Erin Fredrichs/Tribune

Don the border collie drools excitedly as his owner, Malcolm Charlton, works with Nell, the family's female sheepdog, and a herd. Charlton and his wife, Mary Starr, have entered three of their five border collies in the working sheepdog trial at the New Mexico State Fair tonight. "It's kind of addicting," Starr says. "Once you get good, you want to keep going with it."

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SOCORRO — Fly, a 3-year-old border collie, trots through the gate, pauses and trains her gaze on 17 sheep across the pasture. You can sense her instincts kicking in as much as the targeted sheep can.

For the next 20 minutes or so, Fly won't let those sheep out of her sight. It's just days before the annual working sheepdog competition at the New Mexico State Fair, and Fly is out on a sunny morning for a round of practice with her handler, Sandy Kieft of Socorro.

Fly and Kieft's other dog, Bess, will be among the border collies competing tonight in four classes. The dogs will race the clock to guide the sheep through an obstacle course - no stragglers - and into a pen.

On Friday, Fly was put through her paces in a grassy one-acre field along a drainage-ditch road on the east side of Socorro.

"Way!" Kieft shouts and Fly races off, swinging out wide of the sheep in a counterclockwise direction until she outflanks the flock. "Lie down!" Kieft instructs, and Fly stops. "Walk up," Kieft commands in a less urgent tone, and Fly follows the anxious flock, matching its uneasy pace. Before long, Fly guides all 17 sheep into a pen in the middle of the field and Kieft closes the gate.

Then it's another round of drills, with Fly off in the pasture, in her element. Time for a break. Kieft yells "That'll do!" and the dog snaps out of her trance and dashes to Kieft's side.

"That's the best command," Kieft says.

It probably won't be that easy tonight in the Horseshow Arena when the chess game of dog vs. flock can take on the drama of a theater troupe's opening-night performance. First, it will be in an enclosed space, not an open pasture under a blue sky. And second, there will be an audience, which can break a dog's concentration.

Mary Starr Charlton, who trains three border collies - Don, Ty and Nell - in Santa Fe with her husband, Malcolm, says a dog can get spooked easily in the big arena. Ty, 6, got rattled the first time Charlton sent him to the rail closest to the crowd. And the click-click of cowboy boot heels once broke Ty's concentration, she said.

Sometimes it might seem that the dog isn't focused or isn't listening, but that's not necessarily the case, Charlton said. Sometimes the dog wants to go with his gut and, like a quarterback on a football field, overrule the coach on the sidelines during the heat of competition.

Kieft agrees: "When a dog doesn't take a command, it's not that they didn't hear it. They just have a different agenda."

Charlton sees their little minds working: "They'll say, `Are you sure you want me to go that way? You sure? Because they're going to get away if I go that way.' "

Sometimes, though, a dog can have an off day, and nothing will get those sheep through the chute or into the pen.

"That's what makes this sport so fun. You never know what you'll get," Kieft said. "Sometimes it's wonderful; sometimes it's impossible."

Kieft's older dog is the one she started with about seven years ago. Bess - like Fly, black and white but with a longer coat - is 11 now. This will probably be her last State Fair competition. She's got a titanium-fortified tibia in her right hind leg. That surgery was in February. Her eyes are starting to cloud up, too. And, like with hitters in baseball, a herding dog's eyes are often more important than their wheels.

Kieft says Bess gets a lot done by flashing the whites of her eyes as she glances from side to side. "She has particularly expressive eyes."

Charlton says a good dog can reunite a split flock simply by staring at the sheep in each bunch until the halves return to a whole. The gaze is powerful.

"It's like staring at somebody till they turn their head," she said.

Bess isn't nearly as frisky as Fly is. Fly has gray freckles, like an outbreak of measles, on a face that's masked half in black. But look closely and you'll notice that some of those marks are scars, which come from her neurotic habit of trying to chew through her pen. She tends to get spooked by thunderstorms and the blasting in the mountains west of Socorro, Kieft said.

Bess is the opposite: calm, experienced. She has a reputation as an extremely methodical worker when she herds. She's simply never in a hurry and has a gentle touch. (She has won a couple of titles herding ducks.)

"She's so quiet," Kieft says. "She's sooo slow."

Bess has four state fair ribbons to her credit. She took third last year in the ranch competition, which is the third level. Fly was second.

The contrast between Bess and the more coltish Fly is obvious. And that's a challenge to the woman carrying the shepherd's crook.

"It's like the difference between driving a sports car and driving a bus," said Kieft, whose day job is research manager for one of the laboratories at New Mexico Tech. (Her husband, Tom, heads the biology department at Tech.)

During training, the handler and dog build trust. Kieft recalls the tipping point in the early days with Bess when it all seemed to click for the dog.

"There was that moment when Bess realized that I wasn't just yelling at her, but that we each had the same objective and that we were part of the same team," Kieft said. "There was an enlightenment." She pauses and smiles. "It was a brief moment."

Observers often ask what incentives are used to train a border collie. Kieft said it's pretty much a matter of nurturing hundreds of years of breeding and instinct and letting it do its thing.

"Their reward is that they get to be in control of the sheep," Kieft said. "It's not for a piece of dried liver or a treat. They're the happiest when they have access to and can be in control of the sheep."

Fly's Friday workout is coming to an end. She has twice guided the flock through the obstacle course and into the holding pen like a pro. She has worked up a good pant.

"That'll do!" Kieft shouts, and Fly whips around and dashes back to her handler's side.

Kieft leads Fly back to the front pasture. "Do you want some water?" Kieft asks Fly.

Kieft flips over a black plastic tub and fills it a couple of inches deep with water. Instead of drinking the water, Fly steps into the tub and curls up in it.

That'll do.