Beamer (Hansmic Whitebeam) arrived into the world on what would have been the thirteenth birthday of Mick (Hansmic Damnation), our first Munsterlander. The significance of the date, April 1st - All Fools' Day - hadn't escaped me in his case and I could only hope that it wasn't an omen this time!

Mick was always what was euphemistically called "a bit of a handful" - there was a lot of him, both in physical presence and in personality, and when his brief show career was curtailed by an accident we had acquired Suki (Datroy Suki) with some trepidation. We were relieved when her gentle nature, which made her totally unsuited to the show ring as originally intended, tempered his exuberance and they settled down amicably for what we hoped would be a long partnership. Sadly, an inoperable tumour led to the untimely loss of Mick and we were once again a one-Munsterlander family.

Life carried on peacefully: Suki is now past her tenth birthday and is everything we would want a dog to be : gentle, utterly reliable in temperament (but still capable of keeping burglars at bay, as she demonstrated only last year), well-behaved yet sociable - in fact, the sort of dog you can take anywhere. So why did we decide to disturb this tranquillity and take on a Munsterlander pup? Good question.

We first met Beamer at ten days old, much to the puzzlement of my son, who wanted to know why we'd gone to see "a load of blind dogs." We actually made our selection at five weeks and then went to pick her up a couple of weeks later. When we arrived, the litter greeted us joyfully - all except, that is, the one who was too busy trashing a plastic bottle to notice our arrival. She made up for it when she did realise, scrambling over her brothers and sisters in her enthusiasm to get to us, and we were sold. We took her home and she never gave a backward glance, transferring her affections immediately to her new family.

The reactions of our other pets were not what we expected: Suki was terrified of her, and retreated to the settee (where the pup couldn't reach her) in disgust, but Marcos, our huge tomcat, the scourge of all the dogs in the district, named after the late dictator of the Philippines and not without reason, greeted her with curiosity and surprising tolerance! (Perhaps the fact that he was, at the time, quite a bit bigger than her, had something to do with it.) Beamer took it all in her stride.

Two weeks on, Suki finally came round to accepting our new addition. After putting Beamer firmly in her place after one of her incessant assaults on her while asleep, Suki decided that it was OK to play. The trouble was, they decided to play in the dining room, under and around the table and chairs, and it sounded like a football riot - yells, scuffles, crashes, bangs, furniture knocked over - the lot.

Since then, things have got back to something like normal - as normal as life will ever be in a two-Munsterlander household. Beamer and Suki are firm friends and the neighbours are getting used to the noise made by their rowdier games; Marcos continues to rule the roost - Beamer is learning fast just how much she can get away with where he is concerned, how to recognise when he has had enough and to retreat before the claws come out. When her two elderly playmates do tire of her and want peace and quiet, she has invented her own game : "Beamer the Jungle Dog," which involves hurtling round the garden and through the undergrowth, pouncing on imaginary prey as she goes, then trying to climb the apple tree, failing miserably, rolling down the slope into the pond, swimming across and climbing out then having a really good shake in the kitchen before repeating the process all over again. Great fun.

On the plus side, Beamer is displaying obvious intelligence : by nine weeks she was retrieving better than Suki ever has (an embarrassing admission to make about a daughter of Alex - Axel von Esterfeld of Raycris - in his day perhaps the best working and show LM in the country!) and sitting to command, and most importantly understanding and obeying the word "NO!!" She can be a bit of a hooligan at times but by and large she has the makings of a nice dog and we are well pleased with her. Only time will tell what adolescence will bring - but that'll be another story.

EPISODE TWO - A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

The months have gone by and Beamer has grown. And grown. And GROWN! I suppose it’s our fault for feeding her. As she is our third Munsterlander we did have a pretty good idea what to expect, but even so, she is BIG by anybody’s standards! By the time she was six months old she was taller than Suki and still growing, and looking more and more like Mick every day. She is also getting more and more like Mick in many other ways too – she loves going for walks along the riverbank and through the woods near our home, and REALLY relishes getting wet and muddy. She thinks nothing of hurling herself into the water at high tide, or lolloping across the mudflats when the tide is out. Her favourite sport, however, is hunting. She will sniff out and chase the rabbits which abound in the area, and I will never forget the look of amazement on her face when a “rabbit” she was in hot pursuit of suddenly scampered up a tree (she had never met a squirrel before!) but she never comes near catching them. Her favourite persona, however, is Bird Dog. Not for Beamer the game birds and wild duck she was bred for. Oh no, not Beamer. She has ambitions to catch swallows. Swallows are far more fun. They swoop and dive, JUST out of reach. Beamer runs after them. Barking. No Stealth Fighter, she yaps dementedly as they flash by, just out of reach as if they KNOW she can’t get them. I begin to get worried as they tire of tormenting her and fly off across the river because she always appears about to leap of the sea wall in a vain attempt to fly after them, but her brakes are good and she peels off sideways at the last minute and comes cantering back as if nothing in the world had happened, and scarcely out of breath.

In the winter, when the swallows have flown, Beamer turns her attention to the curlews and lapwings which rest on the fields when the mudflats are under water, but they do not give her such good sport as they don’t have the same sense of humour as the swallows. They simply watch her approach: she stalks, ever so slowly, trying to hide behind every blade of grass, until they decide she is quite close enough and fly away. She does not chase them with the same enthusiasm, but regards it as her duty to put them all into the air on her walks.

One day Beamer decided she had been laughed at enough. By this time she was no longer the “baby” but had taken charge of Scully, a mongrel puppy my daughter had brought home to join the household. Scully has learnt everything she needed to know from Beamer (and quite a lot we’d rather she didn’t know!) and Beamer had a fine time teaching her. Scully is not in the least interested in chasing flying birds, but together they go off into the woods, “tracking.” That means that Beamer follows a scent and Scully blunders happily along behind her, frightening off any game within miles. Suki, now a venerable old lady of thirteen and well past such juvenile amusements, looks on benignly and sticks strictly to the trodden paths, knowing quite well that any game within a five-mile radius will have taken to its heels or the air. Until the day it happened. Beamer caught a pigeon. How, we still don’t know – she was once again showing Scully how to move noiselessly through the undergrowth and Scully was practising, crashing through the undergrowth behind her. Suddenly we heard a squawk and a muffled bark, and Beamer emerged with a pigeon in her mouth. She released it on command, rather surprised to be scolded instead of praised, but fortunately the pigeon was unscathed apart from losing all the flight feathers from one wing. I carried it carefully home, accompanied by ecstatic dogs so proud of their “prey,” and it spent the next few months in the care of the RSPCA until its feathers grew back again!

So, Beamer transformed from “Beamer the Jungle Dog” into “Beamer, Mighty Hunter.” I wonder what Episode Three will be: “Beamer – Warrior Princess?” I sincerely hope not!!

When my eldest son was small his favourite story was “Noddy and the Bumpy Dog” and so, with apologies to Enid Blyton, we move on to

The months continue to roll by. Beamer has at last stopped growing, and not before time. Marcos died peacefully in his sleep in his fourteenth year, but Suki continues to plod on, graying visibly around the muzzle but otherwise looking much younger than her thirteen-and-a-half years (that makes her 95 in Dog Years!) Our household has been joined by another cat, Bounce, so called “because she did.” Christopher witnessed her being hit by a car and, when he checked on the seemingly lifeless bundle in the road, spotted a slight movement and brought her home, terribly injured but still alive. It took months of devoted nursing but she has made a full recovery and is now well settled in the household. Then Catherine did a week’s voluntary work at the RSPCA animal shelter, fell in love with an abandoned puppy, and the rest, as they say, is history. Scully came to stay. Beamer was absolutely delighted and became surrogate “Mum” from the start, house-training the puppy, playing with her and disciplining her when needed, and in return Scully is totally devoted to both Catherine and Beamer. Scully and Beamer’s hunting exploits are already legendary, and they take great delight in their gallops across the fields and expeditions through the woods, but in the house it is quite a different matter!

Scully the six-pound puppy has grown into Scully the sixty-pound dog. When she was small, we worried that Beamer would accidentally injure her when they were playing together. Now we worry that between them they might conceivably demolish the house. Scully is THE original Bumpy Dog! She bumps into – or jumps onto – EVERYTHING! She loves everyone and shows it the only way she knows how – she hurls herself at the chosen object of her affections and showers them with kisses (not always welcome!) Suki and Beamer soon learnt not to be quite so demonstrative in their affections and will only jump up when invited to do so, but not Scully! When she is at her most exuberant, she scatters cushions, ornaments and even furniture in her path. Suki beats a rapid retreat out of her way but Beamer will usually join in the fun.

EPISODE FOUR : BEAMER OF THE ANTARCTIC

Suki passed on into the Great Dog Kennel In The Sky on Leap Year Day (February 29th) 2000, aged almost fourteen. Until the last five weeks of her life she ailed nothing but then she had a series of massive heart attacks and deteriorated rapidly, and the end came very suddenly.

Beamer was as upset as the rest of us, and for two weeks she wandered around, looking for Suki and seeming terribly lost, but eventually she stopped pining and settled down (and started to eat again, which was a great relief.) Scully seemed less concerned - she was more puzzled at Beamer's change of mood, but eventually they began to get back to normal.

Normal? Let's not forget we are talking about Beamer and Scully here! What is normal for THEM is not what passes for normal in more conventional households! They now have a combined weight of nearly 10 stones (140 pounds for our transAtlantic readers) and Scully, now fully-grown, stands as tall as Beamer although not as heavily built. Beamer is maturing nicely (and considering that she'll be six in April, not before time..... but then they say Munsterlanders are late-maturing dogs!) and Scully has grown into one of the nicest dogs you could possibly want to meet.

Even though they are now (supposed to be) "grown-up ladies" they still have their moments, though. Take ice, for instance. Living where we do, in the north of England, winters can be (can be? usually are!) pretty cold, and frost or even snow any time from November to March or even April is far from unusual. That does, however, give six or seven months which are frost-free, which is QUITE long enough for them to forget ..... Today dawned bright, sunny, and several degrees below freezing. Bounce sat peering through the cat-flap with interest, before deciding to venture outside. She made her usual leap for freedom, landing squarely on all four feet before realising what all that white stuff was .... Aaargh! Shaking one foot after the other (but having to keep putting them down again, to lift another paw) she desperately tried to get away from the horrible COLD before turning and dashing back indoors again. Beamer, however, loves snow. I got myself well wrapped up, picked up the dogs' leads and together we set off for a lovely long walk in the fresh air. Beamer threw herself into the snow head-first, ran along like a snow-plough, burying her head in it, rolled around flinging her legs in the air and generally demonstrated what FUN it was!! Scully stood with her head on one side, giving her a rather odd look, then decided to sample the snow too. Her priority, however, was to discover if it was edible. She grabbed great mouthfuls of it, spluttering and spitting it out again, before going back for more (maybe THIS mouthful will be a bit warmer?) Beamer, meanwhile, was off in another direction - judging by the tracks in the snow, there were plenty of rabbits around, and the scent would be fresh in the still dry air. ...... more coming very soon !! ..... January 2002.... watch this space!! ......

(L) Beamer and (R) Scully in October 2001, aged 5½ years and 2½ years old respectively.