Poppy’s Tails: The walk that went wrong

The thing about walks is that most of them are perfectly fine. We go to the park. I do my patrol. Dad throws a ball I don’t fetch. We come home. Nice and predictable. Exactly the way I like things.

But every now and then, Dad gets what Mum calls “an idea.” He’ll look out the window on a Saturday morning, see a bit of blue sky, and announce that we’re going on “a proper walk.” Not a park walk. Not a round-the-block walk. A proper walk. With hills.

The last time this happened, it took three days to fully remove the mud from my coat, and I discovered feelings about swans I didn’t know I had.

The optimistic start

It began well enough. We drove to the countryside, which I could tell from the smell because the air changed from exhaust fumes and chip shops to grass, cow manure, and that particular damp greenness that means wellies would have been a good idea.

Dad was wearing trainers. This is important later.

He parked in a muddy car park next to a sign that had a map on it with dotted lines showing various walking routes. He studied it for approximately ten seconds, said “right, the blue route looks good,” and off we went.

The path started out firm and dry. Trees on either side. Birds singing. That golden morning light that makes everything look like a painting. I trotted along quite happily, my coat flowing, my ears bouncing with each step. Several people we passed commented on how beautiful I was, which was correct and appreciated.

Dad was in one of his cheerful moods, which usually means he’s about to lead us into some sort of situation he hasn’t fully thought through.

The mud

At the twenty-minute mark, the path changed. What had been hard-packed earth became soft, squelchy, increasingly soupy ground that made a noise like someone pulling their foot out of custard. For Dad, in his trainers, this meant slipping around and swearing quietly. For me, low to the ground with a long coat that hangs approximately one centimetre above the surface, this meant becoming a walking mop.

My belly fur was the first casualty. Then the leg feathers. Then, after an ill-judged detour through what Dad called “a shortcut” and what turned out to be a bog, my entire underside was a solid mass of cold, brown mud.

I stopped walking. I sat down. I looked at Dad.

“Come on, Pops. Just a bit further.”

Just a bit further. The motto of every disastrous walk in history. “Just a bit further” is what Scott said in the Antarctic. “Just a bit further” is what people say right before they’ve been following the wrong path and are now two miles from the car.

I continued. Under protest.

The stream

The blue route, as it turned out, crossed a stream. Not a big stream. Not a river. Just a modest, burbling waterway about a metre wide with stepping stones that a human with normal-length legs could cross without much difficulty.

For a Lhasa Apso with legs approximately as long as a pack of biscuits, stepping stones are not stepping stones. They are large, wet, slippery rocks with gaps between them that might as well be canyons.

Dad crossed first, hopping from stone to stone in his already-muddy trainers. He reached the other side and turned around, crouching with his arms open. “Come on, Pops! You can do it!”

I stood on the bank and assessed the situation. The stones were wet. The water between them was moving. My legs are short and my centre of gravity is compromised by approximately four kilos of coat.

I put one paw on the first stone. It was cold and slippery. I put a second paw on it and felt it wobble. I looked at the water. I looked at Dad. I looked at the water again.

Then I made a decision. I was not doing the stepping stones. I was going through the stream.

The water was about six inches deep, which on me is waist-height. I waded across with my head held high and my tail above the waterline, but my coat caught the current and billowed out around me like a very soggy wedding dress. By the time I reached the other side, I was soaked from the chest down.

Dad picked me up and said “well, that’s one way to do it.” He was trying not to laugh. I was trying not to bite him.

The swan

We continued along the path, me leaving a trail of water and mud behind me like a very small, very unhappy snail. The path opened up into a field next to a pond. A nice, peaceful pond with reeds and ducks and, as it turned out, a swan.

Now, I have opinions about swans. They’re massive. They’re white. They carry themselves with an arrogance that, coming from another species, I might respect. But swans have a look in their eyes that says “I’m bigger than you and I know it,” and as a dog who weighs seven kilos and has just waded through a stream, I was not in the mood.

The swan was on the bank near the path. It saw us coming. It did not move. Most animals move when they see a dog approaching. Squirrels run. Cats climb. Pigeons scatter. This swan just stood there, neck high, wings slightly raised, looking at me like I was something it had found on the bottom of its webbed foot.

I stopped. The swan stopped. Dad stopped.

“Poppy, leave it,” Dad said, which I found interesting because I hadn’t done anything. I was standing completely still, assessing the threat level of a bird that weighs three times as much as me and can reportedly break a man’s arm.

The swan hissed.

I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t startled. I was. It’s a big bird making a noise like a punctured tyre, and it was approximately two metres away. I barked once. A proper bark. The kind that says “I am a sentinel dog and you do not scare me.”

The swan took a step forward.

I took a step backward.

Dad scooped me up and walked quickly past, muttering something about swans being “territorial” and “unpredictable,” which is quite rich coming from a man who walked us through a bog and across a stream to get here. If anyone has been unpredictable today, it’s him.

The return

The walk back was largely silent. Dad had run out of optimism. I had run out of patience. My coat was a matted, muddy, water-logged mess that would take hours to untangle. My paws were black. My belly was unrecognisable. I looked like I’d been fired out of a cannon into a ploughed field.

We reached the car. Dad put a towel on the back seat (at least he’d planned for something) and placed me on it. I sat there, dripping, while he changed out of his ruined trainers into the wellies that had been in the boot the whole time.

“That was fun, wasn’t it?” he said, catching my eye in the rear-view mirror.

I stared at him for a very long time without blinking. He started the engine and didn’t ask again.

The clean-up

When we got home, Mum took one look at me and one look at Dad and said “I told you to take the green route.”

The bath that followed was extensive. Hot water, detangling spray, two rounds of shampoo, conditioner left in for ten minutes while I stood in the tub staring at nothing. The grooming session afterwards took over an hour.

I was blow-dried, brushed, and restored to a state of fluffiness that, frankly, I should never have been taken out of.

That evening, clean and warm and smelling of that lavender nonsense again, I lay on the sofa and thought about the walk. The mud. The stream. The swan.

And I thought: you know what? I wouldn’t mind going again.

Not that I’d ever tell Dad that.

Has your Lhasa survived a walk gone wrong? Muddy disasters, river incidents, aggressive wildlife? Share the carnage in the comments.