A slug of whisky from the hip flask they had brought out with them. A switching of roles. The man on the roof rapped on it when he was ready, and the driver drove. They shouted to one another through the window over the noise of the engine. Left. Straight ahead. Go for it. Left, left. Hold on tight while I turn. Yeah, that’s great. Get that one. Good shot. Jonathan shot well. Perhaps he shot better than Richard that night, or perhaps that was because Richard drove better, more evenly and matching his speed to that of the rabbits. They told Kumiko to count but she lost count after twenty. She seemed to enjoy it, shouting out too, holding on to the door beside her and to the metal frame of the cab, as the Land Rover lurched across the fields. They must have shot dozens of rabbits. A good night’s work. Passing the hip flask. Driving back, all three of them in the cab now, Kumiko in the middle seat and the brothers on either side. All three elated. But Richard driving slowly now, all settling back into their separate grown-up selves.

When they got to the yard the clouds had opened up and let through a slip of moonlight. Kumiko stayed out alone. She wanted to feel the night. Calm herself. See some stars. She had never done any kind of hunting before.

As the clouds broke further apart and moved away, she thought how they would begin to show, the bodies on the ground.

Richard was beside her. She didn’t know where he came from. I was just going to lock up, he said, then I saw you. I nearly locked you out.

Will you go and pick up the bodies tomorrow?

No, Richard said. Something will scavenge them. They’ll be gone soon enough.

She said she didn’t like thinking that.

It’s how things are, he said. Nature is hard. We used to have a word for things like that, Jonathan and me, ‘maumau’.

I know, she said. He told me once. (Only Jonathan had been talking about more than nature. He had been talking about men, what men do to men, what he himself had seen, what he could not erase.) But it’s funny, she said. We have a word in Japanese that sounds almost the same, ‘mā mā’, but it means something very ordinary, sort of OK. Nothing bad at all.

He was standing close so that she could feel him beside her.

The nature I know is not so hard, she said.

No, he said. That’s what I like about you.

She turned. She felt the pull of him and she turned. Kissed him then in the dark when they could not see one another. Like they were nameless. Not themselves.

Then they drew apart. She could not have said who moved first. There was only the darkness then. Nothing spoken.