January 9th 2008

The dog in the paper is said to flow from the trap at 40mph. The picture alongside the story shows a handsome brown dog wearing two collars. I’m not sure why two collars, but then any dog that fast can presumably wear as many collars as he likes. Like the hound here & myself, he appears to be quite indolent when he’s not winning races. He rises early, but simply to breakfast on toast & soup. His only exercise is a two mile walk & a 300 metre gallop on the straight. The hound on the sofa at ten years old does more than that & so do I, though I do without the gallop. I’d love to know how fast the gently snoring couch-hound can move. She certainly has almost caught a hind now & then. Maybe I’ll organise a time trial on the sands one day; it might be difficult, since she only runs in a circle with me at the middle.

I’d left the hound behind to go out for air between squalls (she hates weather), but the crofter, the Highland woman, her dog, the one with the same name as the postman’s baby (the old one that is. Postman, not baby. We have a new postman now. I don’t think there’s any connection.) : that dog loups up behind me & insists on tagging along a way, flushing snipe & looking round at me, tongue hanging, white tail-plume aloft, as though we’re partners. In these cold January days, with snow on the hills, I’d like to think he can also feel the spring just ahead of us or behind the old oak trunk, somewhere there. But I guess he simply needs to stretch his legs like me, & I’m his alibi for wandering away from the croft. We stand & look out at the bay, curlews & all, with not a word passing between us, a companionable silence as dusk gathers itself, with a squall moving in across the Atlantic. We turn at the same time to get back before the sleet, but it overtakes us anyway as we knew it would. At the byre, the slates of the house over by are turned gold in the sulphurous & nicotine light of the whirling weather front & the hillside bracken a scarlet as deep as any autumn rowan berry.

So the short days pass & the dog & I part company at the door – me for a dram, him for chasing a pickup moving along the hill to the croft house.