The Pentlands.

While walking Merlin today, we bumped into Miss Patch – now let me explain: it must have been soon after we first came to the village nearly forty years ago that we first met Patch, she was a lovely little border collie and her owners were promptly christened Mr and Mrs Patch. In the fullness of time, Patch shuffled off and was replaced by other collies and the daughter of the family carried on the tradition. We no longer see Mr & Mrs P and haven’t got around to asking after them, but they were older than us so have probably become re-acquainted with Patch. Miss P is now regularly seen with her four young collies and we fell to reminiscing about one of our lurchers, with the name of Meg.
 
Meg had many talents, all of them related to food. It should be stated here that she always looked unhappy, we always said that she felt that she had been put on this earth to rid it of rabbits but, unfortunately, realised at quite a young age that they could breed faster than she could catch them. Nevertheless, she kept our freezer full for quite a few years and I do like rabbit pie. Even my vegetarian nephew once tried one of her rabbits, his logic being that the creature had not been subjected to intensive farming, so had had a good life and deserved to be eaten.
 
But it wasn’t just rabbits, Meg learned to hunt squirrels (whose taste she detested) and game birds (but she didn’t know how to get past their feathers to the meat). Catching squirrels was a matter of chasing them up a lone tree; once up there they were, of course, absolutely safe; their problem was that they didn’t understand that dogs don’t climb trees. In their unnecessary panic to escape the barking dog, they would leap down intending to run up the next tree; Meg caught them before they hit the ground.
Game birds she would put up at the top of a hill; there was no hurry, she didn’t want to scare them – yet. They always used gravity to escape so flew down hill; at the bottom, they would take cover. Meg would trot languidly down after them and smell them out. Game birds are not the most agile of birds and rely heavily on having a downhill that they can use to get airborne but, of course, they had already used up all the downhill available and had no means of escape. I had one ability that she lacked, I could pluck a bird; as I’m not particularly partial to pheasant or quail, the dogs had them all to themselves – rabbits they had to share.
 
It was, perhaps, the sharing of their catch that led to Meg’s greatest breach of trust/act of skill and cunning. Standing on her hind legs she could just reach the kitchen worktop. She also had a deep understanding of human psychology. Using her impeccable stealth and timing, she could pick up, in her teeth, a glass casserole half full of stew from the worktop and, without spilling a drop and carry it ,past the table where we were eating our portion, to her bed. Although the whole operation was within our full view, she would have licked the bowl clean before we had noticed that anything was amiss.
And, do you know? We never once caught her in the act and we never worked out how she could securely hold a heavy glass dish in her teeth.
 

The Blip is of the Pentlands from the spot where we met Miss. P; the extra is of Meg, she knows we’re going away on holiday and isn’t going to be left behind, it would have been taken in the July of 2002.