flocks. Having lived in Turkey, I was a natural to do the
collecting in that country. Our thought was that we would acquire likely-looking pups,
since those would be easier than adults to handle and transport, and bring them back to
Massachusetts to breed. It all seemed quite simple. Id travel around eastern
Anatolia; bargain for the pups that struck my fancy, and bring them back. Ive always
liked dogs and this project sounded like fun. Looking back, I can say that it was the most
interesting project Ive ever done. But it wasnt always fun, and it sure
wasnt easy. I think that it would have been impossible, if it hadnt been for
my companion, guardian and native informant on every trip: Ahmet Kilic. During the time I
lived in Turkey, Id been adopted into a family of antique rug dealers. The first
time I wanted to travel to the East, my adoptive father assigned Ahmet, his younger
brother (who was close to sixty at the time) as my duenna. Ahmet and I had made rug buying
trips around eastern Anatolia together, and had discovered that we shared a love of
travel, a sense of humor, and a willingness to put up with rough conditions. We traveled
by bus and train, staying in cheap hotels, and acquiring huge (and extremely heavy)
bundles of rugs. So when I decided to look for dogs rather than rugs, the first thing I
did was ask Ahmet if he would be willing to go with me.
Our first collecting trip was a learning experience, to say the least I also
lost eleven pounds, since I often missed things like sleeping and eating. Its an
understatement to say that I didnt really know what I was doing. I knew one thing,
which was that we would find working dogs in areas where there were still wolves; i.e.,
the wildest, most isolated and most mountainous villages. Our project had not yet received
any funding, so this was done on the cheap. We traveled by bus, which had the upside of
costing almost nothing and the downside of going to towns, but not the mountain villages
we needed to reach. Probably these were some of the reasons why I couldnt find any
pups. However, I am nothing if not persistent, so I kept on pushing north and east, until
we came to Kars, where we were up against what was then the Soviet border and could go no
further. Here, by repeated interrogations of rug dealers and their pals, we met a Kurdish
villager who said that there were two pups in his village which he thought might be
available for purchase. We immediately hired a taxi to take him and us to his village
where, while a posse of men dragged the unwilling pups out from their hiding place under a
house, the village women dragged all their tapestries out in the hope that Ahmet would buy
them. I will skip over the trip home except to say that we managed to get the pups
(brother and sister, named Gneghis and Hatun) back to Ankara by bus, in a vegetable crate,
and I air freighted them back to Massachusetts where, after 48 hours in a crate, Genghis,
who I apparently had named accurately, emerged and instantly grabbed hold of an adult dog
(a small one, it must be admitted) and could not be pried off until he was lassoed and
hoisted into the air. At this time, Genghis had probably been weaned about a month
earlier, and was still in the small fuzzy stage so that the net effect was of an adorable
toy who also happened to be a crazed killer.
It turned out that Genghis and Hatun were not Anatolian Shepherds. I had somehow gone
past the borders of that breed and had imported into the U.S. what may have been the first
Caucasian Ovtcharkas to ever enter the country. This incredibly tough breed of dogs,
stretching across parts of the Soviet Union, Iran and Afghanistan, bred to run alongside a
horse all day, seem to have a built in desire to kill every other canid in the world. In
fact, they were good with people, and all the students who worked with them loved them
as did I. But not only could they get over a five foot fence from a standing start,
they were not trustworthy left alone with sheep. The one and only time we had them out
with a flock for observation, we watched with horror as a ewe tried to nose Genghis aside
to get at some hay he was lying on, whereupon with no warning he reached up and bit off
half her face.
On my next collecting trip, I was a bit more experienced. And, we were getting to be
known in the Anatolian Shepherd community (although goodness only knows why since I still
had not collected any Anatolian Shepherds), as a result of which Quinn and Marilyn Harned,
Anatolian Shepherd lovers from Alpine, California, had generously offered financial help
with my trip in exchange for increasing the breeds gene pool in the U.S. Plus,
through them I had made contact with Natalka Czartoryska, head of the British Anatolian
Shepherd Club, who was going to be collecting dogs in Turkey at the same time that I would
be there. Natalka and I had corresponded and made a necessarily vague plan to meet in
Ankara. Necessarily vague because of the state of the roads, travel and the fact that
neither one of us would have easy access to a telephone. I did give her the rug
shops number and my adoptive fathers address, and hoped her Turkish would be
adequate for basic communication. It was. What follows are my recollections, a quarter
century after the fact, of collecting with Natalka. We only did one short trip together,
and I didnt keep my usual journal (anyone whos travelled with Natalka will
understand that at the end of a day with her, one simply collapsed into bed and
couldnt possibly stay awake long enough to make a journal entry), so apologies in
advance for any vagueness or errors. But the essence of Natalka has stayed with me
all this time. She was a force of nature, and I was in awe of her.
It was the wettest spring anyone could remember in Turkey. We met on a street in my
neighborhood in Ankara, where Natalka arrived in what I recall as a Landrover, along with
two much younger men, who were driving and assisting in various ways. Probably, they had
signed on for the sake of adventure and, after wrestling the Landrover through the mud of
various Turkish villages, had had it with adventure for a while. ,Both they and the car
were in dire need of rest and repair, and they made a non-negotiable demand that they and
the car spend some time in Ankara. Natalka, who had more energy than four or five average
people, was totally unexhausted and was having none of this, so she asked me if I wanted
to share the cost of a taxi to go to a village she had seen, where there was an adult
female she wanted. Plus, we could go to some other villages along the way, and maybe
Id get lucky. So the two of us strongarmed some unlucky taxi driver into driving us
into the country at the rate of $100 (U.S.) per day, which sounded exorbitant but turned
out to be pathetically inadequate, given what we put the poor guy through and what the
trip did to his vehicle. I did collect dogs that spring (more on that later), but my
memory doesnt recall any dogs that I got while I was with Natalka. I do remember
that she got her bitch; I cant imagine Natalka failing to get what she wanted.
Id been told that Natalka had been a member of the Polish aristocracy before she
emigrated to England, and it made sense. She had the bearing and directness of that class.
She was someone I liked; someone I enjoyed spending time with (although too much time
would have left me exhausted), but she was always in charge.
Heres my favorite recollection of Natalka. The taxi driver had managed to get his
cab through the mud to an isolated village which Natalka was determined to visit. But the
cab could only get so far. Ultimately, we had to get out and squelch through thick mud for
the last few hundred yards. I remember that Natalka was well equipped with sturdy British
Wellingtons; lacking boots, I had ordinary shoes on and the mud kept trying to pull them
off me. As we approached the village, making loud sucking noises at each step, three or
four large dogs started running towards us, barking aggressively. Natalka saw me hesitate
and Im sure she sensed my fear, so she gave me the following instructions.
"Dont stop walking, keep your arms at your side, and fix your eyes on the
middle distance." I think that I was more in awe of Natalka than I was afraid of the
dogs, so I obeyed. And we were fine. Ive given the same advice to others numerous
times since although, in my own defense, I have to say that since village dogs were
essentially never immunized against rabies, my fears were reasonable. But Natalka was
fearless (Ive learned from her online journal that she also had been inoculated
against rabies), and a great role model as a collector. I remember us riding back to
Ankara triumphantly, with Natalkas big bitch in the back seat, the taxi
drivers terror (both for his skin and his upholstery) notwithstanding.
Of course, we talked continuously throughout the long trip. What Natalka brought home
to me was the difficulty faced by British residents who wanted to import dogs. At that
time, the U.K. was officially rabies-free and the government had the irrational and cruel
rule that any dog that had been abroad had to spend six months in government-approved
quarantine facilities. Government-approved didnt mean that these facilities were
either good or caring. It was a sensory deprivation environment for the dogs, who lacked
exercise and companionship, and an agony for the owners. Natalka had lost at least one
valuable dog this way, and she would have to put all the dogs she brought back into
quarantine at significant expense and risk. (Plus, being Natalka, all the time she spent
visiting them.) It was easy to understand why people would hire small boats to land them
and their dogs illegally on some isolated coast, and I felt my luck at being able to
simply put my dogs onto an airplane and have them cleared to me without their even passing
through Customs (a loophole that was taken advantage of by at least one person who
imported Tibetan mastiffs in cages with specially built hollow floors holding significant
quantities of drugs).