It was a freezing January morning - one when the earth truly stood hard as iron, the water like a stone. Snow had not yet fallen, though it was possibly too cold.

As Sam and I set out at first light, the frost glistened and gave the moors a magical quality, while the rigid marram grass had the look of strange, alien vegetation. Not that Sam was unduly concerned with the changes that had taken place. True to form, his eyes were focused not on the ground, but on the sky.

Descending to the usually marshy valley, where reeds at the river's edge stood stiffly to attention, my boots scrunched on the sandy path's frozen crust, but Sam's eager paws scarcely connected with this as he spotted the gulls congregating on Three Cliffs Bay. Across our horizon, now at low tide, the sands stretched endlessly, white instead of buff-coloured and shimmering in the rising sun.

Sam made full, exuberant use of them as he launched himself among the gulls. Surrounded by wings, he put all his energy into growing some and becoming a bird. A bouncier Beardie than Sam that morning I'd never seen, as he covered vast tracts of sand in his dogged(!) attempts to be airborne. He kept disappearing in to the distance and then reappearing, well-pleased with his clearance of the beach.

I can't be sure quite when he went missing. I was so stirred by the morning and so certain Sam would keep returning that my memory of his non-return is blurred. It was the silence that I noticed first. This, after all his barking in the background of my mind, and the gulls' excited cries, was eerie. There was, I suddenly saw, much to my fright, no sign, near or far, either of him or of them. Had he finally achieved his dream ... and had he flown with his friends to some shore distant from his doggy kingdom?

I was being fanciful again. It was that sort of morning. Where, seriously, was Sam?

I called him, my voice echoing against the cliffs. The echo sounded so hollow that there seemed no hope of Sam answering. Realistically, if I could not see him, the chances were that he could not hear me. He hadn't followed his beloved gulls out to sea, and drowned, had he?

Anxiety soon had me running haphazardly over the beach, calling him and whistling. This silence, except for the swish of the surf, was so unnerving. Why, oh why, had I taken my eyes off him? Life without Sam did not bear considering.

But I began having to consider it as it became all too painfully apparent that the lad had vanished. After half-an-hour or so of no sounds and no sightings I had grown quite manic and had started running back up the river-valley.

Meeting a woman who told me there was a bitch on heat 'somewhere up near Shepherd's-the-Shop' I ran in that direction, despite the fact that Sam had invariably shown far more interest in birds than in bitches. Finding where she lived proved no problem in such a close-knit village but Sam, predictably, had not come visiting.

Now my only hope was that he had taken himself home. He had never done so before, but then he'd never gone missing before, either. I could take a short-cut from Shepherd's - and did, slithering on a steep hill, the mud on which had stiffened in to ruts and ridges. The air was still so cold that my breath was vaporising and I was preceded by little clouds of puff.

I emerged from shadows in to such blinding sunshine that I needed to shield my eyes. My house was straight ahead of me now, set on its hilltop above the undulations of the downs. But the dazzle of sun on frost was such that, though I knew the house was there, I couldn't see it.

Then, after running some more, I saw - or thought I saw - a bedraggled gray and white chap with a big black nose sitting outside the gates that protect my garden from hungry wild ponies. Was I seeing Sam, or an hallucination - and, if it was Sam, who was with him?

As I approached, Sam and his black companion stood up. There was a road between us. Imagine me finding Sam, only to see him run over before I could reach him ...

"Stay!" I shouted, summoning all the authority I could muster, given that I had almost no breath left. "Stay!"

Sam stayed until I had crossed to him. He seemed subdued - woebegone, even. He didn't attempt any welcome - and the other dog, which I'd never seen before and haven't seen since, ambled off. Sam wasn't injured, was he? He had certainly been in the sea - and was watching me almost fearfully, as if to ask whether I was angry. When he saw that I was not, his tail gave a tentative wag and then his whole body began wagging with abandon. I couldn't see any injury. Soon, I was hugging him and being soundly licked and my errant Beardie was promising not to worry me ever again ... until the next time!

Copyright: Pamela Glynn