Foxglove - December 30

The long thin pond was full now, over the edges, and in some places over the path too.

Here a spindly sycamore had fallen, a clod of earth remaining around roots staring skywards, making new habitat for small creatures to exploit.

The dogs flowed over the trunk of it in silence, while my own progress was more awkward.

The once-bright fallen leaves were dull now with age and wet, starting the long progress into leafmould. I could hear splashing ahead, not the heavy swoosh of big dogs in deep water, but a rapid footfall through shallows.

As I turned the bend, I saw an indignant moorhen scutter away through the reeds, and a rabbit pelted past me going the other way.

It had been ousted from the bramble patches on the higher ground, scanty cover at best, but when your world is flooded, you have to make do. The moorhen was in its element: the rabbit was not.

It is a fallacy that water masks scent, but what it does do is move scent upon its surface, so that when the dogs came by, noses down, they followed the run of the water rather than the run of the rabbit.

Up they quested towards the willows, where experience had shown them that wild things would hide, but they had passed by this rabbit, which was huddled almost at my feet under a flood-made thatch of reeds and twigs.

My philosophy at these times is to let Nature be the arbiter: if the dogs find the rabbit or the rabbit outwits the dogs I will support the outcome.

At the moment, the rabbit was odds-on to survive. It started to ease its way out of its sheltering tangle, and then, though I try to avoid looking directly at wild animals when hunting, somehow our eyes met. I stepped back.

The rabbit's mind was going like a computer, assessing distance and speed and size, and things I had little knowledge of, such as scenting conditions and wind direction.

It slid through a gap you could not have thought large enough for a rat, and then, watching me backwards, edged across the ride on its belly.

A sharp scuttle brought it to another patch of cover, and from thence I knew not where.

At the same time, the two dogs arrived, right on the scent this time, whirling once around the patch where the rabbit had lately hidden, and across the track just so.

They glanced at me, tails half-furled. I looked over to where the thickening mist sat low in the meadows, trapping scent underneath it, promising good hunting all the way to the rife. Or one wet rabbit in a wet wood.

Decisively, I stepped between the trees to the puddled clearing. "That'll do" I told the dogs, and they followed me out, from where I sent them forward, wraiths in the mist, to whatever we could find in the open.