Unease sank through him. He hadn’t told anyone why he was hunting rabbits—not his friends, not his father. When he eventually brought the boat home, he imagined the occasion would be a double surprise: his acquisition of such a thing, and that he’d kept his mission secret. He’d have his boat, and he’d have people’s shock at the casual totality of his competence. Two victories.

But with his father closely inspecting his kill, he realised he hadn’t accounted for how the old man would perceive Ned’s hunting. Now he saw it: how his father’s oldest boys had been pulled to a distant leviathan of a war, beyond scope or comprehension. This very morning—as every morning, wherever they were—their faces were hardening into rough shapes beneath the shade of rabbit-pelt hats. Such smart hats, both stiff and soft, so similar to the one their father had worn in his own war, a quarter-century earlier, on his own foreign battlefields—highcliffed coves, grey worlds of ice-mud—a hat that had darkened his eyes as he was torn apart and recast into this quiet, strange man who remained out of reach and unknowable to his own sons.

And all the while his youngest remained at home, spending his free months selflessly avoiding leisure in order to provide rabbit pelts to the army for the production of slouch hats. Ned saw how it looked, how he had misrepresented his intentions. How he’d drawn a nobler image of himself in his father’s eyes than could ever be true. The tea steam snagged in his nose, bitter in the dew.

His father’s hands were still running over the corpse. He was no longer looking at Ned, or at the orchard, or at anything in particular.

Ned felt a quickening in his blood. His eyes itched. With slow, unspoken statements, he began convincing himself that his father had not been deceived. That he really was going hunting for the sole purpose of producing those proud, necessary slouch hats. That while his brothers were at war, he was playing the only part he could. The pelts were for hats; the boat was incidental.

~

After breakfast he went to work in the orchard with his father, and the two or so hours he spent among the trees, working with his eyes and hands—checking fruit, looking for blight—slowly reordered his mind. Things became clearer. He was spending his summer hours hunting, and his father approved: that was all that was happening. It did not require overthinking.