The rabbits whirl and streak for cover, and a high screaming starts. It sounds like a child being tortured.
Trey swings round to Cal, his mouth opening and nothing coming out.
“You got it,” Cal says, standing up and taking the gun from Trey. “We’ll have to finish it off.”
He pulls his hunting knife out of his pocket on his way across the field. Trey half-runs to keep up. His eyes are flaring with pure wild panic at the runaway momentum of what he’s set in motion. He says, “We could try to fix him.”
“It’s in bad shape, kid,” Cal says gently. “We need to stop it suffering. I’ll do it.”
“No,” Trey says. He’s white. “I shot him.”
One of the rabbit’s forelegs has been taken half off and is bleeding in fast bright-red spurts. It lies on its side, jerking, with its back arched; its eyes are white-ringed and its mouth is open, lips pulled back, showing strong teeth and a bloody foam. Its screaming fills up the air.
“You sure?” Cal says.
“Yeah,” Trey says tightly, and holds out his hand for the knife.
“Back of the neck,” Cal says. “Right here. You need to cut through the spine.”
Trey positions the knife. His mouth is set like he’s stopping himself from throwing up. He takes a breath and lets it out long, like he’s about to fire the rifle. It eases the shake in his hand. He comes down hard on the knife, with his weight behind it, and the screaming stops. The rabbit’s head lolls.
“OK,” Cal says. He digs in his pocket for the plastic bag, so he can get the rabbit out of the kid’s sight. “It’s done now. You did good.” He picks up the rabbit by the ears and maneuvers it into the bag.
Trey wipes the hunting knife on the grass and gives it back to Cal. He’s still breathing hard, but the panic has gone out of his eyes, and his face is starting to get its color back. It was the suffering he couldn’t take.
“Gimme your hands,” Cal says, finding his water bottle.
Trey looks down at his hands. They’re crisscrossed with fine lines of blood droplets, from the arterial spray.
“Come here,” Cal says. He pours water over Trey’s hands, while Trey rubs at the blood, till it’s run off into the grass. “That’ll do for now. You can scrub up good and hard once we’re done with the messy part.”
Trey dries off his hands on his jeans. He turns his face up to Cal, still a little stunned, like he needs to be told what to do next.
“Here you go,” Cal says, holding out the plastic bag. “It’s your kill.”
Trey looks down at the bag, and it sinks in. “Hah!” he says, a sound halfway between a burst of breath and a triumphant crack of laughter. “I did it!”
“You did, all right,” Cal says, grinning down at him. He feels an impulse to clap the kid on the shoulder. “Come on,” he says instead, turning towards the house. Its wall is lit to pale gold by the setting sun, so that it stands square-set and radiant against the gray sky. “Let’s take it home.”
They dress the rabbit on Cal’s kitchen counter. He shows Trey how to take off the feet, make a slit across the rabbit’s back and hook his fingers under the skin to pull it off, twisting the head away with it; then how to cut open the belly, free the organs and coax them out. He’s pleased to find the skill coming back to him so smoothly, after all these years. His mind hardly remembers what to do, but his hands still know.
Trey watches intently and follows Cal’s instructions, with the same methodical neatness that he brought to the desk and to the gun, as Cal shows him how to pinch out the urine sac cleanly and how to check the liver for disease spots. Together they strip off silverskin and sinew and the mangled front leg, then cut away the three good legs, the belly and the loin. “There’s your eating meat,” Cal says. “Next time I’ll make stock from the rest, but today we’re gonna put a little bit of this back where we got it.” It’s what he and his granddaddy did with his first squirrel, way back when: gave the parts they didn’t need back to the wild. It seems like the right thing to do with a first kill.
They take the offal down to the back of the garden and leave it on the stump, for the rooks or the foxes or whoever gets to it first. Cal whistles up to the rooks, but they’re settling into their tree and ignore him, except for a halfhearted rude remark or two.
“Well, we did offer,” he says. “You hungry? Or that take the edge off your appetite?”
“Starving,” Trey says promptly.
“Good,” Cal says, glancing up at the sky. The strip of pale yellow has dimmed into a clear green. “I was planning on stew, but that takes a while. We’ll just fry it up.” He wants Trey home before it gets too late. “You like garlic?”
“I guess.”
It occurs to Cal, looking at his blank face, that he may not know. “Let’s find out,” he says. “You cook?”
Trey shrugs. “Sometimes. Sorta.”
“OK,” Cal says. “You’re gonna cook today.”
They scrub up, and Cal puts on some Waylon Jennings to help them work. Trey grins up at him.
“What?”
“Aul’-fella music.”
“OK, DJ Cool. What do you listen to?”
“Nothing you’ve heard of.”
“Smartass,” Cal says, getting ingredients out of the little kitchen cupboard with the busted hinge. “Lemme guess. Opera.”
Trey snorts.
“One Direction.”
That gets him an outraged stare that makes him grin. “Well, thank the Lord for small mercies. Quit complaining and listen. Maybe it’ll teach you to appreciate good music.” Trey rolls his eyes. Cal turns up the volume another notch.
He shows Trey how to shake the chunks of meat in a plastic bag of flour, salt and pepper, and then fry them up in oil, with
