Disappearing Toffee

 It was all misunderstanding, it turns out, in the end.

Toffee, our toffee-coloured toy poodle, doesn’t just like to walk around the woods with me. In fact, she would probably prefer not to have to walk around the woods anything like as much as I make her. But when she does have to, she wants to be able to check interesting things out.

Toffee walking in the woods

You know, get underneath that bush from which a curious smell is emerging.

Or stop to investigate carefully another dog’s pee from a large rock on the path, because there are a lot of questions to answer about that kind of thing: I mean, was it a big dog? A fierce dog? A male dog or a female like Toffee herself?

As well as all those interesting considerations, there’s the more urgent matter of whether it was there quite a while ago or just recently. Because that can make quite a difference to how we behave going forward: advancing breezily with never a worry in the world, or much more cautiously and with apprehension.

Above all, whatever our investigations lead to, there’s one vital task which we’re certainly going to carry out: Toffee must leave her own calling card on top of the stranger’s. That’s the quickest bit: crouch down, quick spray, move on. Job done.

The thing about all that is that it takes time. And if I don’t stop and wait until she gets to the end, there’s a terrible chance that I’ll be out of sight by the time she’s finished. And then what is she to do?

I reckon she ought to be able to smell the way that I’ve gone. Especially since Luci’s there too. But it seems it’s not that simple. Toffee likes to work by line of sight. If she can see us, she can follow us. If she can’t see us, well, she can’t work out where we’ve gone.

Talking about Luci, who’s the other toy poodle, she couldn’t be less like Toffee in this regard. I mean, they both show entirely justified care of other dogs around and about. Especially big ones. They have that much in common at least.

Toffee and Luci together
So similar and yet so different

Luci always has been afraid of other dogs, but then she’s always been more timid. In fact, when she first joined us, she came from a family who’d never taken her out on a walk. She was scared even of going outside. A place with no ceiling? With no walls around her to keep her safe? And we expected her to like it? She would regularly make a dash for home.

Eventually, though, she adapted and now she enjoys her walks at least as much as Toffee does.

Toffee was much bolder right from the start. She used to go right up to other dogs and see if they’d like to be friends. To be fair, none of them ever bit her, but a few of the bigger ones trampled her a couple of times. Not always deliberately, mind you. When there’s such a lot of you, sometimes you can lose control over where every single bit of you is, and when you’re as small as Toffee, that bit might right on top of you.

So she’s learned to be as wary of other dogs as Luci. But not, unfortunately, in the same way. Luci always knows where we are. Even if a large dog shows up, and Luci disappears into the undergrowth, she’s always keeping an eye on us so that, once the hazard has passed, she can reappear next to us, even if we’ve kept moving down the path.

That’s a useful skill that Toffee sadly doesn’t have. As I said, if she gets a bit too far from us, whether avoiding another dog or simply because she’s stopped to investigate something interesting, she forgets to keep an eye on where we are, so she can’t automatically find us afterwards.

I reckon that’s what happened the other day. Once she’d finished with her business, she looked up for Luci and me and couldn’t see us. So she did a sensible thing: she took the path I usually take to get home from that place.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the path I’d taken that time.

The result? A missing dog situation.

Stupidly I didn't follow my instinct and look for her on my usual path, where Toffee had actually gone. Instead, I walked up and down and around the place I’d last seen her, calling her and whistling, in increasing trepidation.

It took half an hour before I finally decided to try out that other path.

I met a couple coming the other way, with two large dogs (you understand that ‘large’ is a relative term, and I’m applying a toy-poodle scale). I asked them if they’d seen a little orange poodle, but they hadn’t.

Disappointed, I turned back the way I’d come. But then the man called out: “is this your dog?”

“No,” I replied, thinking he’d seen Luci, who had as usual decamped into the undergrowth when she’d seen the large dogs, but about whom I wasn’t worried, “that’s the black one. I’m looking for the orange one.”

“But this one is orange,” he said.

I went back to take a look. And, joy unconfined, it was indeed Toffee!

Well, the joy was rather one-sided. Toffee wasn’t ready to forgive me for what she clearly regarded as an abandonment. She has a way, when she’s fed up with being overwalked, of lying down in the path and refusing to move, until I pick her up. She did that several times on the way home, but each time I took her in my arms, she wriggled to be put back down again.

You want me to keep going?
Then you can pick me up and carry me

The message was clear.

“No, I don’t want you carrying me. You’re the one who walked off and left me all alone in the woods. Where anything could happen to me. I don’t like you any more.”

Fortunately, it didn’t last. It took a while, but by the afternoon she’d relaxed enough to be friends again. And, as usual, took her siesta lying next to me on the couch.

Friends again

All’s well as ends well, I suppose. But I’m going to be taking things a lot more carefully on our future walks…