Puppy dogs’ tales…

Animal carnival seemed to be the underlying theme of last week in CHRIS BENNETT’S busy life.

A COUPLE of weeks ago I opened my South Coast Herald and there staring back at me with a slightly wan smile, or it might have been irony, was what looked for all the world like the face of Maisie Wiggins, my Jack Russell/Dachshund/? miscellany.

MW, for so she was often known, was my inseparable companion for 15 years: she died in June last year, so the picture gave me quite a jolt.

Along with my friend Tegwyn, tireless marketer and inventor of the doggy tent, I went to the SPCA to appraise the candidate.

My brother had already pointed out that MW would find me, so I told him that she had and I was now on my way to an interview with her; MW would be doing the interviewing.

She had been moved to the boarding kennels the previous day, and was fetched for me by the South Coast’s doggies’ best friend, Alistair Sinclair.

As I saw her she wagged her tail and said, “Where have you been? You’re late!” I felt we may have something in common.

I have a friend staying for a few days, and so decided to wait until the coast was clear before bringing her in to the racy underworld of Greenhart Village. There are some highly dubious dogs here, but at least there are dogs; unlike their owners, of course, in the mouths of whom butter would not dare soften, let alone melt.

At the weekend my visitor and I decided to make an oxtail stew. The sealing of the meat and the frying of the onions, carrots and turnips was done on my viewing deck. This process, as you no doubt know, is best done outdoors.

I stirred and daydreamed away, the daydreams being largely about my impending companion and whether she would start her new life by digging up the rose tree.

I looked up from the pan and there, not three metres from my face, my eye caught a windhover, a yellow-billed kite.

Immediately I heard the words of one of my favourite poems*, “….daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding/

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding/

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing/

In his ecstasy!”

In its talons the bird carried a small rodent, undoubtedly by then an ex-rodent. Hovering above me in the buffeting wind, he skilfully (instinctively?) swung his legs forward and his neck down to feed on the prey: his magnificent wings adjusting to every bump and pocket in the air as if on autopilot.

As a backdrop to this, the most amazing sighting of a yellow-billed kite I have ever beheld, and those beautiful creatures are abundant in this part of the world, was the azure grandeur of the ocean and the ballet of a family of humpbacks. They were particularly boisterous that morning.

And they weren’t the only ones.

* The Windhover: Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins; Penguin Classics; London 1953 (1988 ed.)