All afternoon  the boy’s loose stride took him up and down the footpaths and bridleways around Wyndlesham. Patchy woodland fifty yards from back gardens. Dried up ruts in secondary growth already the colour of straw. Sunglare on dusty fields where an inch of soil, parched as early as April, was skimmed on to hectares of raw chalk; then the relief of a wide grassy rake falling away steeply between beeches. Buzzards in the updraughts  and  a temporary altar  of concrete  slabs under  the  tall old-fashioned  single-arch railway bridge at Brownlow. He never left the same three or four square miles. He was waiting for it to be dark, so he could go down the low-lying fields between Wyndlesham and Winsthrow and run his dogs along the beam of the lamp. They were a shade heavy, his dogs, but they were good for a long night on the lamp. He loved to see them curl and uncurl in the path of light. He was happy taking rabbit but he liked hares best. ‘A hare stretches them out, these dogs,’ he would tell himself. ‘She gives them a run.’ It was something to see. It was over in a minute or two. Sometimes he was so excited he saw everything in slow motion as if hare and dogs were swimming ecstatically in the dark air. His heart was so far out to them there! He was seeing faster than they could run. He could feel his heart rocking his body. He could replay every hare his dogs ever caught, like a download in his head. ‘It’s something to see,’ he would say when people asked him. He didn’t know where to begin with them and their mountain  bikes, weekend in, weekend out.

That lot in the fields weren’t out tonight, so he went on his own. The very first thing, the dogs put up a grey hare, the colour of ash in the light. The boy had never seen that before. The hare seemed to lag, it seemed to wait for him to pay attention.  Then the dogs were off and running  and the action was so fast he couldn’t keep it in the lamplight.

‘I never saw anything like this,’ he told himself.