No - this is not the title of a new murder mystery - its a summary of two strange but common phenomena of our afternoon walks.
On a work day, the late afternoon walk tends to be the longest one of the day. This is the time when Winnie gets to stretch those long (well long for Winnie) terrier legs and run around off lead. Besides digging random holes and rolling in fox poo, she also likes to chase after her ball.
Being Winnie, this means that it can't just be any old ball (unless its a stolen ball - but that's a different tale), it has to be a tennis ball AND it has to be squeaky. Just because she is on the petite side, this does not mean that she needs a small ball. Small balls are treated with the same contempt as small sticks (see earlier blog posts). She wants a proper size tennis ball.
Now, I'm not sure if its done with mirrors, or whether she has the ability to dislocate her jaw like a snake, but somehow she is able to pick up one of these balls in her mouth - in fact, I've seen her try to pick up two, but luckily she's never managed it - yet! Anyway, getting back to the ball; this proper sized ball has to be squeaky - this is so that once she has retrieved her prize she can skip around teasing any other dogs by squeaking it as hard as possible and worrying any local wildlife in the vicinity. Winnie never does anything quietly and anyway - why have a squeaky ball if you don't mean to squeak it? Squeaking the ball also acts as a dog magnet, much to Winnie's great delight, because then she can run around in front of them, almost letting them catch her, or the ball, but not quite.
She regularly meets up with three Golden Labrador girlies on our walks and she loves to get them involved in the ball game. These girls are all considerably taller than her but she runs interference as they all chase after the ball. Winnie will run between their legs, leap over heads, even ricochet off the side of them to get to the ball first. She also likes to snatch them from the 'jaws of death' (luckily all three girls are very gentle) or even leap up and try and latch on to the ball that one of the girls is carrying! One of my favourite memories involved a tuggy toy which two of these lovely girlies were playing with. Winnie saw this and launched herself at the rope toy and just hung like a toggle from the centre of the rope while the two girls continued to play tug......
Getting back to the ball.....
Winnie never wastes an opportunity to comment on my physical prowess ,or lack of, shall we say. When I first started throwing the ball for her she used to run off at high speed in the direction she thought I was throwing, without looking back once. It was obvious that she fully expected me to have amazing ball throwing abilities. So my puny efforts were met with terrier incredulity. I could almost hear her saying "is that it?"and curling her lip in disgust. Being a second hand terrier she was obviously used to someone with better ball throwing abilities than me.
So I admitted defeat and invested in a ball flinger. Winnie was happy - on the rare occasions I managed to get the coordination right - which in the early days was not often. I have lost balls in a multitude of ways and normally at high speed. I then have to cope with a disappointed Winnie half way round a walk with no ball. Not a pleasant experience I can tell you!
This is where its probably opportune to explain the 'new ball curse' part of the title. If you look in the back of my car by Winnie's crate you will see a selection of ancient and very decrepit squeaky balls. Most of these are the veterans of multiple walks and are suffering from either being desqueaked or having their squeaker broken in some way. They have been thoroughly played with and 'seen life'. However, the one thing that all these balls have in common is that they have survived their first outing with me and Winnie and avoided the curse of the new ball.
There seems to be an unwritten rule which says that if you have a nice, clean, shiny, pristine, fluorescent yellow ball, you are more likely to lose it on its first outing than at any other time. If I have a new ball loaded in the flinger, it will be at this time that my efforts will be more erratic than ever in consigning them to high speed oblivion. With a new ball this will be the one time that a strange dog will appear and run off with it never to be seen again. A new ball is particularly susceptible to the effects of the magnetic, black hole powers of rabbit holes (more on this in a moment). I remember one time when we were nine tenths round the circuit of our favourite walk with a new ball in tact and still with us when the Labrador girls joined us. I was really pleased with myself as I'd been having quite a run of bad luck with new balls. I'd watched Winnie like a hawk and averted several near disasters. I really felt that this time we might get one home, but then the curse struck when my defences were down.
Quite out of character, one of the Labrador girls felt the anti matter forces of a particularly deep rabbit hole and in a blink of an eye my lovely new, nearly safe, ball was gone. Watching my friend grovel on her belly with her arm up to her armpit down said rabbit hole was a definite compensation for the loss, but Winnie didn't think so.
This brings me on to the other part of my title - the magnetic powers of rabbit holes. If you talk to anyone who owns a dog that likes balls, they will all tell you of the numerous balls that their dogs have dropped down rabbit holes. None of us can work out why this happens, it just does. The scenario goes something like this - dog retrieves ball, dog is returning to owner with the ball in its mouth. For many owners, getting the ball out of their dogs mouth can be quite hard. A ball is not a prize a dog normally gives up easily. So why is it that sometimes dogs are sidetracked by a particularly mysterious rabbit hole and go over to investigate it with the ball in their mouth? Why is it that only when they are directly over the hole do they suddenly open their mouth and drop their prize neatly down the hole - never to be seen again? Why? Neither the Labradors or Winnie are particularly interested in rabbit holes - so why do they have this irresistible urge to drop balls down them? Are they all closet golfers? Snooker addicts?......and why do they always look so pleased with themselves when they do it?
I have visions that in several hundred years time archaeologists will be writing papers on why ancient Britons buried tennis balls deep underground. Perhaps the mouth of rabbit holes are a bit like tiny black holes and the magnetic force affects the dogs jaw, resulting in them dropping their ball down the hole. I just hope Alice doesn't chose to fall down any rabbit holes in my locality as she is likely to be concussed by a squeaky ball!
You can imagine that if you put a cursed new ball and a rabbit hole anywhere close together the end result is not going to be good. The sad thing is you can see it about to happen as the dog goes into the strange 'rabbit hole trance' and slowly drops the ball with a satisfying plop into the hole. Then they look round as you cry out in frustration and loss and look at you as if to say "What? Whats your problem?"
New balls please.......
