Never Leave The Dog Behind Book Review

Fell runner and poet Helen Mort explores our love of dogs and mountains, while reflecting on the time in her life when she acquired Bell, the whippet.

Never Leave The Dog Behind follows it’s nose through a series of short ‘essay-chapters’ on subjects that range from St Bernards rescuing mountaineers in the Alps, musings on what it means to share your dog’s adventures on social media, to Search and Rescue teams in the British hills, and a study into the language we share with our pets.

Despite the academic references, this book comes from the heart rather than the head, expressed through extracts from various dog-inspired poems and anecdotes from the Lake District and Peak District. As Helen runs, climbs, and camps with Bell in tow, their relationship changes from mutal mistrust to a sense of freedom and shared love of stretching their legs on the mountainside. With bite-sized chapters I read it in two evenings, my own collie Riley curled close by. Helen’s words don’t just describe our relationship with dogs and mountains, they evoke the sense of companionship, fear, freedom, frustration, loss and love that come with them. I read the last poem again and again.

By coincidence I’ve met some of the dogs in this book. The first is Dean Potter’s Whisper, who I patted at the Yosemite Facelift in 2014, shortly after a screening of When Dogs Fly in which Potter takes his canine best friend BASE jumping. The film is a reflection on mortality made all the more poignant with the knowledge that Dean was to lose his life in a BASE jumping accident just a few months later. Whisper was not present on that final flight.

Never Leave The Dog Behind is the perfect treat for all dog lovers, and as the book says, “There are two types of people in this world: those who love dogs, and those who haven’t spent enough time around them yet.”

Buy Never Leave The Dog Behind: Our love of dogs and mountains, by Helen Mort

Watch When Dogs Fly, Dean Potter & Whisper (2014)