Dogplay

Blue-black to the west and dirty orange to the east where the sub-horizon sun leeches darkness from the sky. A car kerb-crawls up and there’s D. grinning groggily out at me. D.'s a CID officer, a competition gun dog trainer, an insomniac like me. He’s got a rugby-Sunday hangover, voice like gritty mud. “Get some sleep, D.,” I say.

Walk past the tent pitched under the Scots pines. A homeless guy has lived there since November, thin skin of red nylon between him and the frost. He’s in his thirties, movie star good looks under a wild beard, dresses like a warrior from a dystopian future. Sometimes he sits crosslegged on the grass, watching the moon inch northwards. Not this morning though.

Out on the fields there’s torchlight travelling this way, that way, back again. My pup’s hackles lift like a shark fin between his shoulder blades. He rumbles at the distant light, scouts out and takes up position until I tell him easy now, stand down. Then A. comes along the dirt track, Clint Eastwood silhouette in her driza-bone and slouch hat, her huge hound charging out of the shadows, a grin of dagger teeth, a rolling eye. We walk along together and the dogs wrestle and chase.

All the while, the flashlight moving like a will-o’-the-wisp near the treeline until we reach it and it’s a man, playing the beam back and forth over the grass. He’s lost his keys, he says. Car keys, house keys. Been searching an hour already. He’s cold, tired. We’ll keep an eye out for them, we say, and he moves off towards the cricket pitch, still searching.

Now there are more people out: men hunched under heavy coats, trudging a circuit with a Labrador or collie; runners in spring-loaded trainers, all black and day-glo lycra; a nightworker pedalling home on a clattery old bike. The whippet people all arrive at once and suddenly there’s a chase on, blurs streaking in huge circles, a glimpse of spindly leg, a lash of tail, arrowhead faces.

It’s half light now, soft and grey. Over by the old railway siding, a fox pauses, watches, then slips away into bramble tangle and thorn. We head home. The man with the flashlight is still searching, temporarily locked out of his life. In the tent under the Scots pines, the homeless man sleeps in for once, no keys to lose or find, and I wonder what his story is.