When I was nine or 10 and had reckoned, at my first reading of Jane Austen's novels, that young ladies walked mainly in formal gardens, wearing tight, long dresses and straw bonnets, the notion seemed romantic, but not very ambitious. Anyhow, for us it was different. In California, you travelled by car or rode horses on saddles built for comfort and distance. We didn't walk, and we certainly didn't stroll. If we happened to be moving on foot, we explored, hunting for arrowheads and bear tracks. The ground seemed more interesting then.
My earliest memories of such explorations were in a pine forest in the mountains beyond San Bernadino. We had a cabin. Funny how the word "cottage" was one which for us then appeared only in European fairy tales such as Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel. California evokes vast desert scenes and the Pacific Ocean, but it also means mountains, lakes and woods with tall, furry trees that look like they have been there forever. There are six national parks in the state of California, including one of the most beautiful places on Earth, Yosemite, a paradise for geologists and often busy with reverential groups, a bit like the ones you find in the Burren in Co Clare. Big Bear Mountain, where our cabin was situated, was far more casual, even the deer were relaxed. There were also far fewer tourists. No cars, no radios, just a large population of contented skunks.
Memories of my first adventures at three or four, maybe five, usually feature an old yellow hound dog, the original Old Yeller, so stoic the passing flies saw him as a waste of time. He seemed not to notice the squirrels either, while his slow-moving presence didn't bother them. For me, he was an exciting endorsement of my independence. He wasn't even my dog, so he must have liked me. I was a companion, not a responsibility. We were equals and about the same height. The mountain was steep, so walking downhill took some skill in leaning back without looking like you even noticed. Socks also acquired a new importance. Without them, your toes got stubbed from rubbing against the rubber cap of your runners. Walking uphill was more satisfying: you marched, balanced unimpaired, feeling tough like a soldier or a hero, and never like a girl in a tight, long dress with a straw bonnet.
There was a lot of bird life, depending on the season. Like the yellow dog, they were content to the point of being nearly catatonic. Those pine forest birds didn't seem to make anything like the racket of their jungle counterparts. But perhaps I'm wrong. Radar or not, bats often collided with the screens on the windows at night. There was always bright moonlight. Sometimes a skunk would sniff around the back door. You kind of hoped a bear would discover the trash can, knock it over with a clang and rip the garbage apart. It never happened. There were no cement paths, so every footstep made a soft thudding sound accompanied a split second later by the crunching of pine needles.
An old Confederate grey canvas hammock with a dusty smell was slung like a monument between two fat trees. It was where we planned our injun raids - usually tame affairs, tracking pale faces through the trees. We also played war movies. The quieter you moved the better. There wasn't any point in yelling, it frightened the wildlife and it was disrespectful to the trees. Mom often told us every tree had its own spirit-person - I've never forgotten that.
It was snake country, some were poisonous. We liked to think everything that slithered along in the dust, including the few old water hoses, was a potential killer. You knew you had walked too far away if my father's jazz records became faint and disappeared off the breeze. That's what I remember of him in the mountains, the sound of Louis Armstrong's trumpet, or the band music, some of it marching stuff by a little known legend named Mitch (not Glenn) Miller, who seemed to specialise in variations of When the Saints Come March'n Home. I also remember the yellow spines of National Geographic in tall stacks and the smell of the fluid he used to clean his rifles with out on the front porch. It always seemed cool up there in the mountains in the clean pine air, no heatwaves, not like everywhere else in California. The tall pines diluted the direct sunlight. But the sky was a constant blue, except for the sudden rains. Anyone looking for the perfect setting for a real-life Christmas card, all year round, had found the place. When it snowed, it seemed a shame to leave footprints in it, but we did. The deer patrol usually beat us to it.
It has to be said that for children, walking too often amounts to an organised march around some place or other under the eye of bodyguards known as parents. We did our share of marching around Disneyland (the original one), San Diego Zoo and Santa's Village among other places. But in the mountains, you scattered. It was allowed. It was safe as air. Life moved a lot slower. The habit of hunting acquired in the mountains can leave you with a feeling of being a natural explorer, regardless of terrain. Once, on a beach in La Jolla, we tracked a horrible smell around a couple of small bays and discovered a dead whale. The happy scavenging gulls, drugged by the feast, stayed where they were, camped on the jelly mess of its ransacked body.
In Ireland, the landscape seemed smaller. But then, every walk seemed to become a run. As I got older I decided, why walk when you can run. Running seems more free, your vision is wider but your view is more limited. Irish mountains are also easier to run up. And once you run up, you tend to run back down again, right away. Between turning every walk into a run and every mountain path into a running track, walking seemed to become forgotten in the wake of each new run. You don't collect pine cones if you're running. You miss out on lots of interesting stones. Dogs are famously patient, but even they have a subtle way of indicating enough is enough. They love running, but are natural improvisers; their idea of running around in circles is not quite the same as a human's. It's a lot more imaginative, with no direct routes.
Not every dog enjoys being run on a leash like a soldier going through an official obstacle course. My special dogs, Bilbo and Frodo, re-alerted me to the genius of the walk. And as the world is full of people who shout at you unless your animals are leashed, muzzled and more or less immobilised, and farmers fear for vulnerable livestock, walking your dogs brings you to increasingly remote places. Now with four dogs, many walks have the added dimension of watching for attack from cars, men with shotguns and rogue helicopters, and you learn to stay away from cliff walks. And find better and more secret places. Forests and woods are the best. Dogs don't need to be told trees are spirit-people, they already know.
My Bilbo was a brilliant runner: beautifully co-ordinated with the grace of a ballet dancer. When running on a leash, however, he shortened his stride, went through the motions and quickly perfected a subtle sigh. Frodo was more direct, long ears flapping, he took to running sideways. A simple run meant turning into Ben Hur in charge of a chariot moving in all directions, a mess of leashes and legs. Dogs are happiest when their humans are walking, it gives them more time to sniff, mooch, run ahead and run back. A walking human is also far more inclined to stop and look and even sniff than a human on a run. When you are running you can't smell the countryside as clearly as when walking.
More than one dog can be difficult to mind on a mountain walk. They also trip and get cuts. The reality of this somehow eluded me until the day I half-walked, half-slid down a slippery mountain side with one dog across my shoulders and the other in my arms. We were soon to find mutually safe locations of immense interest to all of us, ancient churchyards. Early into our discovery of burial sites, it became obvious some graves are far more than mounds of earth to some dogs. Spirits lurk, some far from peacefully. There have been times when my dogs' reactions have left me feeling privy to an impromptu seance - but only as an observer, not as participant. We have often run out of the very churchyards we most casually walked into because they got spooked.
Even ancient sites have their restless residents. Walking about the Loughcrew passage grave cemetery in Co Meath was always a quiet experience. Until one late afternoon Bilbo and Frodo, shoulder to shoulder, hair rising, at first snarled, then merely stared up at something a few feet away from us. I saw nothing. Time to go, fast. Now that was a walk that became a run. The next few visits took place in broadest morning sunshine.
It is odd that a walk on even the most beautiful summer's day can not compete with a magical march through a frosty wood or along a deserted beach in the sharp, cold light of a winter's morning. Shortly after daybreak on Christmas morning a few years ago, the dogs dashed across Claddaghduff beach in Connemara and, once they were convinced the place was empty, resumed ownership - leaving us to gather stones to add to the small pile we had made.
There was another walk. On Christmas Eve three years ago, walking across the domed hill of Dun Ailinne, an IronAge royal meeting place in Co Kildare, with the wind so cold our faces hurt, the world appeared at peace. The bright winter sunlight suddenly gave way to a dramatic sunset, orange against a purple sky and a coming blackness. It seemed to suggest something special was about to happen. Another Christmas morning was only hours away.