“Superglue’s rubbish,” Kenny said. “Dad tried to glue the bottom of my shoe back on and it just fell off again. It doesn’t stick anything together, apart from your fingers.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Fingers and willies – that’s all it’s good for.”

That was the sort of chat we had, and it was a laugh, for a while.

The footpath was pretty easy to follow, despite the fact that the snow covered everything. There were stone walls on both sides, and even when there weren’t, the path had its own shape, different to the fields around us. There was a high bit in the middle of the path, and then a lower bit on each side, and then high again at the edges. It looked like tyre tracks, but it might just have been from thousands of feet walking over it for hundreds of years.

Here and there we’d see sheep huddling against the field walls or spot their mucky arses as they ran away from us. Well, I suppose they were really running away from Tina, who barked and growled at them.

I don’t know how much damage she could have done to the sheep, but she definitely wanted to have a go. I don’t think dogs really know how big they are. I read that the only animals that can recognise themselves in the mirror are chimps and dolphins. They do this test where they put a blob of red on the chimp’s nose, and when it looks in the mirror the chimp sees the blob and wipes it off. Other animals just think the thing in the mirror is another dog or whatever. So maybe in Tina’s head she was as big as a wolf.

While I was thinking about how you can have a wrong idea about how strong you are and what you can take on, Kenny said, “This is rubbish. Can we go home now?”

“We’ve got to get to the next village to pick up the bus,” I said. “We’re probably nearly there.”

Just as I spoke, the snow started to fall hard again. I looked at Kenny and noticed for the first time how cold he was. He was badly dressed for a walk like this, on the hills in a blizzard. Just a sweatshirt and a denim jacket and his jeans. And trainers that were already sodden. His nose was red and a line of thin snot dripped down, dabbed every few seconds with the back of his raw hand. He’d folded and hunched himself inside his jacket to try to keep out the cold, but it was like trying to get full up by eating soup.