Three Fences, a Boat, and Biscuit Waiting

Biscuit went missing on a Thursday from a garden he had never once tried to leave. Gate open — a meter reader, probably — and eleven years of homebody terrier gone between lunch and dinner.

We did the drills: shelters, vets, posters, hours of walking his usual routes with his squeaky carrot. Nothing. He is old, deaf in one ear, and it was cold at night. By Saturday I was sleeping in twenty-minute instalments.

In one of those instalments I dreamed I was low to the ground, moving along a path — hedge on my left, and on my right three garden fences in a row, all painted the same peeling blue. The path dropped toward water-smell. There was an upturned rowing boat on grass, white with a green stripe and a hole in the stern where the wood had rotted, and warm darkness under it, and the feeling of waiting. Not my feeling. His. I woke up saying 'the boat.'

We do not live near water — no lake, no marina. But an old drainage canal runs behind the industrial estate two kilometres off, somewhere I had never walked a dog or myself. Sunday morning I went, because searching anywhere beats searching nowhere.