Foxglove June 17 2009

Recent rain has left a leaden sky with active towering clouds that promise more. Rain improves scent: any huntsman will tell you that, and the dogs have their noses down, muzzles plastered to the ears with water off the weeds.

Long grasses are already going from flower to seed, and the first crop of black peacock caterpillars is munching on the nettles.

I inhale the scent of early honeysuckle and wild rose, the latter with petals scattered on the ground from the storm behind us. Turning to watch a pair of gadwall flying across the river, a splash alerts me that something is happening in the rife.

The terrier hates water except when she is on scent: then she has no fear at all. She climbs out on the far side of the rife and sets off grimly through the tangles made by reeds and sedges, her tiny nose down, her tail up and waving like a hound's stern.

Ahead of her is a rippling of vegetation, not travelling fast enough, and it knows, for there follows a plop of something taking to the water.

There are no voles here because the mink cleared them out, and therefore I have no worries that she might be tracking a rare animal.

Most likely she is following a rat, for you do not generally hear a mink enter water.

She crosses over again, stands on the bank to shake the water from her coat, then spots her quarry in the water, where I have seen it too.

It is a young rat, and it is now in trouble. The terrier stands little chance of catching it in the water, but the ratling panics and takes to the bank.

There is a brief squeal and the job is done, a sassy little terrier climbing up the bank with a mouth full of rat, defying the bigger dogs to approach her.

While she is posing, the very old dog has left my side and is on point further along. His eyes are dim and his hearing fading, but his nose is sound and as reliable as it ever was.

The younger dog backs the point, and the terrier drops her dead rat and bounds across in a series of leaps, trying to clear the wet grass, which is evidently a toxic kind of wet, unlike the wet of the rife with a rat in it.

We all congregate around a small hawthorn bush which is clinging stubbornly to the bank.

Dogs have to learn to look upwards, but it comes naturally to humans, so I look up and there in the branches is another rat, a big one this time.

Very unsportingly, I poke at it with my walking stick, and it climbs higher, but the hawthorn is not a big one and so this rat also decides to take to the water.

Varying degrees of splashing follow, resulting in the rat gaining the far side while two of the dogs are still in the water.

Thank goodness the old one is still by my side because his days of swimming are over. Down goes the terrier's nose on the far bank, there is a scuffle and a squeal in the long grass, and out she comes with her second rat.

She stands undecided: should she swim across with her rat? It is rather a large cargo, and she is only a small terrier.

I tell her to drop it, and surprisingly she does, swimming back to us on her own while the big dogs cross further up. Everyone comes to heel, and we continue our walk, while the sun struggles through the clouds and the day begins.