Following You Following Us On The Laid Out Path To Freedom

It’s not yet 8am on Saturday morning, and Bella is whimpering with excitement at the front door, her front paws scrabbling like a tiny Pamplona bull at the charcoal-black hall tiles. Lily is excited too, but Bella, 11, is now turning in increasingly frenzied circles of anticipation and delight — but she’s also frustrated that I haven’t just dropped everything to open the door and release her.

I have to fetch their harnesses and poo bags for the morning walk and sniff around — their’s not mine!

 Bella might be pushing 12 and Lily six, or so, but it’s the same heart-lifting experience very morning, two drowsing fur balls on their couch blankets springing to instant full on delirium once I touch that kitchen door handle.

My daughter has just come in from a sleep-over with a friend, who had to get up early for work, hence K being up this early, even earlier than when she has to go to work herself in the coffee shop.

‘You take the dogs out this early every day?’ the sleepy-eyed princess of my heart enquires.

I resist the strong urge to sarcasm — or so I fancy — and answer, ’Yes, every single day … 19, and you are you only realising just how amazing I am?’

We’re off out to the scrubby wasteland fields behind the house, and I release Bella and Lily — always Bella first, the older woman …

Ever since the plans landed and were so hastily approved for these same fields to be converted into yet more houses, these fields have become even more precious. The familiar well-trammelled trails you can mark by the season … the grass long and wild, and the thistles all strong and forbidding on this overcast July morning.

I just love the way the two dogs tear along these same natural pathways, created by themselves and all us dog walkers, at once so familiar and yet bearing a fresh trove of new scents and curiosities every single time.

Bella is just a joy to the eyeballs, as she prances along, neat and furry as a newborn lamb, the grizzled grey of her face the only concession to age thus far.

Trundling Lily is making what should be the same movements as her elder partner, but it’s amazing how one is so full of effortless grace and deft agility, and the other is … just not. But she’s just as happy. She sticks closer to me than Bella, who speeds off ahead, the leader of our expedition.

Only she’s not really … how do I explain it? Even though she darts ahead, she stops every so often to check where I am, and once reassured will run off again.

This is the thing, we’re following her, but really she is following me, and just doesn’t know it, or look at it like that. If I deviate from our path, in a matter of minutes Bella will come scampering at a rate of doggie knots and I can hear the rattle of her breath as she passes me, and once again takes the lead.

I know how they both operate, Bella and Lily, and I know pretty much when  — and where — they will both do that folding body thing to do their poos, locking eyes with mine as I fiddle to open the plastic poo sack, and it’s a seamless part of the whole expedition.

And I’m thinking now of K, still in the front room when myself and the doggies get back to the house. I think of the similarity — just similar — between herself and her brother and Bella, in particular.

This is fanciful, I know, but this part of K’s life reminds me so much of Bella … leading from the front, but only doing so in the full knowledge that there is back-up, to be scoped out every so often before charging on again, all independence and curiosity.

And even the paths our two babies take, which look so natural and spontaneous, so much of the groundwork has been eked out by those that have gone before.

The structures are there that allow them to sniff and explore. Yes, they must forge their own pathways eventually, or at least pick out new trails along the way, and hopefully they will want to check in on us every now and again, before rattling past myself and A to lead the way again. 

And you’re left wondering, yet again, just who is following who?