"Whenever her father was alone with the dog in the house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel.... a dog's paw was a wonder: the smell of it never suggested dirt. It's a cathedral...so and so's garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen- a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day." Michael Ondaatje
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