The Great Good Dog : NOP’S HOPE, <i> By Donald McCaig (Crown: $20; 240 pp.)</i> : DUMB-BELL OF BROOKFIELD, POCONO SHOT, AND OTHER GREAT DOG STORIES, <i> By John Taintor Foote, illustrations by Gordon Allen (Lyons & Burford: $24.95; 336 pp.)</i>

The authors of these two books are separated by a couple of generations. John Taintor Foote was born in 1881; Donald McCaig nearly 60 years later--but they have a couple of things in common that should be noted at the outset. One is that both books believe in the great dog. The more than exemplary, uncanny heart and intelligence and drive for work that quite eclipse the mere cleverness and devotion celebrated in this century in stories about Lassie and Lad of Sunnybank Farm are at the heart of most of Foote’s stories, and of “Nop’s Hope.” And both books acknowledge in different ways the authority of the great dog and the honor due him.

In Foote’s stories, especially about setters, greatness is figured as uneclipsable; the great dog is never outfaced. In the first of the title stories, “Dumb-bell of Brookfield,” the great setter Dumb-bell becomes, while hunting, lost in a snowstorm. Dumb-bell is not at this point a young dog, and he is hunting in an unfamiliar terrain, an old pine wood. As the storm strikes, driving his human companions indoors, he is on point, having scented a grouse. The storm rages, Dumb-bell grows weaker, but stays on point--and is found the next morning, frozen to death, but still on point. The grouse he is pointing is still there.

This is one figuration of genius, as of a courage and will that are immune to vicissitudes; I have known dogs who tempt you to think in this way. But in “Nop’s Hope,” things are otherwise, and it is therefore, in this beautiful and canny book, a more problematic matter to honor the great dog. The dog is Hope, a Border Collie, son of the great Nop (of McCaig’s earlier wonderful sheep dog novel, “Nop’s Trials.”) His handler is 26-year-old Penny Burkholder. (In both of these books, a handler, or trainer, is someone who is in some ways the dog’s master but as deeply the dog’s servant, like a tennis coach or any teacher who is aware of the awesome possibilities of the activity.)

When we meet Penny, she is on the road, competing in sheep-dog trials. She is in a sense an allegorical figure, having no history besides her quest, which is to win, with Hope, the National Handlers’ Trials, a kind of sheep-dog equivalent of the Olympics. She seems to be made all of absolutes. She is given to the adamantine, as when she says, not callously but passionately after a ewe has been killed in order to try to save her lamb: “It’s a mother’s job to die for their young. That’s what mothers do. Mother won’t die for her baby isn’t worth a damm in this world or the next.” When she says this we don’t know that Penny’s husband and small daughter have been killed in a truck wreck, nor that at least some of Penny’s adamantine drive is a drive to forget, or at least not remember so much--”when I’m out in that trial field . . . I don’t have to be me . . . and at night, when I lay down, I’m too tired to dream.”

The wife of a farmer who sees Penny work a dog feels that “somehow she might have done something different, something cold and bright and beautiful.” Penny’s genius with the dogs is true genius, not a symptom. It shines throughout the book, but especially perhaps at that farmer’s place, where Penny starts helping him with his farm dog Shep, and the farmer “heard Shep talk, clear as a bell. He wondered why he hadn’t heard him before.”

But to say this much about Penny’s quest is to obscure the central and glorious presence of Hope. Hope talks in this book. I don’t mean that Penny interprets his gestures, but rather that he is given dialogue. Sometimes the dialogue is clearly understood by Penny, as when she tells him about the awesome difficulties of the National Handler’s trials, and he says he can do it--”If I am handled correctly.” She says: “I’m not so bad!” He says: “Thy commands come late or too soon and thee (CQ?) fail to read thy sheep.” At other times she isn’t interested, as when he says, “I will guard thee from ghosts,” and she tells him to lie down and stop padding around.

There are various possible responses to this, from the psychologist’s favorite cry, “Anthropomorphism!,” to the more ordinary person’s cry, “Dogs don’t talk,” or, perhaps, the objection of some dog trainers, which might be, “Dogs don’t talk like that.” The psychologist and the person who has never worked dogs in a serious way simply don’t know what they are talking about, unlike McCaig, who has run dogs at national level trials, but the dog trainer’s possible objection is more interesting: Dogs talk, but not like that. But what is not merely interesting but uncannily skillful here is that Hope’s dialogue bears the same relationship to real exchanges between dogs and handlers (these are, remember, people who are both masters and servants to dogs) that virtually any dialogue bears to the talk it represents. Hope’s lines are no more and no less literally true than those of any human character in any movie, which is not to say that the dialogue is “metaphorical,” but rather that the truth here is poetic, true to, faithful to the world it sings. (Hope’s talking to Penny is not only controversial in the world of human opinion. His father, Nop, says, “When we talk, they learn more about us than is proper.”)

As I said earlier, it turns out in this wonderful novel that neither a great handler nor a great dog are invulnerable; both can be over-faced and thus shown, for the moment at least, what hell is like. To say more would spoil the story for you, though it would take more than a reviewer’s prattling to spoil this splendid novel. McCaig, who with “Nop’s Trials” showed us what might be possible when the words “serious” and “dog story” were put together, has done it again.

“Dumb-bell of Brookfield” is edited by Foote’s son, Timothy Foote. The world in Foote’s dog stories is at once less and more human, or at least in some ways more “ordinary,” than the one in “Nop’s Hope.” As I have said, a major difference is that, here, great dogs cannot be over-faced, discouraged, burnt out--indeed, in the last story of the book, “Pocono Shot,” even a hatchet blow that virtually severs the dog over the shoulders fails not only to kill him, but to slow his work in the field. Pocono Shot has a scar from the incident, but is otherwise the dog he was. Having a badly broken leg does not stop the tiny puppy, Allegheny, from doing battle with a mechanical rabbit. Jing has a torn pad, but he runs the field trial and wins the championship.

Foote’s dogs can be killed, but they cannot be pitied or shamed. Even when the mistress of Brookfield stops the master and the kennel manager from putting down the ugly, snarling bulldog cross (mockingly named Buttercup), the reader is invited to feel not pity but admiration--and the mistress herself seems to be motivated at least as much by a sense of challenge as by pity for the brute, who later saves her life.

The reader is not unmoved by Dumb-bell on his last point, frozen in the storm, but at no point is that modern bath of pity that allows people to feel superior to dogs encouraged. It is not that the tender emotions are here absent or discouraged, but rather that the emotion of admiration for great dogs that these stories invoke, an admiration that within these stories compels the human characters deeply and surely, is a more tender emotion than pity. In its grip, the human characters are more vulnerable to the dogs than anyone can be when merely pitying; this is love, the fullblown thing. Love, admiration and awe lead the narrator of “Jing” never to hunt again with any other dog, any lesser dog, after he loses Jing. In this world there are one-man dogs, and one-dog men.

These stories are not about sharing suffering with dogs, which makes them very anti-modern. They are, rather, even in the case of “Trub’s Diary,” about an unrepentant bull terrier, and “The White Grouse,” about deciding that a lesser hunting dog is better because with such dogs the birds have more of a chance, about sharing joy, the dog’s joy in his or her won mastery. Hence the authorities, the beings who have power, ability and transcendence, are the dogs. The idea of acknowledging a dog’s authority to do anything but suffer is so alien to many ways of thinking that the impact of these stories may not be felt by those who cannot conceive it.

I called the stories anti-modern for their celebration of the authority of dogs, but not old-fashioned. They are in another way old-fashioned, that is, the current of social and political chatter in them is not nowadays terribly acceptable. In particular, in “Pocono Shot,” the vote for women and the reading of Russian literature leads to a mixing of gender lines and to rape, murder, and to the dog’s being nearly cleaved in two by a hatchet. (“Pocono Shot” was first published in 1924, before the Cold War, the McCarthy era and the Berlin Wall. “Russian” here means something more like “effete” and hasn’t anything to do with the red menace.) Those details are, however, not the meat of the story, they are simply the accidental and local expression of a quarrel at least as old as Xenophon’s complaints about the Sophists, between the Bounty Bumpkin, for whom an awareness of hard-earned skill (in, say, writing) and of the consequences of actions, is central, and the City Slicker, who is repelled by what looks limited, narrow, even brutal.

In this story, the brutality belongs to the city slickers, though there is more than one murder, one of them committed by the quintessential city slicker, the other committed by the dog’s true owner, in revenge for the terrible wound inflicted on the dog. An unsympathetic reader might say that simple hypocrisy, as common by a trout stream as in Manhattan, is the source of the evil in the story, and there would be some justice in this, but it is a story worth attending to, apart from the wonderful creation of the character of Pocono Shot himself, for its concept of the dichotomy sometimes called “city versus country” for its vision of what “nature” means in one American tradition.

The strength of both of these books is in their possession of a genuinely moral, rather than merely moralistic, vision of possible relations between people and dogs, relations in which the dogs are full participants. McCaig is more alert than Foote to the problematic of that relationship, is the more worried and philosophical writer, the one more congenial to a taste developed on particular ideas of fiction. Both books are indispensable.