Country Matters: Pansy's adventure and my merry dance

SHE is as deaf as 20 haddocks laid nose to tail, and increasingly eccentric. Her powers of locomotion are faltering, which makes her liable to trip and fall flat on her face. Her days of leaping fences are past, and if no gap can be found, she has to be hoisted bodily over. Nevertheless, at the age of 13 human years - 91 in canine terms - Pansy is still going remarkably strong, and insists on coming for every walk on offer.

I thus took no special precautions when we set off for an excursion the other evening. Having driven to the foot of an outlying hill, I parked the car in a niche beside the lane and set off up a footpath across some grass fields towards the rough, wooded ground on the higher slopes.

This hill is a favourite with both me and the labradors. For the dogs the attraction is rabbits, hundreds of which live in dense bramble thickets and come out in the evening to graze, both on the fields below the wood and on the bare spine along the top, which they keep mown to a fine sward. For me, the magic resides in the fact that the hill withstood the grinding of glaciers when they retreated at the end of the last ice-age: it sticks out into the plain, high above the surrounding farmland, and gives a ridge- walker the feeling of being a bird or the pilot of an aircraft.

No such lofty thoughts occupied the mind of Zephyr, Pansy's daughter, as she sighted rabbits by the score and put in a series of careful stalks, creeping forward nose down, bottom up, in the hope that stealth alone would lull some victim into immobility. Rabbit after rabbit hopped off ahead of her until the whole landscape seemed to be on the move.

During these manoeuvres we were all advancing uphill across sloping meadows. At the top of them we came to the lower edge of the wood, my plan being to cross the fence into it and walk along a path that meanders through the scattered trees and bushes. Zephyr forced her way under the wire netting through a tunnel made by badgers, but Pansy decided this was too much and lay down - which meant I had to lift her over.

Exactly what happened next I cannot be sure, because I was hooked up on barbed wire and preoccupied with trying to free myself. I think Zephyr went off along the path to the right and Pansy went the other way. In any case, when I whistled a moment later, the young dog appeared but the old one did not.

I started to the right, confident that she would soon catch up, following us by scent if not by sight. Several small paths wound between bluebells, clumps of brambles, thorn bushes and young trees, and I felt certain that Pansy would appear at any moment. But she did not, even when I waited in a glade beneath a big ash.

I went back to the point at which we had entered the wood and tried a loud tenor yell, which does sometimes get through to her. No result. I began hunting up and down various little paths that she might have taken. No sign. Thinking she might have tracked us along to the ash tree during those last few minutes, I went back there, also in vain.

Worry stole up on me. Was she caught by the collar somewhere? Inside the wood, there were no fences for her to get hooked on, but, in her relatively feeble state, a branch or even brambles might detain her. My mind flashed back to two occasions on which her mother, Pumpkin, had become lodged by the harness that she used to wear for working deer. Once she was under bracken, and once in some bushes, but neither time had she barked to give away her position, and it had been hours before I found her.

Another possibility: had Pansy taken a heel-line and followed our tracks back to the car? If she had, she would lie down in the lane beside the vehicle, and stand a good chance of being run over.

Moving fast now, I hustled back down to a point at which we had come through a fence between two fields. There I could see for sure that she had not returned, as the rather flimsy arrangement of sticks that I had made as a sheep- block was still intact. In that case, she must be in the wood.

I went back and searched more of the paths between the bushes - up, down, along to the big ash again. Zephyr, rabbiting assiduously, seemed unperturbed. Surely she could find her mother with her nose, if she wanted? But she ignored my appeals for assistance.

By now the old brute had been missing for an hour. Other dog disasters rose in my mind to haunt me: the time when Nellie, a flat-coated retriever belonging to a friend, had fallen into a dry water-tank and remained there for two days before being discovered; the awful evening in Ireland when we lost Pepper, an earlier labrador, at last light, and only in the morning found her dead from strychnine poisoning.

I began to fear that Pansy had had a heart attack and keeled over in the thick undergrowth. Rather as a drowning man's life is said to unreel in his mind during his final moments, I saw some of the brilliant retrieves and finds that she had made in her heyday.

Dusk was coming on, and I was running out of options. What to do? Go home and alert the police? Tour local householders and ask them to keep a lookout?

I realised that she might also have taken it into her head to walk up on to the top of the hill, as she had many times in the past. My only chance, in daylight, seemed to be to ascend to the ridge and walk along it, in the hope that either the bitch was in the open on the top, or that by looking down into the scrub on the face of the hill

I might spot her from above.

Ten minutes' brisk walk put us aloft, and at once it was clear that no dog had been up there lately: prodigious numbers of rabbits were out in the open. Pansy must therefore still be somewhere below.

Along I came, peering down into every opening among the brambles and thorns. In another 10 minutes I had reached the last useful vantage-point: after that, the ridge began to descend and no longer commanded the face below. I sat down with that helpless feeling of not being able to think what more I could do.

Then suddenly I saw something that made my heart jump: three-quarters of a mile off and down below the wood, a jet-black object had appeared out on a green field. There were lambs in that field, I knew, but I was pretty sure that they were all white. This black sheep was surely canine.

Dropping rapidly down through the scrub, I headed back as fast as I could, praying the object would stay where it was. Halfway along the flank I had another look, and sure enough: Pansy it was, sprawled at her ease in the grass.

By the time we met up again, an hour and a half had passed since her disappearance, and night was coming on. Zephyr and I, having covered several miles at a sharp pace, were both in serious need of a drink, and Pansy was overjoyed to see us. By her gambolling, puppyish demeanour she clearly conveyed the message that it had all been rather an adventure. But where she had been, or how she had managed to lose us so thoroughly, I could not persuade her to divulge.