A traveler’s tale.

Buried deep in a sleeping bag at 4’500mtrs in the Himalayas I lay rigid trying to breathe what air there was. I went for my usual 10 minutes on one side before the cold seeped into the bones from the ground and then I rolled over .
‘What’s that smell?’ I thought, is it me? Have I died and already started to de-compose?
I then heard a ‘sniff sniff ‘and felt a nose press against the inner door of the tent and nuzzle my hair. Somehow a rather large Tibetan mountain dog had crawled under the flysheet and was now sleeping in the porch. This was no ordinary Dog.
This was Deng Dog, our new guide (our original disappeared over the pass the day before as he had no tent proclaiming he didn’t want to die). Having followed a French trekking party from the village of Deng, ‘Deng dog’ as he became known then latched himself to us and decided we were a safe bet for company.
Having hardly enough food for ourselves we gave Deng our boiled eggs as that was all we could spare. He whoofed two down for breakfast, and happily led the way over the Glacier tail held high farting every 20 seconds. Lunch was another 2 eggs for Deng, what air there was starting to get very rare indeed.
We crossed the pass and Deng stuck around for the next two days, more human than Dog we became terribly attached. In the end we caught up with the French group who he originally followed and whilst he was saying hello to old friends we snuck away not wanting to abandon him to whatever fate would deal him at the end of the trek.
I still think of him now, wondering how he would have got on in Edinburgh if we brought him back. How many Poodles would have eaten by now? And if his stomach ever recovered from all those eggs….