Norway Summer, in Full Bloom

For most of the year, this part of Norway keeps its generosity a little to itself. The light is thin, the trees are bare, the fjord is the colour of pewter, and you have to know where to look.

And then all at once, summer arrives and stops holding back. The birches come into full leaf, the meadows go from faded brown to loud green, and the whole landscape behaves like it's making up for lost time. There's a short window here when the place is so beautiful it's almost like it's consciously showing off. We're in it now.

Mocca has no patience for me stopping to admire any of it. To her, a walk is not a scenic experience; it is a series of urgent investigations on the way to swim, and the beauty is entirely beside the point.

While I'm standing still looking at the way the light comes through the leaves, she is already forty feet ahead, nose down, following a story written in scent across the trail that I will never be able to read. We are, on these walks, having two completely different experiences of the same summer. Mine mostly with my eyes, hers almost entirely with her nose. And I've come to think hers is the richer one.

The trails this time of year are at their best. In the forest the path is soft underfoot and the canopy has closed over into a green tunnel, cool even on the warm days, the kind of shade that smells of moss and warm pine. Out where the trees thin, the meadows have gone to wildflowers and berries, and Mocca ploughs through them like a small determined boat, leaving a wake.

And then there's the shoreline, which is her true north because she is half water dog, and the fjord and our lake in summer is, as far as she's concerned, the entire reason the season exists.

That's the thing about a dog on a summer walk: they don't take any of it for granted. She's simply, completely in it — the smell, the water, the warm ground, the stick she is inevitably carrying by the halfway point. There's no shadow on her summer. She meets each day of it as though it's the only one and also as though there will be a thousand more, which is a trick I've never quite managed and admire enormously.

I, being human, cannot help the other thing — the small awareness, even at the height of it, that this is the peak, and that the light will start tipping back toward the dark before long. But I'm learning, slowly, from the dog. To stop narrating the ending while I'm still standing in the middle of it. To notice the light through the leaves and then, like her, just get on with the walk.

Because for now the meadows are rich and the water is warm and the birches are in full leaf, and there is a wet, happy, stick-carrying dog somewhere up ahead waiting for me to catch up. Summer, in full bloom. We'd be fools to spend it looking at the calendar.