A New Dog, the Same Forest. So Why Does the Walk Feel So Different?

We said goodbye to our old boy in March, after nearly sixteen years.

There is a three-month-old labrador in the house now, and he is nothing like him at all.

Sixteen Years of a Dog Who Thought He Was a Lap Dog

He was a big, stocky labrador — forty kilos of him — and entirely convinced he was a lap dog.

If you sat down there was a decent chance he would try to climb on. Failing that he would settle across your feet instead, on the apparent understanding that this was where he was supposed to be.

He followed my wife everywhere. Close by, quietly, like a shadow with a tail.

He grew up alongside the children, put up with all three of them climbing over him, and never once made anything of it. When visitors arrived he would be at the door waiting — not out of sociability as far as I could ever tell, but because visitors have historically been associated with treats.

Sixteen years is most of a family’s life. He was there for the moves, the noisy years and the quiet evenings, and he took all of it in his stride.

Then the House Was Quiet

You do not appreciate how much space a dog occupies until there is not one.

Not the room they take up. The interruptions — the hopeful wandering over whenever food was in the vicinity, the weight arriving on your feet halfway through the evening.

The house was very quiet for a while, and none of us liked it.

The New One Is Not Him

The puppy is not a replacement, which took me a little while to stop expecting.

He is three months old, obviously clever, and has energy of a sort I had genuinely forgotten about. He is already big and getting stronger by the week. He would like to meet everybody. He would like to investigate everything. He would very much like to do both at once, now.

Kennel club training is under way. We are hopeful about its effect on his enthusiasm, although at this stage hope is doing most of the work.

The old boy was a settled old dog for as long as my younger children can remember. I had forgotten that he had to become one.

Two Hours, No Fixed Route

We are surrounded by forest in every direction, which is a piece of luck I try not to be casual about.

There is no set walk. We pick a direction and a stretch of woodland and go, usually first thing or in the late afternoon, usually for a couple of hours. Normally it is my wife and me.

With a dog this size it is not a stroll. He wants to greet every person and inspect every smell, and he has the shoulders to make that a negotiation rather than a decision.

Talking, and Not Talking

The walk has become the place where my wife and I catch up properly.

Two hours with no phone, no diary and no particular reason to be anywhere is not something either of us gets otherwise, and a surprising amount gets covered.

Just as often we say nothing at all. That took years to learn — that silence with somebody is an entirely different thing from silence on your own, and neither of us has to fill it.

Then there are the other people. Short conversations on the path with dog walkers we half recognise, mostly about the dogs, none of them going anywhere in particular. Small and pleasant and completely disposable.

What It Is Actually For

None of this is remarkable, which is more or less the point of it.

There is no achievement in a forest walk. Nothing gets finished, nothing gets decided, and it does not appear anywhere afterwards.

But it is the thing that resets the week, and I now guard the time for it in a way I would not have bothered to a few years ago.

The old boy had sixteen years of these walks. This one has had a few weeks, and has no idea yet that this is what his life is going to be.

I am faintly envious of him.