Following a near disaster on the beach, Biggles has decided that he can no longer risk letting me offlead when we go for a run. It wasn’t an easy decision for him to make but it was necessary for two main reasons:

1. in recent months my voice has become so quiet that even Biggles can’t hear me when I’m calling for help, and
2. due to my advancing years, I’ve been exhibiting moments of confusion that make me likely to forget where Biggles is

Faced with these issues, any caring Beagle would have done the same for his pet humie. For completeness, it’s worth recording the events of the last beach run which brought all this to a head.

From Biggles’ point of view, it began much like any other beach outing. His assistance humie left him languishing in his travel crate for far too long, clearly unaware of the pressing need to get out and woof at other beach goers. Once the humie had de-crated Biggles, he chose to start running at the exact moment Biggles needed to drop his furry pants and relieve himself. The humie then had the temerity to complain about having to pick up his poop when everybody else – especially Monkey and Poppy – are always desperate to get hold of a genuine Biggles bottom sausage.

As the run got under way the two legged assistant demonstrated woeful ignorance over which tidal debris merited peeing on versus those that didn’t. He was also way too stingy with the hotdog pieces and even insisted on giving some of them to the other dogs in the pack, which was of course ridiculous. Anyway, after a short distance Biggles let the humie offlead and things proceeded fairly normally until, for some unknown reason, the silly humie failed to follow Biggles on an urgent sniffing mission. Worse than that, the humie even led the rest of the pack astray, wandering off who knows where and leaving Biggles all on his own.

Being such a resourceful Beagle, Biggles eventually managed to find another humie – two humies in fact. Both of these humies seemed quite nice and Biggles would happily have stayed with them were it not for the fact that they didn’t have any hotdog pieces. Given that the missing humie did (at last sighting) still have hotdog pieces, Biggles reasoned that it was worthwhile trying to get that humie back. The two surrogate humies seemed quite keen to help make that happen, and after a strange ritual involving those small beeping rectangular boxes that don’t taste nice, they managed to recall the errant humie to Biggles’ location. Hotdog pieces were consumed, and the day ended well.

From my point of view, this was right up there on the worry scale with the time Beanie went AWOL for over three hours on the top of a mountain. At first I couldn’t even believe that I’d lost him; he’d been in clear sight all the way as we approached the turning point on the run. The final 100 yards or so of the run is along a section of beach that has concrete re-enforcement to prevent erosion of the shoreline; there are hardly any places where an elderly and confused Beagle boy can get out of sight, so I took my eyes off Biggles for a moment, and when I stopped and looked back, he was gone.

Knowing that he had to be close-by and assuming (wrongly, as it turned out) that he couldn’t have got ahead of me, I put Beanie on lead and began retracing my steps with her and the pups, convinced that Biggles would pop up from behind a washed up log or patch of overgrown grass. After 5 minutes of going back and forth without finding him, I was getting worried. I decided to drag the pups up the embankment, thinking that a bit of height would reveal Biggles’ location. It didn’t, but I saw some golfers and asked them if they’d seen my errant Beagle, again without success.

I remained convinced that Biggles was nearby, but why hadn’t I seen him and why wasn’t he trying to find me? The answer that kept popping into my head was that he’d injured himself, or had experienced a stroke or heart attack, and was lying helpless in a ditch closeby but well hidden. It occurred to me more than once that this could be the end for Biggles – he could die alone on the beach with me no more than a hundred yards away but unable to find him in time. Getting desperate, I started searching deeper into the sand dunes and the adjoining golf course, still returning periodically to the beach in the hope that Biggles would reappear under his own steam.

I called Susan to let her know the situation, and in short order she packed some Beagle-hunting supplies and hitched a ride to the beach in a neighbour’s car. In the meantime, I continued my fruitless search. By chance I spotted an older guy walking along the way we’d come. I ran up to ask him if he’d seen Biggles, and of course the answer was no, but the guy assured me he’d keep an eye out. I thanked him, but didn’t expect anything to come of it – as far as I was concerned I’d just wasted a bit more time that could have been spent searching for my boy. Some 20 minutes later, that man proved me completely wrong. Not only had he found Biggles, but he’d also found a tourist with phone, and got him to call me using the details on Biggles’ collar.

It took me some time to work out where the two guys were; the tourist didn’t know the area and had trouble understanding my accent (not helped by the fact that intense windchill had numbed my entire face and left me speaking like John Hurt in The Elephant Man movie). In the end he sent me a gps map of his location, and I set off towards it, somewhat reluctantly at first because it was ahead of me rather than behind. Regardless, after a few minutes running I reached the tourist who pointed me in the direction of the older guy I’d met earlier. From this distance all I could see were a couple of dots, but as I drew closer I recognised the man and the cheerful little white Beagle trotting to heel next to him (the guy had improvised a lead for Biggles out of package strapping that often litters the beach). Biggles didn’t seem particularly relieved to see me; he’d been with this nice man who’d looked after him and that was fine, and now he was back with me, getting hotdog pieces popped into his mouth, which was also fine. I thanked the guy again and again, hooked Biggles back up to my own lead, and began the long jog back to the van. In due course we rendezvoused with Susan and the kind neighboured who’d joined the cavalry.

I’ve always been an advocate for quality of life over quantity, and that’s why I’ve given Beanie & Biggles offlead time on our beach runs for the last 13 years. It was a calculated risk, but now Biggles has lost most of his hearing and some of his marbles, that calculation has changed. I don’t know when Biggles will head across the rainbow bridge, but until that day, we’re always going to know exactly where he is (even if he doesn’t know himself).