A beloved friend gone without a trace

OUR BELOVED old dog disappeared the other day: I believe she was dog-napped.

Either that, or she dematerialised, and I don’t believe that can happen to dogs. A spaceship might have beamed her up, but I don’t believe that either. I’ll explain what happened, and you tell me ...

Nicky is a liver-and-white springer spaniel with foxy-red flashes on either side of her muzzle, a feature inherited from some golden cocker or red setter that featured in her genetic mix. She was 12 years old and, while her hearing and sight were not as finely tuned as of yore, she was by no means deaf, blind or senile.

When I last saw her she was bouncing through a field of long grass, springing almost as high as she used to when she was a three-year-old. She had a smile on her face, clearly as happy as could be.

At the bottom of the field, I took out binoculars to see how the young ravens were doing in their nest on the side of a rocky cove over the sea.

There were three large fledglings inside, shiny black and ready to fly any day. I watched them for five minutes, then turned to continue along the cliffs. There wasn’t a soul to be seen, in any direction. Nicky wasn’t around either so I assumed she was snuffling about in the nearby ditch.

I whistled for her as I walked off and then, 30 yards further on, sat down in the sun at a favourite spot and looked out at the Old Head of Kinsale, seven miles away. When she still hadn’t joined me after five minutes, I concluded that she’d become bored and walked home alone.

Home was only 10 minutes away via paths she’d walked a thousand times. Such behaviour wouldn’t have been unusual. She sometimes took the notion to go back alone. She’d be there, waiting, at the front door, when one returned.

Thinking no more of it, I followed our usual circuit through the woods full of ramsons and bluebells and down onto the beach, and home from there. I dawdled, enjoying the sights; I investigated the rock pools and so on. When I got home, she wasn’t there. An hour later she still hadn’t returned.

I walked back to the cliffs and scanned the walls of the cove with binoculars, then, risking life and limb, climbed down into it, and searched behind and under any boulders large enough to conceal her. I could find no trace. The slope above me wasn’t entirely sheer and was covered in vegetation, and the tide had been out for hours. Had she fallen she would hardly have been killed outright and would have barked in distress.

We searched widely, my sons and I, that day and on the days following, returning again and again to the cove and the cliffs and ditches all around.

She had disappeared in, literally, a matter of minutes in an open field, 20 feet from an overgrown cliff protected by a ditch of furze and blackthorn. And there wasn’t a human soul around.

However, that same day, when I first returned to the site, I met a woman who told me there’d been some people picnicking further along the path, in a cove by the woods.

I can’t imagine anyone stealing an old dog deliberately. She was friendly and, I suppose, had she taken that (longer) route home, she might have been tempted by a sweet biscuit from the picnickers: she was diabetic and we never gave her sweet things. It is conceivable that they thought she was lost — although she had a collar — and decided to take her home. If that was they case, and they read this, please return her.

She was with us all but the first year of her life, and the house feels strangely empty without her.

The kids may have been away for periods, or my wife, or myself, but she was always there, always in her bed below the stairs, always following one to the fireside at night, always leaving the sitting room for bed when one stood to turn out the lights.

I’ve been in the house alone all week and I miss her company. When I come downstairs in the morning she isn’t there. Poor dog, I think, that this should happen to her in old age! I keep thinking she will turn up and bark to be let in.