Labrador by Ben Fogle

Author:Ben Fogle [Ben Fogle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-09-20T16:00:00+00:00

While I can’t say she ever saved my life, Inca certainly helped change it in ways I could never have expected.

When I rowed the Atlantic Ocean in 2006, Marina, still then my girlfriend, packed me off with a series of envelopes. One for each day I was away. In each one was a photograph, almost all of which were of Inca, Maggi, or both. They invariably made me cry.

More importantly, they emphasised just what a perfect girl Marina was. Kind, fun, clever, thoughtful, funny, beautiful, but most importantly of all, a fellow dog lover.

Marina and I talked of little else. Our Labradors, Maggi and Inca, were like our children. I think they call them fur babies. I could never have married anyone who didn’t love dogs as much as I did; my family used to joke that it would be Inca that decided the fate of various girlfriends, not me. To give them all credit, they all loved Inca, but Marina was different. Inca didn’t love her, she loved her. What’s more, Marina even had her own Lab.

We spent endless weekends exploring beaches and forests with the dogs. We travelled from Devon to Norfolk with Inca and Maggi, and at weekends we would walk the parks of London together. We were a perfect match. The four of us.

Rowing across the Atlantic gave me a chance to reflect on my life, and more importantly to plan my future. I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather spend the rest of my life with. So I made Marina a little ring made from some rope we had on our rowing boat and I proposed.

A year later, Marina and I married. We tied the knot in Portugal, too far to take our matchmakers, so instead the dogs were immortalised as figurines on top of our wedding cake, and also in a letter I read out to our guests purporting to be from the dogs, and how our marriage had in fact been entirely engineered by the dogs. It probably wasn’t far from the truth.

The dogs were never far from our thoughts.

To make up for them missing the wedding, we devised our honeymoon around them. I had organised for us to spend a week on Taransay, because it was important for me to show Marina the island that had changed my life, but subconsciously I wanted to take Inca back, too, and allow her to share the experience with Maggi. By now the two dogs had become thick as thieves and were inseparable.

We loaded up the Land Rover and together, once again, we began the long overland journey up to Scotland. I’ll never forget Inca’s excitement when we leapt from the boat onto the shore. She was home! She raced around the island to all her favourite spots – she still knew where the fence was high enough to crawl underneath and where the gates were.

Of course, it wasn’t a typical honeymoon. Goodbye tropical island, azure seas and bikinis, hello rain, mud and Gore-Tex jackets. It was cold and wet and we had to cook basic food on a woodburning stove, but it suited us.

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