Today when I wake it is raining heavily. Usually when this happens we stay indoors till it stops, but today the Owner says it isn’t going to stop, the lead is produced, and out, it seems, we go. Come on, she says, we are in it together. Solidarity, Hergest, she says. On we go. This is not a day for giving up.

The Owner often thinks she is Aragorn.

Within moments the rain is landing on me. It is also landing on the Owner but she is sporting some kind of outer waxed layer and it rolls off.

Perfidy! I am not given a waxed costume. Instead I am becoming wet. I check myself repeatedly to see that I am not dissolving. The water is all over me now so it is only a matter of time. She says I won’t shrink but I don’t know why she’s so sure. We pass Other Dogs, some of whom have clearly already undergone considerable shrinkage. One has been affected only on the legs, which seems particularly tragic. It seems to me that the Owner is taking an enormous risk on the basis of some kind of assumption about German Shorthaired Pointers and rain which is simply not borne out by the evidence. It’s only rain, she says from beneath her iniquitous wax coating, I’m supposed to like it.

Like it? I am not a duck. Worse still, when we reach the pond I am paraded in a humiliating fashion past a whole crowd of supercilious ducks, off whose backs the water seems to be rolling in a positively discriminatory manner. Not only, it seems, do ducks float on water. Water also floats on ducks.

As I gaze at them, I suddenly see the Owner differently. The day is turning into some sort of horror movie. In it together indeed! As the ducks gaze at me smugly, and the Owner stands under a tree reading the news on her phone and complaining about the Prime Minister, I watch the water rolling off her and onto the ground and realise she is in fact wearing a duck suit. Beside her, her faithful hound, mocked by the very ducks she imitates, is shrinking steadily.

This is not solidarity.

Categories: dog dog philosophy philosophy rain

Hergest the Hound

I am a dog of many thoughts.