Page 39 of Run Rabbit Run

Tomlin thinks I give them ten days out of cruelty.

He's half right. The other half he's too decent to see, which is that I give them the training and the head start and the fair rules.

Why? Because a fight is the only honest conversation two people can have.

Everything else is manners.

Out here, stripped down to the dark and the running, she can't lie to me and I can't lie to her.

For one night I get to see precisely what a person is made of when every bit of softness has been burned off and only the animal's left.

I've wanted to see what Wren is made of for over four hundred days.

Tonight she's showing me, one hard choice at a time, and she's better than the footage promised, better than I let myself expect, and the hunger in me has sharpened to something I haven't felt in years.

She thinks going low is the move I didn't plan for.

That's the sweetest part, the part I'll take out and turn over later like a stone worn smooth.

She's decided that because I know how she runs, her only play is to run like someone else, and she's right, that is the smart read, that’s what a mind as good as hers should conclude.

But I didn't only study how she runs.

I studied how she thinks about how she runs.

I watched years of a woman narrating her own decisions to a camera, explaining her reasoning out loud, teaching the whole world the second and third layers of her own head.

I don't just know she climbs when she's cornered. I know that when she suspects a hunter has learned she climbs, she'll deliberately go low to fool him, because she said so in a video about outthinking a tracker, eighteen months ago, in a green flannel shirt, with her hair coming loose from its braid.

The low country funnels. She doesn't know that yet, because she's never walked it, because it's mine and it's never been hers.

People think a forest is wild. This one wears wildness like a coat, but underneath it's as arranged as a chessboard, and I'm the only living man who holds the whole board in his head.

My great-grandfather cut the first of these drainages to move timber.

My grandfather widened them, dammed two creeks, dropped the deadfalls that channel a runner without ever looking placed.

A hundred years of Vanes have been quietly teaching this mountain to herd, and I was raised on the map of it the way other boys are raised on scripture, walked every yard of it at my father's shoulder before I was tall enough to see over the fern.

She had ten days and a survey of the parcels next door. I had a childhood.

Every drainage down there runs toward the same throat of land between two ridges, a bottleneck a quarter mile wide narrowing to forty feet of wet black gap, and there's only one way through it on foot.

I know which side of the gap she'll favor because she favors the left when she's tired, drops her weight to the left, a tell she might not know she has and I've watched a hundred times.

That's the piece none of them understand until it's far too late. The land itself is on my side. Not because it loves me. Because my family spent a century bending it to a single purpose, and the purpose was tonight, was every night like tonight, was the slow, patient pleasure of watching something magnificent run its heart out inside a maze it can't see the walls of.

I stand up off the cedar.

I'm in no hurry.

She's got a mile of hard downhill between her and the throat, and it'll wring her out before she gets to the bottom.

She's going to arrive at it certain she's clever, certain she's finally found the ground I didn't anticipate.

I take my time. The night's long and I've waited longer.

I move toward the gap the way water moves, downhill, unhurried, sure, along a line I walked at noon in the daylight while she was still up on her rented mountain, oiling a string and believing a survey map could save her.