Chomp! Part 1

When at home our Beagles rarely have problems communicating their needs to us. A paw on the arm while either of us is sat on the sofa means “I want a blankie”. If the water bowl has been emptied by a thirsty Bigglet, Beanie requests a refill by repeatedly banging the bowl against the wall and making a sound that’s a cross between a groan and a muffled fart. And if someone needs to go to the outside loo (or just snoop around the kitchen) then a bit more paint gets noisily scraped off the kitchen door. Unfortunately when we’re away from home some of those signals just don’t work.

For example, let’s say you’re a silly Beagle boy tethered to a stake in the ground just in front of The Beagle HQ Tent on a Glencoe campsite during the recent heatwave. The irresistible urge to pee takes hold of you but there’s no kitchen door to damage. What are you gonna do? Well if you’re Biggles, you whine briefly, and when that doesn’t work you go up to one of the crucial guy ropes on the tent and sever it with a single chomp.

Yeah Dad, it wasn’t one of my proudest moments but I had to improvise. All things considered, I’m OK with it.

By a minor miracle the tent didn’t collapse; by a more significant miracle the four nights we spent in the tent went brilliantly well. Having said that, I only properly experienced three of them because at 1am on the first night I headed off for a solo ascent of nearby peak Meall Dearg.

As it turned out I could have spent an extra hour in bed; I made the summit with nearly 80 minutes still to go before the sun appeared. Still, my early arrival left me plenty of time to check out possible photography angles and to admire the summit cairn, which looks uncannily like one of Beanie’s poos. You see Beanie’s not content with outputting simple log shapes; she prefers to create little sculptures with her number twos, and Meall Dearg’s cairn is a classic Beanie design: a curling base with the raised central column offset at a fashionable angle.

In addition to having a poo-shaped cairn, Meall Dearg is connected to neighboring peak Sgorr nam Fiannaidh by the infamous Aonach Eagach ridge. This is apparently the narrowest ridge on the British mainland, and I was happy to be photographing it rather than walking it.

The other views from Meall Dearg weren’t too shabby either..

It was a shame not to experience Meall Dearg with Susan and the Beaglets, but this was really a scouting mission to see if it was properly Beagle-able. Now that I know it’s just a hard slog with no technical challenges or scrambling, I think it’s a fair bet there’ll be a real Beanie poo up alongside the cairn in the not too distant future.

Back at the campsite the sun was fully up, and the heat was building rapidly. We opened up the tent for maximum ventilation and kept Beanie and Biggles tethered to a stake just at the front opening. This worked surprisingly well; the Beaglet’s leads were long enough for them to sunbathe on the grass or seek shade in the body of the tent, but just short enough to stop them reaching our cooking gear and food stores at the back of the tent. Biggles quickly took a liking to the inflatable chair we’d brought (even though it was a bit wobbly) and when tiredness caught up with me and I crashed out on the bed, he was able to join me and use my legs as chin rests.

In due course we added a windbreak at the front of the tent to form a sort of semi-enclosed “garden” area.  There are plenty of reasons for having a windbreak on a campsite: to provide shelter from the wind and the sun, to increase privacy, and to stop curious Beagles from seeing things that might lead to noisy howls of outrage. I’ll let you guess which one of those was the most relevant to us.

By the afternoon I’d caught up on sleep enough to be semi-functional; I grabbed the laptop to check if I had any emails that needed attention. Susan was outside the tent, preparing to light our little portable barbecue. I glanced over towards the Beaglets; Biggles was on his comfy chair, and judging by her lead, Beanie had retired to her travel crate for a private nap. It was warm and sunny, with just enough breeze blowing to keep the temperature comfortable. This was one of those serene, perfect moments that happen all too little in our busy lives.

My relaxed contemplative moment was interrupted by the laptop signalling that it had booted, and I began sorting through my email. Just then, Beanie trotted happily by me, her tail raised and wagging gently with the movement of her hips. My eyes switched back to the laptop, but in the back of my sleep-deprived brain a little alarm bell was starting to ring. Hadn’t Beanie just gone beyond the limits of her leash? Had it become detached from the stake? I looked back to the front of the tent, and was relieved to see her leash still safely anchored to the stake, with the other end leading into her open crate.

Hang on! That’s not right!

Yep the Beanster had decided to go on a little solo tour of Glencoe and being a very resourceful little girl, she’d unclipped her lead just as she had done on the top of The Merrick a few years ago. Fortunately this time her multi-hour “yahoo” didn’t happen; she was quickly apprehended by Susan and frogmarched backed to the garden area of our camp. This little almost-adventure served as a timely reminder of why I wrap duck tape round the release clip of her lead when we’re out on hill walks.

Crap! Foiled again!

Biggles has never managed to unclip his lead, but judging by his quick work on the guy rope, I don’t think he’d need to; a quick chomp or two would work just as well :)