It was definitely no fun! Many years ago, I was helping out a friend whose lifetime project was mapping the leys of Australia (which are sometimes but not always congruent with the songlines). Her technique was to walk over the land following said lines, sometimes with a dowsing rod, water-diviner style, sometimes just with her hands, marking up the results on her map as she went. Because some of the places she went were lonely and dangerous, and because she funded her half-years of mapping by a half-year of working on the prawn boats up north which wasn't a safe job either, she kept as a guard dog and companion animal this huge Rhodesian Ridgeback named Ruby.
She had asked me to come along on this particular trip because she was mapping the area around Hanging Rock, and both because she felt it safer to have company there, and because I'm a very good camp cook, which she wasn't, I agreed to come along. The land there is quite strange, confused and tangled both geographically and energetically, and the whole area was then far less settled than it now is.
Anyway, in the early afternoon she went off up the Rock to have a quick look at the area she would be covering the next day, and didn't come back. She had left the dog with me because she was only planning to be gone for half an hour, and at first I wasn't worried because she was competent in the bush and it was a bright sunny day, but as the afternoon went on I began to be concerned. The Rock is full of caves and fallen stones and slippery gravel slopes, also there are snakes, and so I set everything up for dinner and then went to follow her up the Rock. At which point the dog knocked me down and sat on me.
Ruby massed more than I did and it was all muscle, so there wasn't a lot I could do other than lie there under her and hope her boss came back soon. Every time I moved she would snarl a bit and bare her teeth at me, and settle down harder, not so much hostile as with the intent of keeping me there. Her boss had told her to look after me, and I suppose she thought that included preventing me from wandering off. Dogs! It got dark, then it got late.
Eventually Ruby's owner did come back, having spent many hours finding her way out of the cave she had climbed down into, by which point I was seriously considering that I might have to kill the dog to get away, which I didn't want to do. It was a thoroughly unpleasant experience, and quite put me off Ridgebacks.
