I did a double take when Fletch handed me a camera too. “We got a new one?”
“A couple actually.” He indicated one I hadn’t noticed already attached to his torso. “Got a big donation during the week. Gave us funds to get some body armour too. You want some?”
I shook my head for the same reasons I’d always let Sprig take the camera, but I did accept the Go-Pro. I was fast and agile, and it was often me who got to the front of the hunt first. If a fox was illegally pursued, hopefully I’d catch it on film.
“Are we ready?” Fletch asked.
A round of nods passed through our grim band, and we set off for the starting point of a hunt we’d failed to disrupt enough to be cancelled.
Me and Sprig got out of the car at the midway point and split up, each of us finding a concealed spot along the likely route of the hunt. I crouched in thick undergrowth by an abandoned badger sett. The sight of it reminded me of the culling we’d fought against all summer, and the explosion of words I’d thrown at Cash came flooding back. I’d run away from him with hopelessness weighting every step, but it had faded as I’d got closer to home, rejoined my people, and made ready for today. A flash of it reignited and kicked me in the guts. The badger cull had happened regardless of our action, just like the hunt today.Fuck it. I’m going home.
But I didn’t move, because campwashome, and defeatism had no place there. A hunting horn blew in the distance, and adrenaline chased away my doubts.
Let’s have it.
***
“Left, left, left!” Sprig hollered. “They’re coming up on you!”
I tossed a glance over my shoulder as I sprinted across the field, quad bikes hot on my heels. They’d been on my tail since I’d thrown myself in the path of the hounds, distracting them from the scent they’d caught early on in the hunt, and now the hunt “protectors” were out for my blood. The only reason they hadn’t battered me already was I could jump fences and they couldn’t.
A high hedge loomed. I dropped another handful of the soiled sawdust I was using to create a false trail, then hurled myself at it, thorns lancing my skin as I cleared the top and landed in the next field.
Crouched on the ground, I took a split second to scout and listen. The quad bikes behind weren’t getting any closer, and the hunt was to the east. Hounds bayed and horns blew, but as far as I could tell, they’d yet to pick another live scent.
A rush of achievement shot through me, but was cut off by the roar of a quad bike bearing down on me from the side. A new wave of protectors had found me.
Fuck.
My escape routes were blocked. I sprang to my feet and ran at the approaching bike, calculating my chances of clearing it before it ran me down, and of reaching the next fence before it spun around and caught me again.
The odds weren’t good, but I’d made more perilous jumps.Got the scars to prove it.
I kicked up my pace and leapt, leaving the ground just as the bike swept over where my feet had been. My shoes hit metal, and then flesh as I used the rider as a step, and then I was airborne again, flying over the back of him and landing hard enough to make my ankle groan.
But there was no time to absorb the impact. I rolled and kept running, screaming towards the boundary as shouts rang out behind me. Harder and harder, I ran,faster, and for a few blissful seconds, I dared hope that I’d won—the battle, at least, not the war. But my luck had run out. A quad bike charged me from the side, wiping me out, and as my body hit the cold, wet ground, the racket of the hunt intensified.
They’d caught a scent.
Chapter Six
Cash
“Why are you being weird?”
“Hmm?” I glanced up from my phone as Lucky flounced into the staffroom at the garage we both worked at, and flung himself dramatically onto the couch. “I’m not being weird.”
“Yes, you are. You’ve been hiding in your room all week and every time I see you you’re buried in your phone. What happened to unplugging from the matrix?”
I rolled my eyes. “I said I was ditching my iPhone for a Samsung, not going back to the Stone Age.”
Lucky opened the Tupperware pot of pasta Dom had left out for us that morning and gobbled up a mouthful bigger than his head. “Still, you never fuck about on your phone. You don’t even answer it when I call.”
“You don’t call.”
“Not the point. What’s going on?”
I had zero intention of explaining the clusterfuck in my head to anyone, but Lucky had become my best friend, and by the time we got home that evening, he’d worn me down.
