A Kinder Surprise

My dog, Milly, and I have a few things in common: we believe a long walk is a daily necessity, good for emptying – she, her bladder, me, my head; forty winks on the couch is so much better when you’ve got each other for a hot water bottle – except on a Melbourne forty-plus killer; we’d sell our souls for a decent backrub; we’re chocoholics; and we love a good novel.

The liking for chocolate is a bit of a worry. Though to be truthful, for me it’s an indulgence-slash-addiction I have no intention of ever trying to conquer. To overcome my chocolate habit would be tantamount to donating my tastebuds to science. I’m never doing it.

It’s another matter for the dog, however. For her, chocolate, for all its sublime slide-down-your-throat-on-velvet-rollerblades allure, is toxic. Chocolate contains a compound called theobromine – a stimulant and diuretic – which dogs cannot digest. In large enough quantities – and for a small dog this could mean only a few squares of chocolate – it can be fatal.

I like my chocolate cold, straight out of the fridge, so the chocolate at our house is rarely within sniffing distance of the dog. Except last week, when in preparation for tackling the Overland Trail in Tassie, my daughter left the ingredients for her scroggin on the kitchen bench. When we ducked out to the shops for an hour, we hadn’t bargained on the dog nosing the chair out from the dining room table and using it as a stepping stone – via the table – to the bench. When we returned, we thought it odd she wasn’t waiting by the front window and odder still she didn’t greet us at the door with her usual maniacal enthusiasm. She was too busy scoffing a last mouthful of chocolate buds, having another couple of bites of freshly baked bread and negotiating her way down off the kitchen bench.

Actually, my dog and I have another thing in common. Apart from a penchant for freshly baked bread, we’re hopeless at hiding the truth. She greeted us belatedly – and very briefly – tail down, minimal eye contact, before slinking off voluntarily to ‘time out.’ (When she has been naughty we tell her to go to the laundry where she sits with the door closed in the dark for a couple of minutes.)

I weighed the remnants of the chocolate bud packet. She’d eaten half. Fortunately, the only ill-effects that day was a full-on mad turn in the front yard when she completed about twenty figures-of-eight, full pelt. One way to use up the extra calories, I suppose. Perhaps I should start a new routine. Several frenzied laps around the front yard each day to keep the waistline in check.

I’m fairly sure I know when Milly developed an interest in chocolate. It was around the time she read her first novel. I suppose it was remiss of me to leave Cormac McCarthy’s The Road lying around the house. I should have kept it on a high shelf. I should have picked up the clues, too, seen the dog pacing the house; going outside on the pretence of needing a pee, only to stare up at the sky for hours on end; running to fetch the morning paper without being prompted. Unbeknownst to me she had been scheming, working out her survival plan should Armageddon strike during her lifetime.

When my daughter, Hannah, came back from her overseas exchange, she brought with her a cache of German chocolate. She’d half-unpacked her case and laid the chocolate out on her bed before going off to her father’s for the weekend. I went in to retrieve her washing and forgot to close the door behind me. Later in the day, after coming home from an outing, I noticed the open door and went to close it. That’s when I saw the open pack of ‘kinder’ bars. There were three left. The packet had originally contained 18 individually wrapped bars. I searched the house for the evidence, but there was no sign of an empty wrapper anywhere. I concluded that Hannah must have been back to the house while I was out and taken them with her. I thought it was a small miracle Milly hadn’t discovered them first.

Until I went upstairs in time to see her open her mouth and dump three perfectly intact ‘kinder’ bars into her dog bed. She looked so pleased with herself I swear she grinned at me.

Another search of the house turned up one bar beside a bookcase. Eleven were still missing.

That evening Hannah ‘s brother decided to give Milly a whiff of one of the bars to see what happened. Unbelievably, our chocolate thief headed straight into Samuel’s bedroom and under his desk. A search on hands and knees revealed four more, between the desk and wall. As I examined them for tooth marks, the dog turned tail and was off up the stairs, teenagers in tow and claiming our dog would beat me hands down any day in the Easter Bunny stakes. Another search on hands and knees in our study revealed a neat little bundle of five more bars at the back of the computer desk.

The last two bars, however, remained a mystery.

What a busy afternoon she must have had. Oh to have had it on film. All that hard work hiding her treasures and to think she didn’t even sample a single one.

Today I changed the sheets on my bed, and when I gave the doona a shake, something fell out from between the buttons on the cover. A kinder bar! A feel along the bottom of the cover revealed the other one.

Hey Milly – ten out of ten for ingenuity.

That’s another thing we have in common.