Tim Dowling: the dog’s training regime has taken a weird turn

Intermediate Dog School involves hiding behind trees in the park …

It is rare for my wife and I to do a midweek dog walk together, but on this particular afternoon I find myself at a loose end, and volunteer to come along.

Joint walks require a bit of negotiation: my wife expects a minimum level of conversation, which is not a normal feature of my weekday afternoon. To solve this, we take turns delivering monologues of complaint – my wife going first. Because I’m a good listener, I can’t help but notice that a lot of my wife’s complaints are about me. Finally, she exhausts herself.

“Anyway,” she says, “thank you for listening to my podcast. Now it’s time for your podcast.”

“Thanks, and welcome,” I say. “I have been having problems with my email.”

“Oh dear,” my wife says.

“It keeps freezing for no reason, and then I have to Force Quit to shut it down, but almost as soon as I open it again …”

“Quick, hide!” she shouts, jumping behind the trunk of a big oak.

“What?” I say.

“Take that tree,” she says. I get behind an oak and hold my breath, imagining the imminent approach of someone we don’t like. But when I peer round the tree, it becomes apparent we’re hiding from the dog.

“Really?” I say.

“Ssh!” my wife says.

The dog is about 50 metres ahead of us, lapping at a puddle. Suddenly she looks up in a panic, and then goes haring off across a field in pursuit of a strange woman. When she is close enough to realise the woman is not my wife, the dog turns and races blindly in circles, before finally spotting my wife behind the tree and making a beeline for her. Such is the dog’s relief that it begins to leap and twist in the air, like a hooked marlin.

“You found me!” my wife says.

“Bit cruel,” I say.

“It’s part of our training,” my wife says. “It’s supposed to teach them to stay in your orbit.”

At the end of December my wife and the dog came home from the final evening of dog school with a certificate bearing the word “Completed” alongside no other merits.

“Not even ‘successfully completed’?” I said.

“I don’t think they were prepared to go that far,” my wife said. “Anyway, I’ve signed her up for the Intermediate class.”

I don’t know what happens at Intermediate Dog School, apart from hiding. I also don’t know how far my wife intends to pursue the dog’s education, or whether they will eventually branch out into forensics, maybe, before going off to locate decomposing corpses for the police. All I know is, even after all those lessons, the dog still has a tendency to court trouble, especially when she is out with me.

The next day at lunchtime my wife comes home to find the dog and me on the sofa, both looking glum.

“How was the park?” she says.

“We had a fight with Violet,” I say.

“Oh no,” my wife says.

“But even Violet’s owner agreed that Violet started it,” I say. “Also Violet was unscathed, and this one has a big tooth mark in her neck.”

“I don’t even know Violet,” my wife says.

“Violet,” I say, “is violent.”

The next morning we leave the house a bit later, and find the park nearly empty. I throw the ball for the dog for a few minutes without incident. There follows a mildly awkward incident when my dog and another dog swap balls and then refuse to swap back, running circles around me and the other owner. This goes on past the point of amusement.

I don’t actually care which ball I end up with (I know for a fact we stole ours off another dog anyway) but there seems to be some principle at stake.

“It might be easier to swap dogs,” I say. The other owner says nothing.

Eventually my dog gets bored, drops the other dog’s ball and wanders across the field to a big hole, which it proceeds to excavate further. After a few minutes of this I decide to hide, for training purposes.

While the dog’s head is in the hole, I crouch low behind a tree, and wait. I take out my phone to check the time. I answer a couple of texts, then scan the headlines. Every time I peer round I see the dog still digging. The longer it goes on, the weirder I feel.

Finally, after seven minutes, the dog stops digging and starts to head my way. She ambles straight past the tree, sniffing the ground, and then turns to see me crouched there. I stand. The dog looks at me, head tilted, bewildered.

“That’s right,” I say. “You came here with me. Remember?”