by Allan Martin

THAT ’S the thing about a dog – you have to take it out every night, whatever the weather. So when Cassie gets up and stretches at exactly 10.15 every evening, there’s no getting away from it. Mind, Cassie’s half collie and half something else. They say collies are the cleverest of all the canines, and any dog that can tell when it’s exactly 10.15 strikes me as intelligent.

When we lived in Edinburgh the night walks were pretty tedious – up and down the same streets passing the same people and their dogs, including the hairy wee maniac with legs two inches long that thinks every other dog’s its enemy. But since we moved out here – when I retired – to the edge of the Pentlands, it’s a lot more interesting. Our house is the Old Schoolhouse – we resisted renaming it ‘Pentland View’ – and it’s just outside the village, across the burn that runs under the road through a big pipe. But when I take the dog out – and it’s usually me that does it – I avoid the main road. The old road from the schoolhouse crosses the burn further down, on an ancient stone bridge, that’s mentioned in a charter of 1367.

In the mid-nineteenth century the minister, a bit of an antiquary, claimed to have found human bones near one of the piers, exposed by high water after a thaw. He thought they might be from a sacrifice made when the very first bridge was built, to ensure good passage for those who crossed. Bridges were seen by the ancients as places of transition, boundaries from one zone to another, and therefore places where the human world abutted onto others more mysterious.

Anyway, this night – it was in February – as soon as I opened the back door I saw the fog reflected in the light from the kitchen window. So did Cassie, and she didn’t like it, just gave a wee whine and looked up at me as if to say, ‘just the quick one tonight, eh?’ That meant no wandering about, sniffing and exploring, just down the path, over the bridge, follow the road to the war memorial at the centre of the village, and straight back. I wasn’t going to object to that either. In that fog, following the path was all we could do. I kept Cassie on the lead – I didn’t want her wandering off into that mist – and took a big torch too, since there was no street lighting off the main road.