NONFICTION - March 24, 1991

EMINENT DOGS, DANGEROUS MEN by Donald McCaig (HarperCollins: $19.95; 216 pp.). The border collie has been called “the wisest dog in the world,” and in “Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men,” Donald McCaig eagerly illustrates the accuracy of that description. The book is as much travelogue as examination, chronicling the author’s journey to Scotland to watch sheep-dog trials and purchase a collie for his Appalachian farm. The Scots McCaig meets are too familiar--they drink “wee drams” of whiskey, and practically every other adjective is “bonny”--but their dogs, and the animals’ feats, are not. There’s Bert, keeping sheep in line according to instructions whistled by a shepherd 2 1/2 miles away; Sirrah, the great canine love of the 19th-Century Scottish writer James Hogg, and McCaig’s nearly $2,000 acquisition, Gael--small, shy, and “all gingery” like her new master. Like McCaig’s “Nop’s Trials,” “Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men” is an ode to an unusual kind of fellowship.