Page 41 of Run Rabbit Run

Wren

The dark starts to turn gray somewhere in my sixth hour of running.

It comes so slowly I don't trust it at first.

A thinning at the tops of the trees, the black going to charcoal, the charcoal going to the faint wet pewter that means the night's losing its grip on the world.

I've watched a thousand dawns come up over Gramps' river, and I know this one for what it is before my eyes will swear to it.

Morning. Coming. Which means I'm still here.

Still running, still uncaught, still breathing my own ragged breath in the forest I've spent all night learning.

It’s been hard, I won’t lie about that. The terrain here is brutal.

I went low, and I stayed low, and it worked.

That's what I let myself believe, moving down through the drainages in the last of the dark, following the water because water always runs somewhere, and somewhere is where I need to be.

The low area’s been kinder than the ridges.

Softer ground, better cover, the creeks braiding together and pulling me down and down toward what has to be the edge of his land, because everything drains to an edge eventually; everything runs out of mountain sooner or later.

I haven't found another snare in two hours.

I tell myself that means I've finally gone somewhere he didn't map.

Somewhere off the script of my own published head.

I went against my grain, I ran like a stranger, and the woods stopped being a trap laid in my own handwriting and started being just woods, cold and wet, the kind I was born to move through.

My body's past the wall now, into the strange clear country on the far side of exhaustion where the pain goes quiet and the legs keep turning over on their own.

I've been here before, on long backcountry pushes, in the brutal multi-day shoots that built my whole brand.

I know this feeling. I trust it. It's the place where the animal takes the wheel, and the animal, tonight, is winning.

The creeks braid together underfoot, cold silver ribbons pulling downhill, and I let them guide me.

Water can't be bought, bent, or told to lie. It runs where the land makes it run, and if I follow it I find the low ground, and the low ground is where I've beaten him, because he's up there somewhere still waiting for a woman too scared to think, and I outthought him. I outthought all of it.

The land tips down harder ahead of me, the drainages all pinching toward each other, and I follow them because down is the answer.

Through the thinning trees I can see it now.

Light.

Real light, open light, the gray of true sky, spilling through a gap in the ridges ahead where the timber quits and the land opens out.

A gap. A way through. The mouth of the mountain, and beyond it, open country going pale with dawn.

The edge of his land. The end of the maze.

Something breaks loose behind my ribs at the sight of it, huge and warm and dangerous, and I don't have the sense left after six hours to be afraid of it.

Six hours. I've been running six hours through his darkness, and I'm still on my feet.

The finish line is right there in front of me, going brighter by the second.