Welcome to "Man with two dogs" - the family website for dog owners and dog walkers.

This is my countryside diary which appears each Saturday in the Courier & Advertiser newspaper.

Inka

January 21st, 2006

NOT CONTENT with thinking he’s an outsize, black West Highland terrier I fear that Inka may now be thinking he’s a cat.  He has taken to catching field mice, and he brings their limp little bodies into the house and tenderly offers them to the Doyenne.  He cannot understand why his gifts attract so much abuse. 

In reality, of course, he’s a Labrador Retriever and you can be sure the original breeders had something more substantial in mind for retrieval than tiny mice.  The mice are not quite so irritating as the pebbles which he picks up and ‘sooks’ like mint imperials, and drops in dark corners of the house to be ‘sooked’ up by the Dyson with alarming, rattling explosions.

I’m seeing all the signs of approaching spring.  Activity at the bird table is increasing and a pair of goldfinches has reappeared in the garden.  I hear the woodpeckers drumming in the woods round the ‘big hoose’, and they have started to visit our peanut feeders again.  At this time of year they arrive around mid-morning, as does at least one red squirrel.

I can easily waste half an hour and more sitting at the window, drinking my coffee, and watching the goings-on.  There is an ebb and flow in the feeding habits of the small songbirds.  One moment they are mobbing the feeders, then, for no apparent reason and without any apparent signal, they scatter into the surrounding bushes.

I never know what it is that panics them because moments later they are back feeding again.

I watch the squirrel coming for the peanuts, running across a piece of rough ground, ever vigilant for danger.  With its rapid, jerky movements it looks almost like a little mechanical toy, and it hops and darts about the branches of the tree where I’ve placed one feeder. 

When they sit up in their familiar begging pose, with their tails curled up their backs, it’s little wonder they are such icons of the Scottish countryside.

The dogs were summoned for a photo call.  Not a very high fashion photo call, you understand, but every dog must start somewhere.  I thought Inka, at only eight months old, would be an absolute nightmare – wanting to sniff and lick everything, if not worse!  I certainly didn’t expect him to be so patient for fully an hour and a half.  He sat and walked to heel to order, as if to the manner born.

Macbeth was even more laid back, but was declared to be ‘too clean’;  the last thing I expected to hear.  To be in proper character terriers should look scruffy and disreputable.  We ought to have postponed the photographs for a couple of months until he is due for his next clip.  Then he really looks like the ‘demented ball of string’ the Doyenne once described him as.

Written on Saturday, January 21st, 2006 at 8:04 am for Weekly.