Each morning after breakfast he’d skin the rabbits on an old grey stump. With practice he’d reduced the mistakes he made with each pelt, as well as the time it took to remove them. First he’d take his knife to the hock joints, cutting through the tendons, before twisting off the paws. Then he’d make a small slice into the belly fur, making sure his blade did not slip into the flesh. From here he wriggled his fingers into the aperture and began working the skin from the muscle, freeing the stomach, sliding off the back, reversing both sets of legs through the holes where he’d removed the feet.

He did this carefully, meticulously, at all times remaining conscious of the shape and quality of the pelt. The only roughness came at the end of the process, when the final connection left between the fur and the flesh was at the neck. With a sharp yank he’d pull the pelt over the head, ripping it free. The carcass was left port-ruby and naked. The only hair remaining on the body was around its hacked hocks and on its now huge-seeming head.

Ned had learned skinning from Toby, who had learned it from Bill, who never revealed where he learned anything. While he was showing Ned where to make the incision in the belly, Toby had claimed that Bill could skin a rabbit without a knife.

‘No idea how he does it,’ Toby had said, a confused smile on his face. ‘I tried figuring it out, but it happens so fast. Little twists, a pop, a rip, and the pelt’s off. No blade in his hand.’

~

Towards the end of that bountiful week Ned removed a skin with such precision and artfulness that he felt the need to show his father, and to ask him something. It was mid-morning. He found his father in the orchard, standing before a juvenile apple tree. As Ned approached he stretched the pelt over his palms, showing his father the untorn skin, the bloodless fur. The neatness of the thing. But his father didn’t appear to notice him. He gazed at the tree, eyes unfocused, until something caught his attention in the sky and he snapped his head up to stare at a cloud, his mouth moving, emitting no sounds.

Ned waited for a minute. When nothing changed he wandered back to his stump and knife.

Later in the day his father came to find him. He praised the skin he’d found hanging in the apple shed, along with the others Ned had harvested that week, and said that it would be a shame to let them spoil in the heat. He told Ned that he’d take him into town so he could sell them.