IN THE WEEK that followed his fruitless fishing trip with Jackbird, Ned killed fourteen rabbits—by far his biggest haul of the season. He hadn’t done anything all that different, although he’d started getting up earlier, often before sunrise, waiting in the darkness until the world warmed and the rabbits twitched out into the open. He learned to let his pulse settle before squeezing the trigger, instead of rushing to fire as soon as they revealed themselves. As his accuracy improved he began to know the shape each rabbit would make in death, just from how they sat on the grass. In the moment before he fired, he saw a premonition of the form the rabbit would fling into when its flesh caught his bullet—snapping and collapsing into stillness.
His traps were more successful too. He’d learned to distinguish between earth that was bare due to a lack of moisture and soil that had been scraped by a rabbit squirming under a fence. He began targeting these under-fence trails, setting traps in the centre of the dirt and concealing them with scatterings of dry grass. Only a few yielded rabbits, but the ones that didn’t were usually triggered. Ned scored these near-catches as ties, and reset each trap with minor variations.
He enjoyed the game of trapping, of finding the runs and outsmarting the animals. But he did not like treading through purple dawns to find rabbits still living in his traps, their legs rent, blood matting their fur, primitive terror vibrating off their whiskers. Usually they were dead, even if the jaws hadn’t closed around their necks or heads; usually the trauma of the trapping would halt the thump of their hearts. But on those mornings where he found them alive, Ned felt a yellow-green surge in his stomach, and couldn’t rush to kill them quickly enough. They were feral, he reminded himself, as he held their ruined bodies firm and placed a boot over their necks. They were pests. The only true use they had was to serve in death as slouch hats. And yet he felt a huge relief when they ceased shivering under his foot. In these moments he would look away from the rabbit to the sky, the glowing trees, the wakening river, as if the tranquillity of the orchard could remove him from what he’d done.
Each morning after breakfast he’d skin the rabbits on an old grey stump. With practice he’d reduced the mistakes he made with each pelt, as well as the time it took to remove them. First he’d take his knife to the hock joints, cutting through the tendons, before twisting off the paws. Then he’d make a small slice into the belly fur, making sure his blade did not slip into the flesh. From here he wriggled his fingers into the aperture and began working the skin from the muscle, freeing the stomach, sliding off the back, reversing both sets of legs through the holes where he’d removed the feet.
He did this carefully, meticulously, at all times remainin
