We were in the middle of nowhere when the dog pulled up,
like a thoroughbred at a high fence. She placed her behind firmly on the
ground, dug her claws into the earth, and crouched, trembling like an aspen. I
guessed what had caused it – those blasted bird-scarers. They sound like gunshots and can be heard
anywhere in open country around the town.
They go off at regular intervals and the dog is simply frightened out of
her wits by them. Goodness alone knows why it necessary to use them in January,
when there are precious few crops to protect, except turnips and Brussels
sprouts and I’m not sure birds feast on them.
The walk had started off promisingly. The sun was shining down benevolently from an
almost colourless sky, and the dog had trotted nimbly behind me as we strolled
together across a vast field, ploughed for the winter, on which a family of
swans reposed as a more attractive alternative to freezing their rumps off in
the river. We had negotiated the field
without difficulty when we reached the gate at the end and I attached her
lead. We turned right and headed into
the dazzling sun towards the riverside path and the golf course, either
providing a picturesque route back home. The road is narrow and several cars
whizzed by within inches of us. No doubt
the dog didn’t like that, either. The bird-scaring explosions were the last
straw. At this point, she refused to budge an inch. I pulled on the lead, but the only effect of
that was slow strangulation.
I turned about and headed back the way we had come. She accompanied me willingly and I breathed a
sigh of relief. We made it back to the
farmer’s field and the swans when another volley of shots rang out and the dog
once again adopted her passive mode. I looked wildly about me. We were miles from home, and now she wouldn’t
move in any direction. The one we hadn’t
tried, the north, was impossible because a motorway was in the way. She’d trodden east, west and south and had
stopped each time. There was nothing else for it: I had no choice. I picked her
up and carried her in my arms. She was quite content to be carried, cradled
like an infant, nose an inch from my face and little paws sticking straight up
in the air. I managed a hundred yards before my dicky shoulder started playing
up and I had to set her down. She weighs
just twenty-six pounds, but it felt like three hundred. There she sat, immobile
as Lot ’s wife, the look on her face seeming to
sum up her position - “You’re running out of ideas, chum, you’d better think of
something else.” I did. I extracted my mobile telephone from my coat
pocket and rang my wife. “Bring the car to the corner of the golf course road
and pick us up there. I’ll try and coax
her to the pick-up point. Please hurry.”
The dog seemed to understand the main context, if not the precise language, of
the conversation, because she bounded happily along at my side until we reached
the farm gate. My wife took a mere fifteen minutes to appear. When the dog recognised the car and who was
driving it, she leapt and frolicked in sheer unbridled delight. Away in the woods, the bird-scarers were
going off like machine-guns, but she cared not one jot. She had been rescued, and had been spared
further torture from her inconsiderate and demanding master. To paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Man has
his will – but dog has her way.”
