We were two kilometres away from camp and several hundred metres into the rainforest when we heard the howling.
At first, I thought it was gibbons but it sounded nothing their distinctive calls, nor like anything else I’d ever heard in the forest. Redly, one of the local guys leading the macheting stopped cutting and turned around sheepishly. “Those are my dogs,” he grinned.
Moments later two overgrown puppies came bounding through the understorey with their tongues lolling and tails wagging. They launched themselves at Redly in greeting and received a scratch behind the ear in return. Pinkie and Ringo, not keen on the idea of staying behind at camp and waiting for their owner to return, had decided to chase after the car and come for walkies in the forest.
For the next six hours, the pair of 3-month old siblings were never far away as we cut a kilometre and half of new trail. At times, they would grow impatient as we hacked through dense areas of vines and would wriggle ahead and out of view. But whenever the trail grew steep and muddy they would always reappear, struggling alongside us and occasionally needing to be lifted over a log or tall buttress root—or even thrown across gulley too wide to leap over.
They were especially slow through freshly cut sections of bamboo because their paws would get stuck between the canes. Ringo, the more excitable, adventurous and arguably dimwitted of the two, still tried to zoom through these areas and faceplanted more than once. Pinkie would pick her way through the tangled branches slowly, carefully placing every paw step like a dancer.
At times the dogs would get a little too close to a swinging blade and would have to be warned away. But mostly they seemed to love exploring the forest, lapping up water from crystal clear streams and no doubt chasing after the many scents of the forests. At one point, we heard both dogs barking for a solid minute. When we went over to investigate, we saw what all the fuss was about—they had found a tortoise!
By the end of a hard day’s work the dogs had much more energy than we did. As we traipsed aching and sweating back along the hard-earned ground we had covered, they rushed ahead yipping at us to get a move on. And when we collapsed into the truck and drove back to camp, they raced along behind us as if it had all just been a lazy stroll in the park.
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