Page 27 of Run Rabbit Run

Every switchback of deer trail, every rotten log that looks like footing and isn't, every bog that wears a skin of bright moss and will take a boot to the knee, I've walked ten thousand times, in every season, in the dark and the light.

A woman could spend a lifetime out here and learn a fraction of what I carry without trying.

Wren Holloway is going to get one night.

Old Tomlin walks a pace behind me and to the left, where he's walked behind three generations of us.

He's past seventy now, bent like a wind-scoured pine, and he knows this forest the way I know my own pulse, every trap, blind, and blowdown, every place the ground lies about how solid it is.

His father set snares for my grandfather. His grandfather for my great-grandfather.

There's a straight line running back through the Tomlins and the Vanes to a time when this was simply what powerful men did with land and people, and nobody had yet invented the soft words that make modern men pretend they're something gentler.

I don't pretend. I find it restful, not pretending.

"North traps are seated," Tomlin says. His voice is gravel and pipe smoke. "Pit's dug on the ridge line where you wanted it. Took the boys the better part of a week to get the cover right. You'd walk over it yourself and not know."

"Show me."

He takes me up the north slope, and the climb is long and mean, exactly the sort of grade that punishes a body already running on empty, and that's why I chose it.

We come out onto the spine of the ridge where the trees thin and the high country opens.

Tomlin stops, and I stop, and I look at ground that appears in every way to be ordinary forest floor.

"Where?" I ask.

He points with his chin. "Four feet ahead of your boot."

I crouch. Study it.

Even knowing, even looking, I can barely find the seam, the faint square where the woven cover sits flush with the true ground, moss transplanted whole and living across the top of it, ferns rooted through so they'll still be green come Halloween.

Beneath it, a drop and a net, and no way out that a woman climbs on her own.

It's good work. It's the finest concealment I've seen from him, and I've seen years of it.

"You've outdone yourself."

"You said this one mattered." Tomlin looks at me, and there's something old and unbothered in his face, a man who long ago made his peace with the family he serves. "You've never said that before. In all the years. You've had me set the ground for a dozen of these, and you never once said this one mattered."

I straighten. Look out over the valley, the soft green length of it going to fog at the edges, all of it mine as far as the eye reaches and further.

"This one's different."

"I gathered." He tamps his pipe, unlit, an old habit of the hands. "The others, you didn't care where they ran. Point them at the woods and let them go and take them wherever they broke. This one, you've had me build the whole hunt around one line up this ridge. Like you already know which way she'll come."

"I do know."

He nods slowly, the way old men nod at weather they've seen before and don't much like.

"Then why give her the ten days?" he asks. "Why the training, the running start, the fair set of rules. If you already know how it ends, why let her believe she's got a say?"

It's more than Tomlin's said to me in a year, and I let him say it, because he earned the right decades before I was born, and because the question is the correct one, and because a man ought to be able to answer for what he is at least once to somebody who won't flinch.

"Because a caught animal that never believed it could run doesn't break," I tell him. "It just dies, sullen and dull, and there's nothing in it worth keeping. But one that ran its heart out, that tasted the open air and the coming dawn and let itself believe, all the way down, that it was going to make it—" I look back at the seam in the ground, invisible even now that I know where it is. "That one breaks like nothing else on earth. And what's left underneath, when it finally goes, is the only prize I've ever cared to take."

Tomlin is quiet for a long moment.