“What the fuck is a sab?” he asked.
“Saboteur. Hunting with dogs was banned in 2004, but it’s a flimsy law with lots of loopholes. Most hunts fake a trail hunt, then flush foxes out anyway. In reality, nothing’s changed. And when you push something underground and don’t enforce it, shit gets real pretty fast.”
Cooking apparently forgotten, Lucky turned off the gas and abandoned his frying pan. He got me a beer from the few I kept in the fridge and came to sit beside me. “I’m lost. I knew about the ban and thought that was the end of it.”
“That’s the problem. So did everyone, and why not? If something is illegal, why not think it doesn’t go on anymore.”
Lucky snorted. “Drugs are illegal, and I smashed my fair share of them regardless. But I still don’t get what a saboteur whatsit is.”
“The clue is in the name, Luck. We sabotaged hunts, or tried to, at least. It was a tough game, and we lost a lot—foxes, and people. I got out in the end because I couldn’t handle it.”
And the rest, but I didn’t feel like connecting the dots between what Lucky already knew and what I was throwing at him now.
He rubbed my shoulder, then got up again and returned to his dinner prep. “So this…Rae, is from your activist background?”
“Kind of. Some veterans on his crew sent him to find me.”
“What for?”
“Dunno. We didn’t really get that far.”
“Why not?”
I didn’t really have an answer for that. There was no doubt in my mind I’d have sent Rae packing, but he hadn’t given me the chance. “It got a bit weird,” I said. “He didn’t know he was coming for me until I came to the door—I never told him my real name. And no one I ran with up north knew it apart from a couple of real close friends.”
“So it’s a friend who sent him?”
“Doubt it.”
Lucky said nothing for a while. Just fried eggs, filled plates with baked beans and oven chips, and set a giant bottle of ketchup between us. I watched him move around my kitchen like I’d built it for him and waited for the cloud to lift. For the relief of confiding in a real friend to actually mean something. But nothing happened. And why would it? Lucky knowing my shit didn’t change anything. Rae had still ripped open the wound in my heart and I was too tired to heal it.
“Cash.”
“Hmm?” I glanced up, startled. “What?”
Lucky scowled at me like I was a mutant, then his expression softened. “I asked you what you’re going to do. And don’t say nothing, because that clearly isn’t an option. I didn’t know about the sabbing shit, but it makes sense now. It fits with the bloke I thought I knew.”
“Vegetarian and lazy?”
“No…vegetarian and brooding over something me and Dom couldn’t figure out.”
Great. So him and Dom had been psychoanalysing me the whole damn time. “I’m not brooding.”
“Whatever. My point is you’re clearly torn. Sabbing meant the world to you, didn’t it?”
I shrugged. “Itwasmy world, man.”
***
My conversation with Lucky went in circles, but it was always going to when I couldn’t talk about the true reason I’d turned my back on sabbing. My explanations were holey as fuck, and he was sharp enough to know it.
Eventually, he let me be, and I escaped upstairs to continue what I’d started the night Rae had brought perspective crashing back into my conscience. My laptop lay on my bed where I’d left it that morning. I opened it and the sab blog I’d tracked Rae to through the email address he’d left on my pillow filled my screen. Like everything linked to the cause, personal info was scant, but I’d written the book on this shit. From the very first post I’d read, I’d known the words were his.
Didn’t stop me reading every damn entry, though, following Rae from the moment he’d joined the Bedfordshire sab gang three years ago to his report of last weekend’s hunt—a post I’d been halfway through when Lucky had cornered me at work. Disabling vehicles, setting false trails, distracting the hounds, it was all so fucking familiar, but yet somehow seemed alien now. As though I was so removed from it now that Rae was from another world.
Right. That’s why you’re reading his blog like a fucking stalker?
Whatever. I found my place in the article and read on, picking up where I’d left off as the hunt swept past Rae’s hiding place, chasing down the scents he’d spent days trying to conceal. He threw himself in their path, blowing a whistle, shouting, screaming—anything to distract the baying hounds—and my pulse quickened. I knew how it felt to have a horse ride over you.
