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Guest Puppy Post by Lucy Coats
A teckel. What is a teckel? I hear you cry. Well, it’s a very large wire-haired dachshund, bred to hunt boars and badgers*. Very fierce? You think? Well not at the start when they look like this…. More brown slugs than attack dogs here!
It was January when I was informed that A Teckel Goddess Was Born. Did I want one? (I did). Could I find a Welsh name beginning with K for her Kennel Club pedigree certificate **. I could (with difficulty). Cloghaneely Kerridwen seemed a little long for this small person below, though, as well as hard to call on a winter’s night.
So I asked the Powers that Be (aka the other branch of Robin’s Story Council) what she would like to be called when I collected her from her home in Hay on Wye+. As Robin knows, sometimes the names talk to you, if you are quick enough to catch them. This time I was, and it seemed that Sophy (after the little girl in Roald Dahl’s BFG) was right for her. After being copiously sick in the car, she perked up a little on arrival in Northamptonshire and promptly rolled in fox poo, necessitating a bath.
Then she met the Wimpy Weasel Labrador and the Grumpy Dinmont. It went ok. Well sort of ok. They both bit her to teach her her place. She bit them back. There was Much-Growling-In-The-Marsh. But peace, of a sort, eventually reigned. She was even shown round the gravel by the Grumpy Dinmont.
Then she learnt to chase birds. Lots of birds. While emitting a high-pitched squeaky bark which is REALLY ear-splitting at close quarters. (You can’t see the bird–mostly neither can Sophy, but phantom birds are just as good).
Flowers are good to sit in when wanting to look cute. She knows she’s cute. This was my best bit of woodruff, which I have been cossetting for years. It is now flat. Sophy has also dug up most of the garlic and a good many of the helianthemums. As well as trying to chew Tipsy Imperial Concubine (for which she got severely chastised). There are some things which are Not On–even for a teckel. Chewing roses is one of them.
When she gets tired she runs up to the office (where I am usually to be found, wrestling with The Words). She then collapses in the Little Red Bed and snores. It’s tiring, being a puppy.
*dachs being the German for badger, or so I am reliably informed. I don’t know where the boar bit came from.
** The Kennel Club of Great Britain. Snooty Keepers of all things genealogically canine.
+ Scene of the literary festival and many bookshops, so an eminently suitable birthplace for a writer’s dog.
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