Shooting and fishing: Crumpet has turned out to be the best shooting dog we have ever had

TODAY is Crumpet’s birthday. She is four. We shall have a two-barrel salute to celebrate the event at which I predict she will tear about like a blue-arsed fly looking for something to retrieve only to find that, not for the first time in our brief shooting career, there is nothing to pick up.

I have been told by my daughter, very fiercely, that not only will she require a cake, but a ribbon round her neck and balloons and a party.

I bought an absolutely disgusting jawbone of an ass or ox from the local hardware shop which has been snaffled by Mango, the by now rather dotty 11-year-old golden retriever who has slunk off with it and is lying under the dying elm at the back door, growling at all comers.

Crumpet has turned out to be the best shooting dog we have ever had after a long series of golden retrievers with pedigrees traceable to a pre-war dog owned by my mother-in-law in Somerset.

Quite what possessed the rest of the family to switch from golden retrievers to a cocker spaniel is a bit of a mystery. I think they were ambushed by a friend with a new litter, desperate to get the puppies sold and it happened to be my birthday coming up. (My mother-in-law would shamelessly go to social gatherings with a car boot full of puppies and invariably sell the lot.)

On close quizzing as to why they picked Crumpet, we can get no further than “she just had something about her”. Which is true and as good a way of picking a puppy as any. She was born a day later than the rest of the litter and there was a dead puppy in front of her. As the runt of the litter, she was a natural.

No less critically, she absolutely has “it” when it comes to shooting. She has a natural nose which never lifts from the ground and her ability to understand things is to my mind extraordinary. She even comes back most of the time. You only have to wave a shoe at her and say, “Where’s the other shoe?” and she will invariably go out and find it – usually in the bamboo round the oil tank, an area she favours as a repository for shoes, mangled teddy bears and socks. If she can’t find it she’ll go and find another, completely different, shoe.

I can claim almost no credit for what I consider to be an astonishing level of obedience for a Robertson dog. I think instead of a party we will go out and see if we can find a pigeon for her to retrieve.