Doggy pals

I'll do until the real thing comes along, but basically what Scrap loves more than anything else is another dog to play with. It doesn't have to be a particularly sophisticated game – ruff and tumble and sniff-chase will do – just so long as he's playing it with someone hairy with stinky breath.

Never knew the name of this redhead, met in Shobrooke Park, but they went the full 15 rounds together

The redhead finds a swamp of doghenna to slop in: a muckstep too far even for our less-than-fastidious hero

Eoife is a 9-year-old bitch belonging to my old school friend Clive. They spend all their time together when I go to visit.
Here, they share a stick in the woods behind C's house early this year.

Romping can be tiring.

Monty's mum is a glass artist who lives in the village. He's more or less the same age and size as The Scrap.

Another round with Monty by the pond in the MG.

Velma the Wizsla lives down our lane and is just a few months older than Scrap: when either goes missing, the other's garden is one of the first places to look. Something about her Hungarian aristocratic bearing, though, means that there's no chance of getting her to get down and dirty.

Prince, the whippet from the Community Stores, has the Scrapster beaten for speed, and here adds insult to injury.

Sadly, I have yet to get a photo of him with Bobber, a two-year-old Jack who lives down the road and who is perhaps his favourite of the local dogs. Be sure you will see it here first when it happens.

The C word

It's pretty much guaranteed that one of the first dozen or so words out of the mouth of anyone meeting Scrap for the first time (especially if they are young and female), will be 'cute'. Can't imagine why...

Digger's nose

muck-spreading

Wot, no kibble?

Hello ladeez

Sticks and Streams

Scrap likes all the usual puppy games, but has developed one of his own that I never saw before. Every dog loves the amazing flying machine that people call 'stick', and indeed Scrap will happily settle down with a small bough and shred it to pieces in the kind of methodical frenzy with which he accomplishes the dismantling of random pieces of plastic, his bedding, other dog's bedding, things that smell of Daddy (i.e. his gloves, socks, shoes and anything he handled in the last six months) and areas of carpeting, but he somehow developed a taste for twigs plucked from running water, and now finds he enjoys the sport more than the feasting.

Less than half a mile from the house is a small patch of woodland, squeezed between the footpath and the road leading south out of the village to the local market town. Through this runs a stream that has been more or less in spate for all of Scrap's life.  There are twists and turns, falls and pools and shallows, and bridges made by tumbled trees or twisting exposed roots.

Jams of twigs often form at places like this, and build beaverishly into quite formidable dams. Scrap loves to pick these apart, tugging and pulling them on to the shore, and sometimes a long way from the bank to form makeshift piles. Sometimes he enlists my help. Sometimes he gets it when he does not require, and furies of barking and splashing take place, and sometimes we Go Home in disgrace...

All this from a Jack Russell, a dog that supposedly dislikes water. Scrap started out tentatively,  but after falling in a couple of times, now wades in without fear after a particularly juicy ramification. If it weren't for the fact that I've still yet to see him out of his depth, I'd assume I'd been sold a ringer....

Scrappy channels Blondin and steps across the fearsome Treeroot Falls standing only on, well, a tree root

Clearing a channel beneath Big Bridge

Judging by that belly, he's already been in once, but still our brave lad storms straight back in to tackle a recalcitrant piece of tree ivy

It isn't just twigs, you know: Scrap demonstrates his dragging power

It doesn't really count until he's hauled every inch of it out of the water

This may be the origin of it all. Last year, there were several floods, and S seemed fascinated by the fast-running patterns the water made rippling across stony paths, like so many rats. And then he tried to jump on one, and the bow waves around
his planted feet made even bigger ‘rats’, that he would snap at wildly. Sooner or later, his teeth must have closed
around a random piece of tree debris: he had caught his first prey, and was lost to the wild joy of the hunt.

The First Picture

Scrap snuggles up to Chip on our visit to his birth home

In the beginning

It was my late wife, Chip, who chose Scrap. We had heard of a litter of Jack Russell puppies in Cheriton Fitzpaine, a nearby village, on the morning of 13 August last year. We went to look at a bitch, but Chip only had eyes for one of the dogs, who was even fuller of the terrier spirit than his sibs. If there had been any doubt that we would be getting a puppy — it was something we had decided rather quickly, as neither of us, despite our three previous dogs together, had ever homed a puppy — disappeared when we heard that the litter had been born on 27 May, our 30th anniversary.

We arranged for the puppy, renamed Scrap on the spot (largely because Chip had seized on a chance remark of mine that I thought it was a good name for a small dog and had alchemically transmuted it into the notion that I had a lifelong yearning for a puppy of that ilk), to be delivered later in the week, and went home via a pet shop where we spent out on a cage, bed, puppyfood, a collar and toys. Chip was so thrilled, and happy.

That evening, she had a stomach haemorrhage, which ushered in the last four weeks of her life. The cancer slowly stripped her spirit, but not before she had taken a degree of delight from the first puppy she had ever had, even though she knew she would never feel the joy of walking with him, of smiling benignly at his backside as he sashayed ahead, as she had with other dogs she had loved.

That, and other pleasures and occasional pain would be mine alone, and I conceived of this blog as being about that, but it is also, it appears, about Chip and the other dogs we shared – Toots, Sallywags and Kezzy.

Chip and Scrap