A dog's life

They're man's best friend. We talk to them and expect them to understand, but what do they make of us?

- DANYL McLAUCHLAN

She likes to look me in the eye as she urinates. Her eyes and the fur on her face are both black so her expression when she does this is unreadable. When she's almost finished she lowers her head and gives a couple of vigorous hip thrusts then strides on, head high.

She's a small dog: a maltese shih tzu cross about as big as a large cat, although she carries herself with the self-confidence of a large wolf. I walk her at least once a day. If the weather is bad, we loop around the park near our house, but on sunny days we continue on up the trails above it. We live in a commuter suburb in a valley high in the hills, surrounded by even higher hills. It can feel claustrophobic, but when you reach the hilltops and walk along the ridgelines you get expansive views of the world beyond the suburb: empty farmland giving on to steep, unfarmable crags with the sea beyond them, and beyond that, the indigo and white peaks of the Southern Alps.

My favourite trail takes us through pine trees and regenerating natives and, for a section of it, the noise of the traffic and lawnmowers dies away. You can hear only the wind and the waves from Cook Strait converging into a white noise that feels like total silence. If we time the walk for when the sun is low and directly ahead of us, it beams horizontally through the trees; the world falls away and we're like underwater swimmers drifting through silence and light.

But for my dog these walks are mostly an opportunity to urinate and to smell the urine of other dogs. I try to indulge this - it obviously means a lot to her - but we have only a narrow window of time to get to my trail when the sun is in the right position, and after that we need to get down off the hill before it fully sets and it becomes too dark to navigate.