Oh dear, hacked-off collie alert!

We've just been out for a walk in appalling weather - which was quite nice, in a slightly perverse way. (Coldfall Wood is not unattractive with lots of water around, and the playing fields were blissfully deserted.)

Daisy is now damp, smelly, fluffy, hungry (despite just having had a bowl of food) and patently at a loose end. She's been wandering up and down the kitchen yapping and fussing at me: I've failed to be entertaining enough for her and haven't been able to persuade her to come and sit with me, so I've given her a chew, a leathery thing probably made from some much-dried hideous abattoir remainder or other.

I'd forgotten that this does not really work, or not in the hoped-for sense of giving her something calming to do for a while: instead, it gives her a new manic mission, which is to bury it, presumably against some future need (which never really seems to get identified).

So now I have on my hands a tensed-up collie who has been dashing around the house (for neither of us wants her to go out again, as it took me the best part of ten minutes to dry her) looking for the perfect spot to conceal her new acquisition. In here she tried the corner by the back door for a bit, turning to glare at me from time to time (it's secret you see). She was also upstairs for a minute or two, causing who knows what disruption. (Update: it actually turns out that she was visiting Lottie, casing her bedroom as a possible hiding place, and generally giving her the evil eye.) Finally, while I was "not looking" she got up on the bench overlooking the back garden, at the other end of the table from me, and literally dug her way into a pile of newspapers and post until she'd made what she presumably saw as the perfect burial hole, and deposited her chew within.

She's now retreated up the corridor and is at least quieter, but is still watching me with a beady eye. If I were to dare to go to the other end of the table I know she would decide that I'd sussed out her cache, and with her security thus compromised I'd have triggered the whole search process all over again. So I am looking very innocent and disinterested and sitting very still for a while ... maybe she'll get bored watching me and doze off.

PS And anyway I honestly wasn't planning to steal it and eat it. It's just collie paranoia.