Ball then Breakfast

"Aye. He's affa black."

That was the whole of my welcome. It has turned out to be the biggest thing anybody has ever said to me.

Tarry arrives at Wester Glassel in a cardboard box, eight weeks old, into a farmyard above the River Dee with a sky the colour of a wet stone. Eleven acres. A byre, a shed, a burn, a stand of beech, and, over the march dyke, eleven cows who want to come through and who are held back, as far as he can establish, by nothing whatsoever except him.

He keeps a diary.

It covers the vital matters. The discovery, on Day Eleven, of a grey tennis ball under the dresser, and of the single arrangement that will govern the rest of his life: the ball goes away, and I bring it back, and he is still there. The correct procedure for rolling in something dead, and the technical reason a thing must be allowed to become ready first. The North Sea, which is water that comes at you, and which he barks at for eleven minutes without result. Puppy class in Torphins village hall, where he is awarded a certificate reading "Most Enthusiastic", which the Boss identifies immediately as what they say when you are no good.

There is the Cow Watch, established at five months old and kept twice daily for twelve years, unpaid, unsupervised, and never once thanked. There is the invention of the ball thrower, which changes the shape of the known world. There is a heron, a squirrel, a vacuum cleaner, a bin lorry, and one specific gull at a harbour, all of whom are enemies. There is a nine-year campaign to be allowed on the sofa, conducted in six phases and won completely without a single word ever being said. And there is the good coat coming out of the wardrobe, and the polish going onto the good shoes, and a door closing with a dog on the wrong side of it.

Then the years start going faster: a yellow puppy who ruins everything; a hip, a hill that gets too long, a green tablet in a bit of cheese; a man who walks forty yards out into a field to pick up a ball himself and never mentions it again.

Funny about mud, unreliable on arithmetic, and quietly devastating about what it is to belong to somebody, this is twelve years of one dog's life on a Scottish hill, told entirely in his own words.

For anybody who has ever thrown a ball for the ninth time, said "right, last one," and then thrown it again.