Page 37 of Run Rabbit Run

I've been running for an hour, hard, smart, using every trick I own, and he hasn't been behind me the whole time because he doesn't need to be behind me.

He's not driving me anywhere.

He's just letting me pour myself out into ground he already owns, waiting somewhere ahead, somewhere I'm going to arrive at on my own two feet because he knows where my own two feet will take me.

I push off the tree. I make myself move again, because standing still is its own kind of dying.

But I change my line.

I go against my own grain on purpose, force myself off the low ground my instincts want and onto a harder traverse, because if he knows how I run, then the only card I've got left is to run like someone else.

It's the smartest thing I do all night.

It's also, I'll understand much later, exactly the second move he planned for.

I work the creek for another quarter mile and then I break from it clean, up and out on a shelf of rock that won't hold a print, cutting back across my own route the way I always do.

I climb a little because the shelf offers it and because some deep-wired part of me wants eyes on my back trail.

And that's when I see the first one.

Twenty feet off my line, half-tucked under a deadfall where a tired runner might crawl to rest, there's a snare.

Fresh.

The wire is bright where the weather hasn't dulled it yet, set at exactly the height and exactly the spot I'd have picked to go to ground.

I stop dead in the dark, and the hope that carried me up this shelf goes sour all at once, a cold, sick drop behind my breastbone and down into my legs, leaving them watery under me.

Because a snare is a chance.

One snare in a whole forest means nothing, a hunter covering his odds, no more than that.

But it's set where I would rest.

Not where anyone would rest.

Where I would, the specific way I go to ground, learned off a hundred videos I made with my own hands and my own mouth, narrating exactly this, exactly how I think when I'm tired and hunted and looking for a hole to breathe in.

I back away from it slowly. I tell myself one snare is a chance.

I make it another half mile before I find the second.

This one's worse, because this one's smart in a way that's specifically mine.

It's set at a pinch point where two deadfalls funnel down to a single gap, the natural route, the one any tired animal takes because the ground gives you no other, and I know this pinch.

I've filmed a hundred pinches like it, I've stood in front of my own camera and explained how you read terrain to find a chokepoint exactly like this one and turn it to your advantage.

He didn't use it to his advantage.

He used it to mine, because he knew I'd read the ground the same way I taught the whole internet to read it, knew I'd come down this natural route thinking I was being clever, thinking I was using the woods, when the whole time the forest was using me, arranged and waiting, because the man who owns it watched me explain out loud, for years, exactly how my mind moves across ground like this.

I stand at the edge of the second snare in the dark and something goes very cold and still in me, colder than the creek, stiller than the hushed animals.

He hasn't set traps in the woods.

He's set my own traps in the woods.