Barker
The barker is the common and garden canine you'd recognise as a dog -- until you clock how long it's been sat at the end of your garden without moving, and that it hasn't blinked in that time either.
It looks like a lurcher gone to seed: ribby, patchy-coated, the sort of stray you'd feel sorry for anywhere else in Sheffield. In Hellsborough it does not scavenge, because scavenging implies stopping. A barker eats until whatever it's eating is gone, then looks for the next thing, and does not discriminate well between a dropped chip supper and someone who's sat down for a rest.
The bark is the trap. One barker sounds like any dog griping at a gate. Three or four, spaced along a ginnel and taking turns, sound exactly like a street full of ordinary dogs objecting to nothing -- which is what keeps people walking through instead of round. By the time you're level with the second dog you're already flanked by the third.
They don't fight cleverly and don't need to. A barker's jaw does the same job on a fence post as it does on a shin, and keeps working the job long after you've stopped being able to argue with it. Catch the eyeshine at range and it holds a beat too long, the way any Hellsborough eye does when something behind it is still deciding whether you're worth the chase. I've watched a pack take down a stray sheep, twice the size of any one of them, with nothing more sophisticated than numbers and not stopping.
Field note: one barking dog is a dog. Two or more, spaced along your route and taking turns, is a pack working you toward the middle. Cross the street before you're level with the second one.
| Type | Hungry |
| HP | 5 |
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