A couple of years ago we stayed in a converted Shepherd’s hut set in a Hansel and Gretel Dorset woodland. It was September, and damp and cold at night. It felt like camping except there was no muffled hum of neighbours’ voices, nor the whip of zips from their tents as nighttime fell. We were alone in the woods, me, Ronny, Sunny and Vera.
We walked the dogs in the early mornings when the blackberry bushes and the gorse along the trail were doilied with spiders webs, and mist subdued the fields. There were several families of sika deer in the woods and we would hear them up ahead, muscling through the undergrowth, just out of sight. One morning a curious group was waiting for us as we turned a bend, like muggers hanging around the bus station. Four or five long, prizefighters’ necks turned to us in unison.
Sunny, our lithe whippet - Sunny the lover, the seeker, the poet - was starstruck. An autograph hunter coming face to face with Ava Gardner’s slow-moving, dark-eyed glamour. Sunny’s nose and right paw lifted in unison as whippet eyes locked with deer eyes, thirty foot away.
He knew them. They knew him. Harps might have sounded, Disney-style.
Charmed by his delicate beauty, they called Sunny to the herd. It was a moment from a Spielberg movie. The UFO lands in a clearing, the hatch opens, the orchestra swells, a white light falls like the Holy Spirit and the seeker has to make the big choice - to leave his loved ones and everything he knows for the adventure of unexplored frontiers, or to stay and be subject to the ravages of time, disappointment and gravity.
For a moment I think our dear boy considered joining them, but, of course, we needed him more. Also, at the moment of prevarication Vera caught up with her pack.
Vera the hunter, the rabble rouser, the rowdy, big-bottomed broad with the soft heart. Vera, our chase-first-ask-questions-later lurcher, took off after the deer. Paws thumped, mud flew, flanks shivered and the herd teleported away.
Come nightfall at the hut, Sunny, with a pedigree whippet’s courtly sense of entitlement, claimed the centre of the only bed in the joint. It was a big, luxurious, cushion-strewn island that filled the tiny, spare house almost from corner to corner.
Vera, a rescue from an Irish travellers camp, was more accustomed to penury than to luxury, so she spent the first twenty minutes of the night in her basket on the floor. Then, realising her foolish mistake, she heaved herself up onto the mattress to join the muddle of warm bodies, anchoring any unfortunate human leg, arm, or foot in place for hours.
Our hut was lit by a small solar unit that gave out the tepid glow of a single candle. An older gentleman, Sunny had failing kidneys at this point, so every few hours, with exquisite refinement, he enquired about being escorted outside to water the pine needles and beech leaves that kept our neighbourhood so silent.
Ronny, a gentleman in the same mould as Sunny, insisted on stepping out with him, even though I was happy to go. Sunny hopped Baryshnikov-like over the bodies in the pitch dark as Ronny’s shins found most of the sharp edges in the cabin. The steps of the hut were too shallow, too steep, too something for a whippet’s complicated spatial sensibilities, so often Ronny would end his five minutes of coaxing and cajoling by scooping Sunny up in the dark and feeling for the top step with naked toes.
The woodland darkness was a blindfold and the cold air was a shock. The sky was sapphire and noisy with stars. Sunny disappeared into the trees and he was gone for some time. Ronny shivered and waited.
He said: “I haven’t seen stars like this for years. You don’t see this in Tampa any more”.
Three hours later and the duo was back out there, answering the same call. Peeing at eleven years old was a slow process for our dear Sunny Jim, for sure, but if I know my boy as I’m sure I know my boy, he just wanted to leave gentle signs for his pals, study the stars, and show the heavens his holy radiance.
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