the dog collar

Ian still sometimes dreamt of that hot, still summer long before he'd discovered lager, cars and girls. On those brittle afternoons he had walked for miles with his dog. It wasn't really his dog, more of a family pet, but it, he, seemed special to Ian then.

The dog was a mongrel, skinny with a wiry coat, part lurcher part God knows what. Ian remembered him best lying in his basket beneath the kitchen table, paws clawing sleepily at his pale blue blanket.

The blanket wasn't really a blanket, it was actually a poncho crocheted by Ian's Auntie Sheila. She was well meaning, if a little eccentric, but everyone hated that thing, except for the dog, who would lie curled up on it for hours, contentedly snoozing.

Asleep in the basket the dog would often dream, his teeth protruding from his lips in a yellow grey snarl, like fragments of ancient weaponry uncovered from the mud of his gums.

As he roamed the rabbit scented woodlands of his canine subconcious, his eyes flickered like brown marbles wrapped in the skins of lychees and his ears pricked up like Doctor Spock off Star Trek. His ribs heaved as if he'd swallowed a xylophone and his snout - the button of an old, leather three-piece - excitedly snorted and flared.

Towards the end of the dream, the dog's lips, flecked with spit, would eventually subside into the smile of a satisfied hunter whilst his tongue dripped like a thick slice of rolled ham.

In the dog's dreams the rabbits always tasted like chicken snatched from unguarded dinner plates - his soft brown belly rumbling with the memory of those gravied slices, gulped down guiltily beneath the dining room table. Then he'd roll onto his back and wake with a meaty fart.

Although the dog was not a very large dog, Ian always felt secure walking with him, befriended by day and guarded by dusk in the wood's loneliness. The dog had an infectious energy, a boisterous nature, that spread wherever he bounded.

Even years after the dog was gone, when Ian walked through those woods, he felt the dog's ghost chasing his heels or breezing through the trees.

The flesh is gone, but the spirit remains. That is what he would have written on the dog's grave, if the dog had a grave. The spirit remains, though the flesh is gone.

Maybe that was too grandiose for a dog. It was the kind of epitaph that would be carved on the headstone above the grave of a famous playwright, or painter, or a soldier that never came home from war.

Flesh and the spirit, spirit and the flesh. No, it was too much for a dog, a dog who, by all accounts, at the end amounted to nothing more than a useless pile of bones in a wrinkled sack of skin.

Even in his prime the dog never did anything particularly special. He never saved a small boy from drowning in a pond or alerted his family to a fire whilst they slept by barking at the smell of smoke. No, the dog was remembered only for guiltily eating his own shit from the kitchen floor, for cocking his leg on the vicar's wellingtons and for trying to shag some old dear's leg after he'd sniffed a bitch on heat outside the post office.

The dog was not even really a hunter. He only ever caught one blind old rabbit its eyes clouded over with myxomatosis. But that summer the dog seemed special, as all things did.

Each of those brittle afternoons they'd walk for miles through the scorched woods, with the sun on their backs and their ears filled with the hiss of vipers, the crackle of gorse bushes and the buzz of blue bottles around heaps of horse dung on dusty bridle paths. The incessant noise reminded Ian of the interference he got on his old transistor radio, which (when he could beg, borrow or steal the batteries) he used to listen to beneath the bed clothes at night.

After a while Ian would leave the main paths of the wood and wade through the bracken to the quiet shade of clearings where he and the dog could laze undisturbed, hunting for grasshoppers which whirred all around them.

Often he would lie for hours, his elbows in the peaty soil, peering through a jungle of grass blades in search of those elusive musicians. When he discovered them they always seemed so small.

He expected them to be as large as locusts, but instead they were small as emerald brooches with little ruby eyes like needle pricks of blood and tiny chicken-like legs.

Quite often in the summer when they went out for a walk, Ian would take a library book and a couple of apples with him. They would head for the clearings in the middle of the woods, where the dog danced whirlpools through seas of grass, then lay hidden in the crushed green vortex and panted and snapped at big blue flies.

Whilst the dog snoozed in his grass nest, Ian would lie beside him and read. He could lose himself for hours in tales of talking animals, heroic sportsmen and seemingly ordinary children who somehow entered mythical kingdoms and became great warriors. They were both great dreamers, him and the dog.

When, after a couple of chapters, Ian tired of reading, he would explore for insects. Along with the grasshoppers, Ian's favourites included the tiny scaled insects, no longer than a thumbnail, which scuttled like prehistoric beasts from beneath upturned stones, and the rounded beetles with metallic turquoise shells which clung to blades of grass like futuristic acrobats. But best of all were the black, vicious one with spiky tails, who - when picked up - would pose like tiny scorpions in the palm of his hand.

Generally, Ian was not the kind of boy who would deliberately pull the legs from spiders or tear the wings from flies. However sometimes when he discovered ant nests filled with hundreds of white eggs he could not resist prodding at them with a twig, just so that he could marvel at how quickly the ants came teeming out of their tunnels to pull the eggs down deeper into the earth.

Although at an early age Ian had received his fair share of warnings regarding the supposed dangers of touching insects, he had never once been bitten or stung by anything other than flies (which he grudgingly accepted had no other purpose in life than to pepper human skin with itchy red lumps).

So, aside from flies, he had no qualms about letting insects crawl all over him. And he particularly enjoyed feeling the sticky feet of caterpillars marching across the downy hairs on the back of his hand.

That summer the sun used to get so hot the tarmac melted. Often Ian would find caterpillars trapped in pools of tar or stranded in deserts of dust between two verges. And he would always pick them up and gently transfer them to the most sheltered and lush foliage he could find.

Once, when Ian and his sister were waiting to be collected by his mum from school he saw a huge furry red caterpillar in the road. But before he could rescue it some ignorant brat, who claimed that all caterpillars bite, had steam-rollered it with the sole of his patterned sandal.

Ian couldn't remember the kid's face or even his name, but he could still picture every last detail of those sandals; light brown leather, two bronze buckles, a pattern of holes like a fountain on toes scuffed by playground football.

Ian hated the way that kid had turned the caterpillar into a red stain on the road. Even then, he knew it was important to lift caterpillars out of the sun and not squash them flat. He knew they didn't bite and that they would turn into the butterflies which fluttered, pale blue, primrose, blood red and black, through his secret grassland kingdom.

Ian decided to teach a lesson to that kid with the patterned sandals. So he grabbed him by his grey v-necked jumper and bloodied his nose with a couple of head butts. After all, a summer not graced by butterflies would be a sad, sad thing.

When Ian became bored of watching insects or reading he'd lie on his back in the grass and look up into the sky, as the dog rolled over and over, or chewed grass, or lay panting by his side. He watched planes chalk their jet streams across the troposphere, tracing the white smoky lines which fluffed into cloud tunnels and faded into the blue as the planes disappeared in a distant curve over the edge of the world.

Sometimes Ian would take his shirt off and use it for a pillow, lying there for what seemed like hours with the sun beating down on his face. The coarse grass gave him terrible rashes on his back, which him awake for hours, itching in his bed all those sweaty night. But it didn't matter. Nothing mattered then.

For a few months after that summer had ended, Ian still walked the dog, though never so far or so often. They had both grown older. Ian'd discovered other things to do and the dog grew tired more easily.

One night whilst walking unusually deep in the woods, Ian saw a sinister shape in the darkness of the trees and grew scared. He ran home dragging the dog by his lead faster than his old legs could carry him.

By the time they were near enough home and had stopped running, the dog's collar had cut into the back of his ears leaving a raw bloody wound. The dog looked up, tongue lolling, tail wagging, with confused brown eyes that seemed to ask, What were you running from? I was there wasn't I?

When Ian saw how he had cut the dog's ears, he thumped his fist into one of the walls of his home, until his knuckles bled. Months later, when he laid his hand flat on a table, he noticed one knuckle stuck up a little above the others, and the finger was slightly crooked. He guessed he must have cracked the bone and it hadn't quite knitted together properly. He and the dog were even then. That was the main thing.

Death came quickly to the dog. It seemed as if one day he was bounding down the hill from the wood and the next he couldn't stand. The dog dragged his hind legs across the kitchen floor to reach his food bowl like a wounded legionnaire crawling through the desert to a distant oasis. Dark, flaky scabs appeared on the dog's balls. Then the whole of his back became paralysed.

The dog lay in his basket and stared miserably at the food in the bowl beside him. Sometimes he would raise his head and sniff at the food, but then he would just lay his head down again without making any attempt to eat.

Shortly after that they took the dog to the vet. The vet laid the dog on the operating table in the surgery. Ian held the dog still as the vet carefully inserted the needle of the syringe into a vein and pushed in the white plastic plunger. Ian felt the dog twitch then die beneath his hand, life leaving him gradually like air escaping a punctured football.

After the dog had died, Ian sometimes still went for long walks in the woods. But he felt almost naked without the dog by his side. Dog walking was an good excuse to lose oneself among the trees. To walk alone was slightly weird.

During one of his solitary walks Ian met a man with a young Doberman, already threateningly large. It bounded over to him and leapt up, salivating madly.

"Don't be alarmed," said the man, who was in his early thirties, had curly blonde hair and wore a sturdy green raincoat and mustard-coloured corduroy trousers. "He won't bite. He's only a puppy".

"I know," Ian replied. "His eyes are still bright". And they were bright, gentle and playful. One day those eyes would cloud over and assume such ferocity they would set apace the heart of any burglar who had the misfortune to stare into them. But at that time the eyes were gentle pools still twinkling with youth.

Ian patted the Doberman puppy's head, and murmured, "I expect mine were like that once."

The man in the green coat looked up sharply. His pale, blue eyes considered Ian with curiosity for a moment. Then he nodded understandingly. Ian looked away. There followed an awkward silence.

"Oh well, I better get back home, I suppose," said Ian.

"Yes, I expect it will be dark soon," said the man.

"Bye then," said Ian and raised his hand.

"Bye," said the man.

Ian turned and started to jog down the hill. The Doberman puppy galloped away to chase the breeze through brambles and decayed brown bracken. After that, Ian saw the puppy grow older from a distance, but their paths never met again in the mish-mash of paths that dissected the wood.