Sure enough, just past the crest of the first hill, an eastern cottontail darted out.

It came right at him, God bless its tiny little brain, but then turned and bolted off in the other direction.

He let it get a good head start. Anything less than twenty yards was just fish in a barrel.

But then he raised the bow, drew back to the corner of his mouth, and let it fly.

The cottontail stumbled hard, ass over whiskers. It came to a stop in some tall grass and was still quivering when he got there. A quick snap of the neck finished it off. It took only a minute after that to truss it up with some twine, and he was moving again.

Going faster now, he jogged down the next slope and across a small ravine.

It took another twenty minutes to climb back up to the other side, where he stopped just before a line of giant spruce growing along the ridge.

Record.

“You’d never know it to look at these trees now, but they probably marked a property line at some point. Back when this was dairy country and not woods. Now it’s just our own little home away from home. It can’t compete with the White House, of course, but lucky for me, it doesn’t have to.”

Stop.

He stood among the trees for several minutes, scanning the area down below.

After he’d satisfied himself that it was safe to move out into the open, he broke through the line of evergreens and started down into the hollow, where the old farmstead sat moldering away to nothing.

THE FENCING WAS long gone. the whole back half of the old house was sagging right into itself, almost like it was taking a final bow. And the driveway — what used to be the driveway — was just a long patch of goldenrod and buckthorn, with two ruts in the ground you couldn’t even see from a distance.

The barn was still standing, though. More or less. Thick brush and vines had made the back of the place nearly impenetrable. In front, someone had torn off the big double doors a long time ago, and the flap to the hayloft above that. With a few pieces of missing siding near the peak, the whole thing looked like a face with black gaps for orifices. He always thought of the entrance as the mouth.

Just inside, he untrussed the fat little rabbit and let it roll out onto the floor, right next to the last one. From his pack, he took a plastic travel container of granular lye and a small Poland Spring bottle he’d filled from the tap at home. He sprinkled both over the animal. The lye sped up the breakdown of tissue, and the water sped up the lye. It was an old farm trick, and a half-decent little insurance policy, too. Nothing said keep walking like a goopy carcass in your path.