Nearly five years ago Beanie decided to escape the confines of popular walking routes and go off on a solo romp in the Galloway hills. She unhooked her lead (which she was able to do back then, before I employed extra security measures) and went on her own Big Yahoo of an adventure.

After some hours of merrily following her nose she returned, tired but happy. I’ll never know what she got up to during that time, but I do know that after carrying her the 8km back to the car, the two of us spent the next day thoroughly knackered, with tender feet and sore muscles.

Last week Beanie returned to the Galloway hills, had an even bigger adventure away from the popular walking routes, and again spent the next day recuperating. This time however I know exactly what she got up to, because me and Biggles were with her every step of the way.

Our walk started by Bruce’s Stone at Glen Trool, but instead of following the well-trodden route up The Merrick, we headed out towards Gairland Burn and Loch Valley to try some of the lesser-visited hills.

The first part of the walk followed an old drystone wall and offered beautiful views back to Loch Trool. The weather was perfect; dry and bright but not too warm. It strongly reminded me of the hilly farming regions of North Yorkshire I enjoyed as a boy.

The next section was long, boggy and boring for anybody not in possession of a highly-tuned sniffer, but when we emerged from it we were by Loch Valley, getting our first view of the hills we’d be sampling.

Looking forward towards the hills

It was here that we answered a question that’s been foremost in the minds of top current affairs experts of late. No I’m not talking about the Brexit implementation details, or the Russia/Syria thing, I’m talking about the really big issue, specifically: “are Earl’s Air-dried Beef Steaks any good?” Our pups have had growing respect for Earl – who seems to be a Golden Retriever who makes the cheap doggy stuff at chain-store Aldi – ever since they tried his dental sticks. Knowing that a big walk was ahead of us I’d grabbed a serving of Earl’s latest creation and stuffed it in my camera bag, but I had no idea whether it would pass muster. And the answer? Well if speed of consumption is any guide then yep, Earl knows his stuff and his beef steaks are well worth speed-swallowing.

Moving on we passed the long-abandoned “sheepfold” between Loch Valley and Loch Neldricken, sniffed it, peed on it a bit, and then headed uphill. The hillside was covered in a thick layer of dried, reedy grass which was so soft it sucked the energy right out of my legs, but made very comfortable bedding material for his Biggleship.

After no small amount of climbing up and over things we eventually ended up at the top of a hill that actually has a name: Craignairy. The weather had been cycling between heavy cloud and bright sunshine up to that point, but as we reached the summit plateau and looked out over Loch Enoch towards The Merrick, we got the perfect combination of the two.

Beanie and Biggles sipped from the pool of fresh, clear drinking water that had been so thoughtfully provided by the summit cairn, and I continued to take a few shots.

Deciding that this would be a good time to confirm the initial conclusions regarding Earls’ beef steaks, I put Beanie & Biggles into “wait” position by my feet, and placed one “steak” on the top of each of my boots. After a short wait, I gave them the go-ahead, at which point Beanie promptly grabbed the steak that had been intended for Biggles.

In the split-second that followed, I saw a range of emotions pass over Biggles’ little face. First there was shock, then panic, and then resignation, even though there was still one steak sitting untouched on my other boot. I started pointing and trying to get the words out to Biggles before Beanie could gulp her steak down and go for round two: “Oi! Biggles! Quick, get the other one!” It was close, but he came to his senses just in time. Beanie of course was aware of her missed opportunity, and complained loudly:

What?? I was going to have that!

Noooo!

As often happens Biggles didn’t really understand why Beanie was woofing, but decided to join in anyway, so I got stick from both of them for trying to keep things fair.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t get it right.

Now we had to choose which of Craignairy’s neighboring hills we would visit next: the worryingly named “Dungeon Hill”, or the larger “CraigNaw” that was sort of on the way back to the van. Given the light and the time of day, I decided that CraigNaw was the better choice.

The way ahead to the start of Craignaw

Craignaw took longer to climb than I expected; every time we reached what I thought would be the summit, yet another short climb was revealed ahead of us. Regardless, there were plenty of great views to be had on the way up, including one that made even Biggles feel a bit inadequate.

Looking back to CraigNairy

And other views from the top

We had our final round of beef steaks at the very top of Craignaw, and this time there were no mishaps.

The walk out to this lovely region and the hill climbs from it had all been great, but now we had a long, boggy trudge back to the van. For most of this I edged around the worst mud and marsh spots, but the closer we got to the finish line, the more slapdash I became. At one point, having untangled Beanie & Biggles’s leads for the umpteenth time, I thought “Why bother avoiding the wet stuff? My feet are wet anyway, and this will go faster if I plough straight through it”. So that’s what I did at the next muddy pool, and almost went over as my entire lower leg disappeared into bog. Ever the caring Beagle, Beanie came straight to my side, and used my sudden loss of height to gain access to my trouser pockets. I gently but firmly extracted her snout from my trousers, then not so gently extracted my leg from the bog, and returned to my original “avoid the bog” walking strategy.

We were all tired and hungry when we finally reached the van; I reckon we’d probably walked around 18km in total, and a fair proportion of that had been on hills. I served up the pups’ tea and while they half-swallowed, half-inhaled it from their bowls, I perched on the back seat in my mud-soacked clothes, sipping an instant cappuccino and demolishing a bag of bacon rashers crisps. Now two days later I still have muscle-soreness from carrying all my camera gear on that walk, but I know that at some point we’ll be back to do the hills we missed.

Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.  Well, all I can say is that this Einstein bloke clearly had no experience of Beagles, otherwise he’d have realized that he was talking utter crap. Beagles try the same tricks and strategies over and over, day in, day out, and while most of the time they don’t work, there is always the chance that this time things will be different. The key is persistence; just keep going for long enough and eventually you’ll get lucky.

To demonstrate the truth of this, consider the classic “double-dinner” ploy. This is where a Beagle in a two-human family tries to convince humie “A” that he/she hasn’t been fed yet, even though humie “B” served up doggy dinner barely an hour ago. Beanie & Biggles have been trying to dupe us with this every day of their lives since they came to live with us. In Beanie’s case, that’s about 3700 attempts to get a double dinner, and 3699 of those attempts failed miserably. Einstein would have given up after two tries. A Collie dog would probably have thrown in the towel well before reaching 100 repetitions, but my pups kept on trying. And trying. And yesterday, IT WORKED!

Bear with me while I document the circumstances behind this remarkable event.

In your face, Einstein!

Sick of doing boring local walks and beach runs in spectacularly grotty weather, I jumped at yesterday’s cold but sunny forecast and decided to take Team Chaos for a walk up Ben A’an. Hills are usually out of the question at this time of year due to ice and snow, but Ben A’an is small, has a great path and is hugely popular; conditions have to be really bad to take it off the menu.

Aiming to do the hill in the early afternoon, I gave Beanie & Biggles an early breakfast without any prior walk and packed the van with all the essentials: water, coats, harnesses and leads, munchy sticks, cow ears, bone-shaped biccies, bowls and – crucially – a can of Chappie to provide a filling dinner when we got back down.

We’ve been up Ben A’an several times before and I remember it being longer and harder on the legs than it was on this occasion. Maybe I’ve got fitter and stronger, or maybe it was thanks to a much improved path, but we reached the summit in barely 45 minutes even with frequent stoppages for photos / pees / poops / sniffs.

It was very cold and windy up there but clear, and the views over Loch Katrine and across to Ben Venue were beautiful as always.

It was a throughly enjoyable and uneventful walk, and after Beanie called “time” we headed back down, arriving at the van well before the light failed.  I swapped my boots for trainers, took off coats and harnesses, and then – most definitely and without the slightest room for doubt – I served up two bowls filled with “original” flavor Chappie, which happens to be Biggles’ favorite. Beanie and Biggles – most definitely and without the slightest room for doubt – consumed said Chappie in haste, and then proceeded to chomp through a cow ear each.

When we got back home I let the pups into the house to greet Susan, then set about the longer process of bringing every thing back in from the van. While I was occupied with this, Beanie & Biggles tried their favorite con trick on their mum. She’d been working hard so maybe she was distracted, or maybe the bowls I brought in from the van looked too clean to have been used, or maybe Beanie’s dinner-summoning dance was just really, really good this time, but whatever the reason, Susan took the bowls and started filling them with kibble. Just at that point I came back into the house with another load of stuff and heard the sound of kibble hitting thin metal.

“Susie they’ve duped you – they’ve already had their nosh!” I shouted.

But here’s the thing: once you start serving up dinner, you have to finish. This isn’t NASA; there is no big red “Abort Launch!” button for dinner. And so, after a decade of trying and failing to con one of us into serving up dinner twice, our pups finally triumphed and proved Einstein wrong in the process. That’s something worth woofing about, not that Biggles is ever short of an excuse.

 

Last week Beanie and Biggles sniffed, pulled and aarrffed their way up no less than two distinct peaks in one day: Ben Luibhean and Ben Ime.

We’d had a go at Ben Luibhean earlier in the year, but that expedition had been marred by snow. We had made it to the top, but it had been a very hard slog with no pay-off other than a handful of overly-refrigerated meat and cheese nibbles. This time around with no snow to fight through I was sure our journey would be easier and more rewarding.

As it turned out it was a little easier, but not much. Instead of frozen earth with a thick coating of snow we had to trudge our way over slippy, boggy ground; it soaked up energy like a sponge and gave nothing back. To add to the difficulty we also encountered groups of sheep which made certain team members very noisy and prone to pulling in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, after about a hundred minutes of slog we finally got to see what the summit cairn looks like without all that pesky white stuff on top of it.

I was a little worried that its central upright stone might suffer a mishap when I dug into my pocket for the first serving of mini-jumbones; things always get exciting when the edibles come out and Biggles seemed intent on winding his lead round everything he could. He tied up my legs, he tied up the legs of my tripod, and he even tied up his own legs, but somehow he didn’t knock over that pretty summit marker.

We hung around the top of Luibhean for a few minutes while I took photos, but I was very conscious of the need to get moving if we were to reach the summit of neighboring Ben Ime before sunset. For her part, Beanie was very conscious of the fact that there were still two mini-jumbones in my pocket, and became very irritated when I refused to release them. She was clearly unware that we had another climb ahead of us, just as I was unaware of the trouble I was storing up by not serving all the treats in one go.

Ben Narnain (left) and the distinctive serrated head of The Cobbler to the right

Ben Chorranach and Ben Ime in shade on the right. 

Before we could get started on Ben Ime we first had to make a partial descent of Ben Luibhean and cross the very marshy “Bealach a’ Mhargaidh”. This part of the route was as pretty as it was wet. I tried to use Beanie & Biggles as indicators of the best and worst places to tread to avoid going deep into the mush. Biggles seemed particularly good at finding unexpected mud baths so I put my faith in Beanie, but as I discovered not everything that supports a nimble eleven kilo Beagle can also handle a human.

Crossing Bealach a’ Mhargaidh. Presumably “Mhargaidh” is Gaelic for “wet feet” (if it isn’t, it should be)

Ben Ime looked a lot bigger as we got closer to it. I’d climbed Ben Ime solo some years before and found it pretty tough, but that had been in snow and from a much lower starting point. Still, I began to have doubts about my ability to get to the top before sunset, especially with the “help” of Team Beagle. Don’t get me wrong: put our two pups on a well-trodden path and they’re great, in fact Biggles could even be described as an asset for hillwalks in the right conditions. However, on an open grassy hill with pockets of sheep and no clear path to follow they can best be described as.. troublesome. I decided I’d be happy enough just to get to a reasonably high viewpoint, but every time I set myself a target and checked my watch, I found that we could go on just that bit further. Quite suddenly we intersected with a path coming from Ben Narnain and our rate of progress increased dramatically. We reached the summit very shortly afterwards!

The summit cairn of Ben Ime has a low stone windbreak around it, but on this day the windchill was pretty mild. 

Cloud blew over us almost as soon as we arrived, but I still managed to grab a few shots.

In between those photos I handed out treats to my furry companions (obviously), but I made a crucial error in judgment: I served up the two big cow ears in my bag instead of first dishing out the remaining jumbones from my pocket. This might not sound like a big deal, especially for food-obsessed Beagles, but it demonstrated the huge difference in outlook between Beanie and Biggles.

Biggles is a “glass half full” kind of a boy. He approaches each day unburdened by expectations; when something good happens he just enjoys the moment. When I held out the cow ear to him on Ben Ime he wagged furiously, grabbed it, found a place to settle down (within the bounds of his lead) and set about chomping down on it.

Beanie is the polar opposite of The Bigglet. She’s acutely aware when routine isn’t followed, and is always careful to ensure sure she isn’t being cheated out of something owed to her. At mealtimes if a crumb hits the floor she’ll pursue it obsessively,  even if that blinds her to the many bigger, easier mouthfuls of food still in her bowl. Accordingly when I gave her the cow ear, she was still thinking about the other treats that were still in my pocket. She took the ear half-heartedly, but then dropped it and started scratching at my pocket and grumbling. I pointed at her ear (the cow ear, not her big furry lug flapping in the breeze) and tried to convince her to go back to it, but she wasn’t interested. Biggles however was. “I don’t mind if I do!”  is a phrase we often attribute to Biggles, and it was written all over his face as he merrily grabbed Beanie’s ear and carried it over to his own.

Beanie wasn’t immediately concerned about the ear she’d just lost; all that mattered currently was the jumbone still in my pocket that had her name on it. Stupidly I gave in and handed it to her, and she devoured it in record time. Biggles was still knee deep in cow ears at this point, but he’d noticed that extra food was on offer and of course shot me an appealing “can I have some too?” look. I directed him back to his ears, which he accepted quite happily; in Biggles’ world it’s always a good idea to ask for things, but if it doesn’t work out that’s OK too.

As you might expect, the moment Beanie finished her jumbone she remembered the lost cow ear and began whining about it. I could easily have taken an ear back from Biggles – he wouldn’t have objected – but that just didn’t seem fair, so instead I gave Beanie the remaining jumbone. That finally seemed to settle the issue, but now of course Beanie and I had to sit on our bums for an extra ten minutes watching Biggles battle through jaw fatigue to finish the last chunk of cow ear.

After this – even in the dark – the journey back to the Beaglemobile passed surprisingly quickly and easily; from time to time I could see the eyes of sheep glinting in my torchlight but the pups thankfully remained oblivious!