Foxglove

The path takes us wide and slowly, sometimes with a kingfisher to flash past, or an egret on the far bank, a slate-grey heron lifting heavily from the grass bank, or mallard nesting cunningly beside the rife. You would never see the duck, but the drake's bright colours give the pair of them away.

Limping beside me is a dog with a heavily bandaged leg. The other three legs demand exercise, so we are going for a slow walk to refresh and cheer up the injured one.

Happy dogs heal faster than dogs that are upset and frustrated at not being able to smell the sweet air and feel the earth beneath their feet.

Thus I am here, on a side of the river that I do not normally take a dog, because here there are water voles and I do not want to disturb them. The heron, rats and sundry other beasts will give them quite enough harassment; it's a short life and a merry one for a vole.

While I look for wildlife, the dog scents for it, my sight picture echoed in her scent picture. A small brown bird is powering upriver into my vision, swimming at speed along the middle of the water. I look and look again: yes, it really is a grebe.

I have not seen one of those here for some time. Neat and dapper, with a pert expression, you could never imagine a grebe being untidy, though this one is going so fast that I fancy it might be late for something for which a grebe would rather be on time.

The dog tenses and looks at the far bank, where a small kerfuffle in the sedges reveals a terrier working its way along. I look but cannot see anyone with it.

A restraining hand persuades my dog that, injured as she is, leaping the water and joining in would not be ideal. She thinks otherwise, especially when the terrier plunges into the brambles with a great flurry, and out shoots - what?

The smell reached us while I was still trying to see the small, fast creature that had exploded out of cover. Stoat! Of course - the little russet body with the white shirt-front, the black tip to the tail, the looping run, the rattling screech and spit, but most of all that smell, all reached my brain at the same time, and told me "stoat".

Clearly annoyed, it had emptied its musk glands, and the smell hung thick on the morning air. It was a sweeter and more rounded scent than that of a peevish ferret, though its heavy pungency was probably not what a lady might want to dab behind each ear, even without the stoat attached.

The terrier, which had evidently received a good blast of eau de stoat, was running after it, having the advantage in the longer tussocks of grass, the tiny mustelid twisting and turning and just keeping ahead.

Though a stoat can pack a formidable bite for its size, so can a terrier, and there was no doubt that trouble loomed for one and possibly both of them. The stoat is no friend of ground-nesting birds, or voles for that matter, and its absence would be better than its company, but for all its small size, it did not present an easy quarry.

I thought at one point that the terrier had caught it, but the little dog slipped and lost its footing on the downhill slope of the bank, and the stoat leaped forward into a small tree, which it climbed until hidden from my view.

The terrier stood up on its hindlegs and stared into the tree for a long moment, and then, with a terrier version of a shrug and "some you win, some you lose" followed its nose back to the brambles and set about finding something else.

My dog and I continued along the bend in the river, and the hope of seeing more wildlife. I wonder what the terrier's owner made of its distinctive new perfume when they caught up with it again?

This was first published in the West Sussex Gazette April 16. To read it first buy the West Sussex Gazette every Wednesday.