Yesterday started out quite good, I woke early and needed to go off the boat and onto the grass to spend a penny. I barked at dad and he got out of bed and opened the door onto the back deck. I had a walk and a bit of a sniff round, before I went back on board. Mum had put a joint of meat into the slow cooker the previous night and there had been a mouth watering smell drifting out of the kitchen. I like it when the slow cooker is in use, as I always get a juicy bone to take into my basket.
A bit later on Jasper returned from his constitutional walk along the canal bank. He likes to go and watch the birds flittering about in the hedgerow. However, Jasper is now so old, that there is no way for him to catch a bird. But I think he likes to go and remember the days when he was a danger to the local rodent and bird population. However, that only lasted until mum and dad fitted him with a very noisy bell attached to his collar. After that, he could only catch the odd arthritic mouse.
Now, Jasper has one habit that annoys me more than anything else in the world. That is when he tries to take up residence in my bed. One of the problems with this is that he also likes to do a bit of pilfering of anything I may have hidden in my bed for later consumption. Yesterday was no exception, when I returned to my bed. Jasper was sat gnawing on MY BONE, I was not in a good frame of mind.
I needed a new plan of action. After some considerable thought, the solution was simple. I would use the age old trick of burying my bone for retrieval later. So when no one was watching, I managed to sneak ashore and engage in some surreptitious bone burial in the hedgerow. I returned to my bed and started to drift off to sleep. Well digging a hole to bury a bone is quite taxing and I need to keep up with my beauty sleep. I can remember slowly drifting off to sleep with the lapping sound of the waves on the boats hull, the muffled noise of the engine and the faint quacks of the Mallards in the reed beds.
Some time later I was jolted awake by the sound of mum and dad knocking the mooring pins into the towpath. Dad has to do this from time to time as passing boats can cause the pins to come loose and the boat to drift away. I lay in my bed and listened to the noise outside for a while and then I drifted off back to sleep again. Later, I awoke when I needed to go outside again, for another call of nature. This time dad decided to come with me, for a walk along the bank side hedgerow. I dashed out of the boat and onto the towpath to be confronted by buildings. Someone had removed the hedgerow and substituted buildings. I started to walk along in front of dad puzzled by where the buildings had come from. Suddenly, Panic! I remembered my buried bone. I went back to where it should have been, but now there were buildings where my bone had been buried. I checked carefully but I was unable to sniff it out. It was then I remembered hearing the boat engine. We had moved further along the canal. Now my bone could be miles away and lost forever.
When I got back to the boat, the cat was in my bed again. I am having one of those days.
Yip Yap.
XX Poppy
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