The vicar pulled his hand away and walked back round to the front of the table. He said, ‘Hello, sir’, which seems like it should be friendly but it sounded nasty. Sarge stood right in front of him and asked him again what the hell he was doing. The vicar told Sarge that he was shocked to hear that I wasn’t enrolled in school and then he repeated his offer to have me come to church so that I could find out the truth about Jesus.

When he said this Sarge’s eyes bulged out of his face and I thought he was going to explode. He grabbed the vicar by the shoulders and marched him to his car, yelling for him to ‘get the hell off my land’. Then he called him a word I’ve never heard of. Pervert. The vicar looked all flustered when Sarge said this and his eyes darted from side to side as if he was checking to see if anyone had heard. But there was no one about. The road was empty of cars. It was just us three and the birds. When the vicar got to his car, he pushed Sarge off and kind of squared up to him. I came out from behind the table so I could hear what he was saying. He said, in this really quiet voice, that this may be Sarge’s land but the woods were not, ‘And there are prison sentences for poachers.’ He nodded his head towards the dead rabbits that were still hanging from Sarge’s shoulders. Then he got in his car, slammed the door and drove away.

‘He forgot his eggs,’ I said. But Sarge didn’t hear me. He stormed into the house, dropped the rabbits on to the kitchen table and told me to go get my gun. At first I was scared he was going to follow the vicar and do something stupid but when I came back out with my gun he told me that it was time. I was finally going hunting again.

But it was all wrong. The way we stormed towards those woods. That wasn’t how you approach a kill. There was no planning, no preparation. That’s what I told myself afterwards anyway, when Sarge marched me back to the house in disgrace.

This is what happened. We hadn’t even reached the centre of the woods when Sarge ordered me to get down. There were a couple of scrawny old rabbits nibbling the grass up ahead. They weren’t fit for the pot and their fur was all matted so wouldn’t be of use to us. I told Sarge we were wasting our time, that he’d done the hunt for the day, that we should shelve this and head back. But he just glared at me and pointed at the gun.

I did as I was told, picked up the gun, got down on the ground and aimed at the rabbits. They carried on nibbling their grass, oblivious to the danger they were in. I cocked the gun and pulled back the trigger. But then something strange happened. As I lay there on the ground I felt myself rise out of my body. It was the weirdest feeling. I tried to pull myself down, tried to keep my eye on the rabbits, but it was impossible. The world began to wobble. There’s no other way of describing it. The trees swayed in front of my eyes even though there was no breeze and as I tried to focus I saw what looked like a huge elephant weaving in and out of the trees. I heard Sarge mutter something behind me and I blinked. The elephant disappeared. The trees stopped swaying. The rabbits were still there but the moment was lost. I couldn’t do it. I threw the gun to the ground, startling the rabbits who went scurrying off into the bushes.