With the weather blazingly hot in the Ystwyth Valley this morning, I set off while it was still relatively cool to walk Rudi through our field to the red bridge over the stream to our neighbours' property, and from there across the cycle-path and down to the river, where he likes to retrieve his ball and swim.
Our field was lushly green a week ago, starred with wild flowers and thrumming with insects. It probably hasn't been fertilised for the best of a century, and this is the first time in several years it hasn't been grazed - at least in part - by horses throughout the Spring. Rudi vanishes in the chest-high grasses when chasing his ball, and I have to be up-hill of him to trace his trajectory by the parting track like the speeding Velociraptors of Jurassic Park. He emerges sneezing with nether-parts and face butter-yellow with the pollen, reminding me of the little man with a golden beard in Ruskin's The King of the Golden River. Through the gate and into the steep, wooded valley where the red bridge is cool in dappled shade, rimmed with huge clumps of glossy hart's-tongue ferns, the bluebells having long gone. (We have the native bluebell in the wood, though the ones in the garden planted before we arrived are the bigger, showier Spanish variety.) Below the bridge our stream continues to run, though the flow is now desultory and the rock pools under the two waterfalls are a lot more shallow than they were a month ago. A quarter of a mile on the river will still be running deep enough for Rudi to swim, so we press on.
A few weeks ago the track down to the the river cut through deep beds of wild garlic. Now the path has transformed with seed-heads dropped from the trees, and it's as though we're walking on lamb's-fleece. As Rudi bounds ahead flashing through shafts of sunlight, little bombs of grass-pollen go off like soft firework displays in his wake. At the river a flotilla of Canada geese watch from the water, regally still at a distance of about a hundred yards downstream, as Rudi doggy-paddles loudly about in pursuit of his ball. It's lovely to watch him from above, the water clear and the far-below pebbles rippling as his shadow passes over them. When first he came to us a year ago he was circumspect at the river's edge, only willing to retrieve his ball if it floated within range without him plunging in. Now he cannons in with a splash and swims like a champion, riding high in the water with tail up and ball clenched between jaws held above the surface. (Jack on shorter legs used to ride low in the water, and his river-intake when carrying his ball was prodigious as a result.)
This afternoon, because he asked, I took Rudi for a ball-throwing circuit of the grounds, and halfway across the field in the full blast of the day, wished I hadn't. Even in my straw hat the heat beat down like a hammer on the top of my head. Rudi vanished for minutes on end, lying flat in whatever shade of grass he could find. The vibrant greens and purples of last week's grass have now scorched to shades of pale green/straw, and though that's the way it always goes, this year the transformation has been a lot faster. Right now everything looks beautiful, but we need rain. A week more of this will see a big difference in the landscape.
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