Niccolo Machiavelli, reborn as a chocolate lab?

When our four-year-old dog, Aquinnah, and I went out for his early-morning constitutional yesterday, it was dark and bitterly cold - 14 degrees, with a stiff breeze blowing up from the Kennebec River.

Quinn is normally fairly efficient on these jaunts, completing the first of his two assignments on our walk up the street and the other one on the walk back down to the house. That was the case this morning, when - how shall I put this? - the trains ran on schedule.

But yesterday, he was decidedly uncooperative as I took him on a convoluted tour of the neighborhood, waiting for him to finish his tasks.

Despite the darkness and the biting cold, which seemed to bother me a lot more than it bothered him, Quinn made his rounds at a leisurely pace, stopping here and there to sniff a discolored patch of snow or some microscopic tidbit.

What should have been a 10-minute walk, tops, took 20 minutes before Quinn finally got down to business. By then I was so cold that I raced him back to the house, where he wolfed down a biscuit and ran upstairs for what he undoubtedly saw as a well-earned nap.

My explanation for these occasional drawn-out missions is that Quinn gets distracted - by sights, sounds or, especially, scents - and loses track of why we’re braving the pre-dawn gloom as he uses his super sniffer to “check his mail” along our route.

But my wife Liz has a different theory. She argues that Quinn, far from being absent-minded, is keenly aware of the passage of time out there in the frozen darkness.

In fact, she says, that’s just the point. He deliberately meanders as long as possible, so he can stay outside as long as possible. It’s just one example of him "connecting with his inner Lab," as Liz puts it. While I'm connecting with my outer frostbite.

Sounds pretty Machiavellian to me. But I wouldn’t put it past Quinn to treat me as nothing more than a pawn in his game.