Ned had wasted a bullet, and the sound of his shot would have sent any other rabbits into hiding. He stared at the distant water, wrestling his frustration, feeling that he had ruined the morning. His mood eased on his way back to the house, when he checked a trap he’d placed in a run beneath one of the fences.

When he’d set the trap the previous evening, he’d worried that its trigger was too light, that any passing creature would set it off before entering the radius of its jaws. But a fat rabbit lay in the dirt of the run, metal teeth sunk into its neck. Except for the puncture wounds, its coat was unmarred. Ned removed the animal, then reset the trap. He ran his fingers over his kill, noting the thickness of the fur, the rigidity of death. Felt bright heat in his throat.

He resumed walking through Limberlost, his father’s orchard, the rabbit swinging stiff in his hand. Smoke hazed from the house’s chimney. Apple trees in a nearby paddock had taken on the glow of dawn. At Ned’s back the river shone, teal blinking into slate and cerulean, revealing a greater truth of colour.

~

It was summer, and in the long blond light of the season Ned aimed to kill as many rabbits as he could. Their pelts could be sold to the army, who made them into slouch hats for soldiers. He had no other way of making money. In previous summers his father might have paid him for helping out on the orchard, but with the war on that was no longer possible.

If he killed enough rabbits he might earn enough to buy his own boat—something he’d imagined ever since his father had taken Ned and his brothers to meet the mad whale on that clear, star-rich night. Nothing fancy, just a small, single-sailed dinghy he could run into the river. Out on the water he could sail wherever he liked, from downstream where the current ran fresh to the broad estuary in the north. Squid-filled reefs, forested coves, schools of flashing salmon, trenches of snapper, lonely jetties, private beaches on whose cold sands he could burn hidden fires—all would be open to him if he had a boat. If he killed enough rabbits.