We get all four of our Beagles out together on most walks now, but but from time to time it’s nice to give each pair of furries their own dedicated adventure. A little while back the youngsters got to do a woodland walk in Stewarton, and a week later Beanie and Biggles returned to the Ayr Gorge walk in Mauchline. They’ve done this walk a number of times over the years, and it’s always one they enjoy, with lots of ups and downs and sniffs at every turn. Catch it on a good day in the right season, and it’s truly magical.

One of the signature points on the walk is where the path is framed by two huge old trees, as shown in this shot from one of our previous visits, below.

This is now gone forever; the tree on the left has been felled. I can only hope there was a valid reason for this, rather than it being part of some harebrained scheme by the local council. I must admit the sight of this once great tree reduced to a stump dampened my spirits, but it didn’t seem to have the same effect on the Beaglets; Biggles trotted right up to it with a waggy tail, peed on it, and moved on, snapping me out of my moment of reflection. The Bigglet has always been very good at living in the moment; the only time he ever dwells on things lost is when part of his chew drops down between the boards on our deck. Even then, just slip another treat into his chewing gear and he’s instantly happy again.

This time of year the bluebells are very much in evidence, and The Beanster went on a few off-path sniffing missions among them, at least until her extending lead hit its end stop.

From time to time the sun cut through the trees and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this particular trail looking more beautiful.

In the midst of this uplifting beauty, Biggles reacted much as he had done to the sight of the tree. This reminded me of the famous Zen parable “Is that so”, in which a Zen master meets changes in fortune with the same calm, stable mood.

The pee that says “Is that so?”

Is Biggles a furry Zen Master, or just a little Beagle boy that likes peeing on stuff?

We did the standard figure-of-eight route that looped us back to the van. I think it took about 90 minutes, by which time everything that needed to be sniffed had been sniffed, everything that needed to be drenched in pee was suitably wet and smelly, and every doggy biccie that had been in my pocket was now in a tummy getting processed (probably with some other things that shouldn’t end up in a tummy).

Walks with the youngsters may be more lively, but when you want a carefree stroll in nature, you just can’t beat the original team.

Our four Beaglets have become much more of a pack in recent weeks. To encourage this we’ve been making a point of walking them all together once a day, even if oly one humie is available for the walk – that’s right: one pair of hands holding four leads. The first time I did this I really struggled to keep the leads from tangling; it was bit like a Maypole dance in which all the participants were on a sugar high. Just as I was starting to get the hang of it, an unexpected aspect of Beagle pack behaviour manifested itself. I guess you could call it the poo domino effect: all it takes is for one pack member (usually Biggles) to drop his furry pants and deposit a bottom-sausage, and suddenly all the other pack members feel compelled to do the same.

If walking four Beagles is difficult, dealing with four consecutive poo events while walking them is like trying to thread a needle while wearing boxing gloves. The moment that first poo hits the deck, Poppy and Monkey are desperate to get a bite of it, so I pull everyone away from the drop zone and transfer all the leads to one hand while trying to extract and open a poo bag. When all is ready, I misdirect the youngsters just long enough to lunge at the poo and scoop it up. Ideally the next poo in the sequence would happen right at this point, while there’s room in the open bag, but that’s not how it plays out. Nope, the next squat only happens once I’ve tied up the poo bag, untangled the Gordian knot of leads and just got everyone moving in the right direction again. Worse still, lately Biggles and Monkey seem to be in a competition to find out who can do the most dumps on a walk, so it’s not just four poos I have to deal with but sometimes eight or nine.

I don’t want to dent Biggles’ ego, but when it comes to sheer quantity of dumpage, Monkey holds the record due to the crazy amount of food he needs to fuel his growth.

A question I often get asked on walks is how well our four dogs get on, given the considerable age gap. I would say that Beanie & Biggles have accepted Poppy completely; she’s absolutely one of the team and knows all our little rituals, from treats at the kitchen baby gate to the mad race to crates when it’s bed time. With Monkey, things are more complicated; he’s very much accepted on walks and there are very rarely any clashes in the garden, but in the house he can still be on the receiving end of a stern telling off. Very often these admonishments are deserved; Monkey has more nonsense between his ears than even Biggles, and he’s hopeless at understanding where the red lines lie. That said, it’s easy to forget that despite his size (he’s almost the same size as Biggles now)  inside he’s still just a baby.  This is never more evident than when he gets a treat he hasn’t tried before; he plays with it for ages before attempting to chew it, and it never occurs to him that as he throws it around and rolls on it that any of our other three doglets – Poppy included – could steal it from him. He’s just a big, blundering, lovable oaf with all the common sense of a brain damaged lemming. Give him time and I’m sure he’ll progress to the same level of awareness and intelligence as Biggles (let’s face it we don’t want to set the bar too high).

Dad, there was a hole in the bottom of our padded play kennel, so I stuck my head through it. It may not have been one of my better decisions.

Another question – one we ask of ourselves from time to time – is whether we did the right thing by getting Poppy and Monkey while Beanie and Biggles are still with us. The answer has always come back “yes”, but increasingly this answer comes more quickly and with more confidence. I honestly believe that our older pups have gained more than they’ve lost, and perhaps the biggest gain is in the nature of our interactions with them. As they’ve aged and Beanie in particular has shown signs of frailty, the knowledge that we must eventually lose them has been ever harder to suppress, and they must have sensed our feelings. Instead of making the most of whatever time we have left with them, we were in danger of spending their last years or months listening fearfully to that relentless clock ticking down. Having Poppy and Monkey has dulled the worry and made it much easier just to take each day as it comes; that must surely be a benefit to our original pair of woofers.

Monkey came quite close to being renamed this week. After watching the final season of the Viking saga The Last Kingdom, Susan started calling our youngest Beagle boy “Olaf”, and I have to admit it seemed like a good fit.

Like a big Viking oaf our boy does have a habit of blundering into things. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve crouched down to give Poppy a little cuddle, only to have our moment interrupted as two big Viking paws slam down onto the top of my head and a big slobbery mush pushes into my face. When he enters the living room his way of saying “hello” is to jump onto you unannounced, landing like a big sack of potatoes and trying to stick his (usually poo-covered) tongue up one of your nostrils.

Just like the stereotypical viking he’s quite fond of pillaging; he grabs socks, gloves, toilet rolls, tools, shoes – basically anything he can get his big chops around-  and carries them off to his pile of other looted items in the garden. He’s also developed a taste for humping. At the moment Poppy is the sole target of his x-rated pelvic activities, and he has absolutely no sense of propriety. For example one morning we closed the two of them on the deck for a moment, and Poppy tried to squeeze through bars of the gate just as she’d done as a little pup. Poppy is still very much a titch, but apparently she has grown enough to cause her to get stuck about half way through the bars. Once she realized her predicament she started to panic, and as both Susan and I raced up from the garden to assist, Olaf  The Insatiable decided that now would be a great time for a bit of rumpy pumpy. From his point of view a fair maiden was stuck halfway through the gate with her business end fully accessible – what else would you expect a Viking to do? Oddly enough his unwanted advances did motivate Poppy to pull herself back through the gate before I had to rip the bars off it, so I guess you could say he helped, after a fashion.

A couple of days later an incident occurred which wrecked my boy’s Viking aspirations. I was giving the youngsters their morning walk and as we passed a house with a very territorial and vocal doglet, I realized that their garden gate was open. Before I could do anything the dog in question sprinted out to confront us, woofing angrily. Fortunately verbal abuse was as far as this encounter went. Poppy took it in her stride, but what did Olaf The Fearless Beserker do? He bravely made a little puddle. This was hardly the stuff of heroic Viking sagas; it was just a silly little boy peeing himself because he got scared by another dog – a dog who incidentally was smaller than him. “Olaf” was instantly right off the table, and Monkey was back for good.