Page 3 of Run Rabbit Run

She's the only living person who stood on that bank with me.

The only one who understands why I still haul all this gear out to a stretch of water with terrible light and no parking, when there are prettier rivers an hour closer to town.

Some things you don't film because they're convenient.

You film them because they're yours.

Gramps' voice comes up in me the way it always does the second I draw.

Cold's not your enemy, Wrennie. Your own panic is. Slow the breath. The body follows the breath.

So I slow the breath.

The fog thins over the far bank, peeling back off the water in long gray ribbons.

My exhale stretches out, even and controlled, and under all the noise of not wanting to blow a fourth take, the old stillness comes back into my arms like it never left.

The riser goes calm in my grip.

The string finds the corner of my mouth the way it's found it ten thousand times before, because it has, because I've put in the hours nobody claps for.

Forty yards downrange, the foam target sits pale against a black wall of firs.

I've moved it three times this morning chasing a backdrop that reads on camera, and my boots have punched a muddy little conversation into the bank to prove it.

The light's finally doing what I need—that thin silver wash that comes off river fog when the sun's still deciding whether to bother.

Everything narrows to the pin, the pale shape behind it, and the small warmth of my own held breath.

A drop of river water slides off the fletching and touches my knuckle, and I don't feel it so much as note it, the way you note a sound in the dark.

I loose.

The arrow leaves with that flat, wicked snap that lives somewhere in my back teeth.

It buries an inch left of center.

Good enough.

Better than good enough. It's the sort of shot that'll look effortless on a phone screen at seven in the morning, when some seventeen-year-old in landlocked Ohio is deciding whether I'm worth a follow.

"Got it."

Rue's already hunched over the monitor, thumbing back through the frames, and the grin's spreading across her face before she even looks up. "Got it, got it. That's our take. Your face went all calm and murder-y right before you shot—they're going to lose their minds."

My fingers won't quite let go of the riser.

I have to peel them off one at a time and shake the blood back into them, hissing when the feeling returns hot and mean to the tips.

Filming is the part they never see.

They see ninety clean seconds of a woman putting an arrow exactly where she wants it.

They don't see the four takes, the mud, the ninety-minute crawl up a logging road with no shoulder and a drop-off that'd swallow the truck whole.

They don't see the emails stacking up on my phone while I stand here freezing, waiting to be answered from the cab with the heater roaring.

One brand wants their new broadhead featured by the fifteenth.