Cycling through a beech forest, but the trees kept moving, like soldiers taking a ridge line.

He left his bike in a fox hole. He tucked his tail between his legs, sore. The trees, moving, made noise he couldn't handle. Great bristles thumping a sea wall. They clapped with their big arms, lichen-clad. He couldn't stand it.

He hid in a tent that wasn't his, the canvas patterned with old plants, flowers from a distant age, jurassic ferns. The phrase 'aura of fauna' was stuck in his head. Extinct lizards were in his mind's eye.

As he unzipped the entrance, someone already inside, in the dark, told him the space wasn't available. It was there, but full, they said. Full of what?

He insisted he could fit. He carried in a strip of beech bark to prove it, silver, fat with moss. Something stepped on his tail. Something lit a candle. The tent smelled of damp fur, spring onions, socks.

They inspected the bark together, he and whoever else was there, nuzzled in sleeping bags, or nuzzled under one giant duvet, indivisible, invisible in that deepest of darks. Nobody said he could stay, but nobody told him he had to leave.