Page 28 of Run Rabbit Run

"You're a hard man, Ezra Vane," he says. No judgment in it. Just weather.

"I'm an honest one." I start back down the ridge. "Hardness is only honesty other men are too frightened to look at."

We work the rest of the morning.

Tomlin talks as we go, more than usual, which is his way of circling something.

He tells me the boys found bone up on the far north line last week, resetting an old snare, and left it where it lay because that's the rule on this land, you don't disturb what the ground's already taken.

I know the bone. I know whose it was, more or less, the way you know the name of a debt paid a long time ago.

There have been others on this mountain. Not many.

My tastes are narrow and my patience is long, and I've only ever run the hunt for the rare one worth the trouble.

None of them ran the way she'll run. None of them mattered the way she matters.

They were appetites, indulged and finished.

She's something else, and Tomlin knows it, because Tomlin has watched me my entire life and never once seen me build a hunt around a single ridgeline before.

I walk every line of the hunt the way she'll walk it, and I feel where the ground wants to funnel a runner, where a slope offers itself as an easy grade and delivers you instead into a bottleneck, where the country whispers this way, safety's this way and lies.

Tomlin's ancestors and mine spent two hundred years learning how this forest lies.

I've spent my whole life adding to the ledger, and Wren is going to spend one night against all of it with nothing but a dead grandfather's voice in her head.

Six years of footage, and I've watched every lesson that grandfather ever drilled into her surface, one at a time.

Everything he taught her, I know. Every default he drilled into her, I've studied until I could set my watch by it.

She'll climb when she's frightened. She'll go for the high ground when the walls close in, because a man who’s been dead for years told her height was safety, and she believed him because he loved her and because on any other ground in the world he'd have been right.

Not on mine.

On mine, the high ground is where I've dug the deepest hole, because I know the one thing her grandfather never could have: that the surest way to catch Wren Holloway is to let her run exactly the way he taught her to.

Near noon we come down off the mountain, and the house rises up out of the trees ahead of us, gray stone gone green-black at the joints with a century of wet, gables like folded hands, windows that give back nothing but sky.

My great-grandfather built it to look like the places his people came from, cold country and old money and older cruelty, and it has never once felt like a home to me, and I’ve never once wanted it to.

A home is a soft word. This is a keep. You put what's precious in a keep so no one can take it out.

I stop at the tree line and look up at the east wing, at the windows of the rooms I've had made ready.

Ten days ago they were empty.

Now there are fresh sheets on a bed she doesn't know is hers yet, and a lock fitted to the outside of a door, and heavy drapes on windows that look out over the very woods she'll fail to cross.

I had it all done gently, without fuss, the way you prepare a room for someone you intend to keep a long while.

She's up on her mountain right now, running herself to the bone, learning my water off a survey map, believing she's stealing an edge.

Let her have it. Let her have every edge she can scrape together.

I want her to arrive confident.

I want her to walk onto my land the morning of the hunt with a plan and spine.