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.

The towpath had a hedge on the left. My heart began behaving strangely at the first blue fence. There were three, identical, peeling — back fences of the last houses before the estate. The path dipped, the water-smell arrived, and on the bank ahead lay an upturned rowing boat, white, green stripe, rot hole in the stern.

He was under it. Thin, filthy, one paw sore, entirely unbothered, as though I was late. He squeaked no carrots but ate half a sausage in one movement.

The vet says dogs shelter near water and I say certainly, yes — and also that I had never seen that boat in my life, and I drew the green stripe for my wife before I left the house.