Where The Trail Runs Cold

There is an hour, at the going-down of the light, that belongs to the small fierce hunters of the boundary country and to no one else; and it was in that hour, with the cold coming up blue out of the earth and the warmth going thin in the pile, that old Bryony spoke the first words of the night.

'The cold's early,' she said, from somewhere in the dark heart of the heap where the oldest and the smallest lay warmest. 'Earlier than it has any right to be. I felt it in my bones before I felt it on my fur, and that's the kind of cold that means business.'

'It always means business,' came Rust's voice, low and unhurried, the voice of the hob the rest of them moved behind. 'That's the only thing the cold has ever meant.'

They lay knotted together beneath the fallen boards of the old place, in the dry under-dark of a thing the upright walkers had once raised and roofed and then, in some season none of them remembered, abandoned to the rain and the nettles and to such as them. It was a good den. It smelled of old straw and older stone and of their own warm musk laid down thick in every corner, that rank sweet reek which was the smell of home and kin and safety, the first smell a kit ever knew and the last an old one carried down into the dark. Long bodies they had for such a place, low and lithe and built all of curves, made for the narrow ways, for pouring down a rabbit-hole and turning round at the bottom of it in a space no wider than the reach of a paw; and they lay woven into one another so close that where one of them ended and the next began was a question none of them could have answered and none would ever have thought to ask. Rust lay near the centre, the dark guard-hairs of him sable over a paler underfur and the mask across his face darker still, so that by the light of day he might have been taken for a polecat come up out of the hedge, though no polecat ever denned so willingly among its own. Sorrel was pressed into the long curve of him, marked much as he was, dark-faced and sable-backed. Burr, who could not be still even in his sleep, lay half across them both with his nose pushed under, his small clawed feet, that did not draw in soft as a cat's but stayed always out and ready for the digging, twitching against the boards. And the kits lay deepest of all, in the place the warmth pooled, little Tansy among them with her face hidden; and among them too lay old Bryony, pale as a moth against all that sable dark, white from her nose to the tip of her, white as the first hard frost, whose eyes, when she opened them in the gloom, caught what little light there was and gave it back not green as the others' did but a soft and burning red.

'I dreamed of summer,' said Burr, stretching the whole long length of himself and yawning enormously. 'A warren of it. Voles lying about in the sun too fat to run, and me walking among them choosing.' He smacked his jaws. 'I woke up hungrier than I went to sleep, which hardly seems fair.'

'Hunger isn't fair,' said Bryony, and she lifted her pale head out of the warm, and the kit nearest her stirred and showed, even this young, the first cream coming through its coat, pale where she was pale, for the white ran in their line and surfaced where it chose. 'Hunger is the one thing in all the world that was never once fair, not since the first of us slipped her collar and went to the hedge and never came back to the hand. There was a time, the oldest of the old used to tell it, when our kind lived behind the wire, in the warm and the dry, and a hand came down at the going-down of the light with meat in it, and there was no hunting then, and no cold, and no fear. And then the hand stopped coming, or we left it, the tellings differ and I was not there to know, and we came out into the cold country and learned the hunger, and we have not been free of it since. You'll learn it the way every one of us learned it, young Burr. The belly wakes you, the belly drives you out, the belly fills and empties and fills again, and between one filling and the next there is your whole life, every scrap of it. There's no part of being what we are that the hunger doesn't have its teeth in.'

'You make it sound very grand,' said Burr. 'It only feels like wanting voles to me.'

'It is wanting voles,' said Sorrel, lifting her head at last, her eyes catching the last grey of the day and throwing it back flat and green. 'She's only telling you that the wanting never stops. Which it doesn't. So you may as well get used to the sound of your own belly, because it's going to be talking to you for the rest of your nights.' But she said it kindly, with the rough fondness she kept for the young one, and she reached over and gave him a nip on the ear that was all play and no teeth, and Burr clattered with delight and rolled.

It was then that Rust went still.

He had lifted his face toward the gap in the boards, where the cold air came down clean off the high ground, and something in the set of him changed, some stiffening that ran the whole length of him from behind his eyes to the place his hindfeet braced against the floor, and the others felt it the way they felt everything, all at once and without a word, and the dook went out of them, and the warmth of waking turned in an instant to a held and listening cold.

'What is it?' said Sorrel, very low.

Rust did not answer for a moment. He was reading the air. There was a smell upon it that should not have been there, faint and drifted and carried down from the low ground by the water, but carried over their own country, into the very gap of their own boards, and it was a smell of musk and oil and rot, heavy and rank and wholly wrong; and braided through it was the green breath of the stream and the silt of the bank, and under all of it the deep and particular foulness of a thing that ate flesh and marked the eating.

'A stranger,' he said. 'By the water.'

'What sort of stranger?' said Burr, his nose up now, working, his bravado quite gone. 'It smells. It smells like the bottom of the stream and something dead in it.'

'A hunter,' said Rust. 'A big one. Bigger than us.'

Old Bryony had gone very quiet in the dark of the heap, and when she spoke again the lightness had left her voice entirely. 'I know that smell,' she said. 'I have not smelled it since I was younger than Sorrel, but you do not forget it once it has been across your fur. There was a thing like that came up our water in the old country, in the bad year, the year the den by the willows was lost. It came up out of the stream and it took whatever it pleased, and there was no hole deep enough and no wall long enough to keep it from the bank. The river-things, the old ones called them. Dark as wet peat all over, near to black when the water's on them, and shining with it, for they are never long out of the stream; and at the throat of each one a little splash of white, the old ones said, like a single drop of milk spilt under the chin, that you see at the last when it is far too close. Bigger than us, and longer, and they swim as easily as we run, and they go down into the deep water after the fish and come up dripping and den in the banks where the water can lick the door of the hole. Not of our kind, and not of the rats' kind, and not of anything's kind that belongs here. There is no hating a thing the way you hate a thing that swims, my dears, for the water is a door it can always go through and we cannot follow.'

'And what do you do about a river-thing?' said Burr.

'You stay off its bank,' said Bryony. 'That is what you do. You stay off its bank and you go hungry rather than feed where it feeds, and you hope the cold drives it on before it drives you to the water.'

There was a silence then, in the warm dark, while the cold pressed patiently down through the boards and the smell of the stranger hung faint and foul upon the air. And into that silence the hunger spoke, as it always spoke, in every one of them at once, a hollowing and a falling-away at the very core of them that would hear no reason and accept no telling; for they had eaten before the long sleep, and eaten well, but the bodies that had held that meal had already burned it down to nothing in the cold labour of keeping the blood from ice, and there was no fat in any of them to spare, and there never was, and there never could be.

'Bryony,' said Rust gently, 'we can't stay off its bank. The good hunting is by the water. The voles are by the water and the rabbits come down to the water, and there is nothing else, not for a night's travel in any direction the cold lets us go. You know that better than any of us.'

'I know it,' said the old jill heavily. 'I have always known it. That is the cruelty of it, Rust. The thing settles itself down in the one larder we have, and then the cold makes sure we are too hungry to keep away.'

Little Tansy lifted her head out of the warm then, and her small voice came thin and frightened into the dark. 'Are we going to the water where the river-thing is?'

And Rust turned and put his nose against the top of her head, and held it there, and said, 'You are going to stay close. Closer than close. You are going to be a burr on my flank the whole night through, and so are the rest of you, and we are going to go careful, and we are going to feed, and we are going to come home to this very heap before the bright comes up. That is what we are going to do.' He lifted his face to the rest of them. 'Up. All of you. The belly's awake, and it won't be argued with, and the longer we lie here the colder and the hungrier we get. Up, and close, and quiet on the wall.'

And he went up through the gap into the falling dark, and his kind poured out after him, as water pours, into the night.

They did not cross the open. It is not in such as them to cross the open while a wall will take them, and the wall was there, the long tumbled grey line of the dry stones running down off the high ground toward the low, and they took it, and were glad of it, as their blood had always been glad of it. They went the way they were made to go, low and humped and flowing, the back rising and falling, each of them pouring along the foot of the stones where the grass grew rankest and a night's worth of smells lay pooled and waiting to be read.

'Mouse,' said Burr, almost at once, his nose down. 'A mouse went this way. Not long. It's still warm in the ground.' He bunched himself to go after it.

'Leave it,' said Sorrel. 'A mouse is a mouthful, and a mouthful isn't worth breaking the line for. We want the warren, not the wall.'

'A mouthful is a mouthful,' said Burr, but he left it, and fell back in behind her, grumbling in the cheerful way he had that was half complaint and half song. 'When I'm the one leading I shall stop for every mouse there is. I shall be the fattest hob on the whole of the high ground, and very slow, and very content.'

'When you're the one leading,' said Sorrel drily, 'the rest of us will already have starved waiting for you to choose between two voles.'

'I would choose both,' said Burr, with dignity.

Old Bryony came along at the rear, slower than the rest, her breath loud in the cold, and Rust dropped back now and then to go beside her, matching her pace without a word, and the others closed up around the kits so that the whole of them moved as one moving warmth through the freezing dark; for they could not afford to scatter. Scattered, they cooled, and cooling, they weakened, and weakening, they died, as the cold had always meant them to. But woven close they were a single thing the night could not put out.

'You feel it, don't you,' said Bryony quietly to Rust, as they went. 'The way the smell sits on top of everything. It's stronger already than it was at the den.'

'I feel it,' said Rust.

'It's between us and the warren. You know that. The water and the warren are the same place, near enough, and the thing is on the water.'

'I know that too.'

'And we're going anyway.'

'We're going anyway,' said Rust, 'because there is a kit back there in the middle of us who has not got enough on her bones to last another cold night unfed, and there is you, who has given fifty nights of hunting to this business and won't take from the caches what you've earned, and there is the whole of us with the belly already gnawing. There is no other larder, Bryony. There's the water, or there's the slow cold going-out of us one by one. So we'll go careful, and we'll go clever, and we'll keep off the open where the thing is strong. But we'll go.'

The old jill was quiet a moment. 'You're a good hob, Rust,' she said. 'Your mother was the same. She'd walk into the cold mouth of anything for the ones behind her. It's what got her killed in the end, but it's what kept the rest of us alive to remember her, so I'll not call it a fault.'

The first life of the night was Sorrel's, and it came as such things always come, out of the grass and out of nothing. A sound, high and thin, a single thread of squeak pitched up past the reach of any heavier creature, the small busy talk of a vole going about the small busy business of its life beneath the tussocks. They heard it all at once, and the hearing went straight into the body without passing through anything that might be called a choice; and Sorrel, who was nearest, froze with one foot raised, and turned the sound over, and narrowed it, and fixed it to a single point in the dark beneath a fist of dead grass.

'There,' breathed Burr, who had heard it too. 'Under the dead grass. Go on, go on.'

She did not need the telling. The grass twitched, and she was upon it before the twitch was done, the whole length of her uncoiling in a single line and the jaws closing exactly where the movement had been, and the small thread of the squeak was cut off forever. She killed it cleanly, and ate it head first and whole, the little bones giving with wet clicks, and licked the cold place where the life had been.

'One,' said Bryony. 'One vole, between six of us. You see now why I fear that thing on the water. It isn't the thing itself. It's that the thing has the only ground where one vole turns into forty.'

'I could find the warren by smell from here,' said Burr eagerly. 'I have the rabbit-run already, can't you smell it, the run crosses the wall just down there where the ground goes flat. Let me go ahead and. .'

'You will not go ahead,' said Rust, without raising his voice, and Burr subsided. But the young hob's blood was up now, the vole-kill and the rabbit-scent and the cold all working in him together, and a little further on, when a scuttle came out of the short grass on the open side of the wall, the hunger flung him out after it before any wisdom could close its hand upon him.

'Burr!' Sorrel's voice cracked across the dark. 'The wall! Get to the wall!'

But he was already three bounds out under the wide and naked sky with his nose to the ground, and the open had nothing in it at all, only the scuttle already gone to earth, and he stood there small and exposed beneath all that emptiness with his sides heaving and the moonlight flat and grey upon his back. And Rust was out after him in an instant, low and fast, and took him by the scruff of the neck with no play in it at all and dragged him bodily back to the foot of the stones.

'Out there,' said Rust, and now there was something in his voice that stilled even Burr, 'a death falls on you out of the grey before ever your slow eyes have made it into a shape. Owl. Fox. The thing on the water, if it ranges this far up. You do not go into the open. You do not go into the open for a vole, or a mouse, or the finest fat rabbit that ever ran. You stay on the wall, and you stay in the line, and you stay alive. Do you hear me, Burr? Tonight of all nights, you stay in the line.'

'I hear you,' said Burr, very small.

'Good,' said Rust, and his voice softened, and he nosed the young one's flank where he had scruffed him. 'You've a hunter's nose and a hunter's heart, and one night you'll lead a business of your own. But a dead hunter leads nothing. Now come. Close up. The warren's near, and the thing is nearer, and I want every one of us where I can smell them.'

The trail of the rabbits crossed their road where the land at last lay level toward the water, and it was old to the eye and fresh and living to the nose, a line laid down through the grass by warm bodies dragging their warmth low along the ground; and it was strong, and it was many. Not the trail of one rabbit but of a run, of a coming and a going worn deep by long use, and a run worn so deep meant a warren near, the old dug city of them beneath some bank, deep and warm and packed with life.

The whole business felt the promise of it go through them like a current, and the dook rose from them despite themselves, low and quick and helpless, the sound they could never hold when the prospect of plenty came upon them.

'There,' breathed Burr. 'There, you can smell it, the whole warren of it, warm and close and full of them. Rust, there must be forty rabbits down there. Fifty. We could feed for three nights. We could fill every cache in the den.'

'And the stranger?' said Bryony.

For the smell of the stranger had thickened with every bound now, no longer drifted and stale but present and recent and wet, laid down freshly upon the very ground, and it was braided into the rabbit-run as though the two trails ran together to a single place. And they did. The warren was by the water, and the water was the stranger's, and the stranger had been here, and was perhaps here still.

They came to where the wall gave out and the ground opened, and there they stopped, bunched and uncertain, their noses up into the rank and freighted air. Ahead of them the bank fell away to the dark and moving smell of the stream; and in the bank, ringed about with the bare trodden earth of much passing, were the mouths of the warren, round and black and breathing out into the night the close packed reek of rabbit, of warmth and fur and dung and life heaped warm upon life.

'There it is,' said Sorrel softly. 'Everything we need, three bounds off. And the thing's reek lying all over it like a hand.'

'Then we don't go,' said Bryony. 'We turn back, and we hunt the wall for mice, and we live another night, hungry, and we come again when the thing has moved on.'

'And if it doesn't move on?' said Sorrel. 'If it's found itself a warren and a stream and means to stay? We can't hunt the wall for mice for the rest of the cold, Bryony, you said it yourself. One vole between six. We'd be carrying Tansy's body home inside a few nights, and yours not long after.'

The old jill had no answer to that, and the silence of her having no answer was the worst thing any of them had heard all night.

'Here is what we do,' said Rust at last, and they all turned to him, even Bryony, because that was what they did. 'The thing is heavy, and it is made for the open and the water. We are small, and we are made for the narrow dark. So we will not fight it where it is strong. We go for the mouths, all of us together, fast and low and straight. If the thing is in the water, we are down a hole and into the warren before it knows we came. If the thing is on the bank.' He paused. 'If the thing is on the bank, then the first ones to the mouths go down, and they take the kits down with them, and they do not stop and they do not look back. Sorrel, you take the kits. Tansy on your flank, the rest behind. Burr, you go with her, ahead of her, you clear the way down the hole. Bryony, you keep up as you can and you make for the nearest mouth and you do not wait for anyone, do you hear, not for anyone.'

'And you?' said Sorrel.

'I'll come last,' said Rust. 'I'll come last and I'll see you all down.'

Sorrel looked at him a long moment in the dark, and what passed between them then needed no words and got none. Then she said, only, 'Come last. But come,' and he said, 'I'll come,' and that was the whole of it.

'Now,' said Rust. 'Close, and low, and straight for the mouths. Go.'

And they went.

They were halfway across the open ground, the black mouths of the warren three bounds off and then two, the warm reek of the rabbits filling all the world ahead of them, when the stranger came up out of the dark of the bank.

It was larger than them, and that was the first thing and very nearly the whole of the first thing: larger in a way the body understood long before the slow eye could fix upon it, a long dark shape pouring up out of the shadow of the bank with the water-smell rolling off it in a wave. To their eyes it was no more than a grey smear and a terrible certainty of movement, low to the ground as they were low but longer by far and heavier, broad through the head, thick through the chest and the shoulder, built all of a heavier making; and it set itself down between them and the black breathing mouths of the warren, and it spoke.

'Little hot things,' it said, and its voice was wrong, slow and cold and wet, a voice with the stream in it. 'Little hot quick things, all in a line. I smelled you on my bank. I smelled you wanting what is mine.'

They had stopped dead, the whole of them, fanned out in the open with the terror going through them as a single cold wire drawn tight from spine to spine.

'It's nobody's bank,' said Sorrel, and her voice shook only a little. 'The water's nobody's. The rabbits are nobody's. They were here before you crawled up out of the stream and they'll be here after.'

'They are mine now,' said the stranger, and it did not hurry, and that was the most frightening thing about it, that it did not need to hurry. 'The water is mine. The bank is mine. The little ones in the ground are mine, every one, and I will eat them slowly, all through the cold, while you go hungry on your wall. And tonight,' it said, and it turned its broad blunt head, and though it could not have seen them well any more than they could see it, some older sense in it found the smallest of them, found the place where Tansy stood frozen at Sorrel's flank, 'tonight I think I will start with the littlest. The littlest are the tenderest. I have always found it so.'

And it came.

It came fast, faster than its weight had any right to allow, the long dark shape closing the open ground in a churn of muscle, and it came not for Rust and not for Sorrel but low and straight for the place where the kits were, for Tansy, for the tenderest, exactly as it had said.

'The mouths!' Rust's voice tore across the dark. 'Sorrel, the kits, NOW! Burr, clear the hole! GO!'

And then he did the thing that was older in him than his hunger and older than his fear, older perhaps than his kind: he broke not away from the killer but across it, full into its path, low and screaming his own thin furious hiss into the night, throwing the whole of himself into the narrow space between the stranger and the little ones. And Sorrel, even as she drove the kits before her toward the black mouths, cried out, 'Rust!' and he called back, not turning, 'Go! Get her down! GO!'

The stranger checked, and swung its great head toward the new and nearer thing that had flung itself across its path, and for one heartbeat its cold wet attention was all on Rust, and that heartbeat was everything. In it, Sorrel reached the nearest mouth with Tansy pressed to her flank, and Burr was already in it, already gone down clearing the dark of the run ahead, and Sorrel drove the little one down into the saving earth and the other kits tumbling after, and Bryony, slow Bryony, reached the second mouth and folded her old body down into it and was gone.

'Down!' Sorrel screamed from the mouth of the hole. 'Rust, they're down, all of them, come NOW!'

But the stranger had Rust marked now, and it lunged, the broad head swinging round and the jaws coming with it; and this close, far too close, the slow eye that had made it only a grey smear across the open ground caught it whole and clear at last, and what it caught was worse than the smear had been. The coat of the thing was near to black, and slicked flat and shining with the river it had not long left, the water still running from it in beads; the feet that drove it forward were broad and spread, half the toes webbed for the swimming, leaving wet splayed prints in the cold earth; and there, beneath the broad blunt chin, as it opened its jaws upon him, was a single splash of white, pale as spilt milk against all that wet black, exactly as Bryony had said, seen at the last when it was far too close. Rust felt the wind of the jaws and the foul wet heat of them and the deep wrongness of teeth made for fish and frog and the throats of larger creatures than he. And he bent. The whole of him bent, folding back upon itself in a way the heavy killer could not follow, so that the jaws closed upon the empty air where his shoulder had been and he was already gone, already pouring himself low and sideways across the open toward the one black mouth still near, while behind him the stranger screeched its rage into the cold.

He struck the mouth of the warren at the full of his running, and the patient earth opened, and took him in, and closed over him.

And the dark beneath the earth was a different dark, and it changed everything.

In the world above, the dark had still been a dark of shapes and edges, of the doubled grey his eyes wrung patiently out of the starlight. Here there was no light at all to double, and the black was whole and grainless and complete, and the eyes that had served him beneath the open sky went dead and useless in his head. Yet he did not slow, for here he had no need of them; the world tipped in an instant from the eye to the face, to the long stiff hairs that swept the curve of the run before him, brushing root and stone and the cold packed earth, reading the way ahead as surely as ever his nose had read the wall. The burrow spoke to his face and he answered it with his body. It narrowed, and he poured himself smaller. It turned, hard and downward, and he flowed into the curve.

'Rust!' Sorrel's voice came to him through the dark, close, frantic. 'Are you down? Are you whole?'

'I'm down,' he said, and the relief in her breath was a thing he could hear. 'I'm whole. Are they all with you? Tansy?'

'I'm here,' came the small voice, shaking. 'I'm here, I'm all right, I came down so fast I bumped my nose.'

'Bump it as hard as you like,' said Rust, 'so long as you're down here to do it.'

Behind him, above him, the stranger struck the bank. He felt it more than he heard it, a thud through the body of the earth, a scrabble, and then the cold wet voice came down the run after them, choked and furious and close.

'Come out,' it said. 'Come out, little hot things. You cannot stay in the ground forever. You have to eat. I know you have to eat, I can smell the hunger on you even now. So I will wait on the bank, and you will grow hungrier and hungrier in your hole, and in the end you will come out, every one of you, and I will be here.' And then they heard it set its broad chest to the mouth of the run and push, and heard the earth grind, and heard it stick fast where the way pinched down, and heard the screech of its rage as it raked and tore at a hole that would not widen by so much as a hair.

'Let it push,' said old Bryony's voice, dry and steady, out of the dark of a side-gallery. 'Let it push till the cold takes it. It can put its head in a rabbit-hole. It cannot put the rest of itself after. That is the one mercy of being small, my dears, and it is worth more than all the size in the world: there is no narrow place we cannot follow, and the narrow places are where the heavy things must stop.'

'It says it'll wait,' said Tansy, frightened.

'It can say what it likes,' said Sorrel grimly. 'Talk doesn't fill a belly, and a thing made for the water can't sit on a cold bank forever any more than we can. It'll wait, and it'll get hungry too, and it'll go back to its fish. We've the better of it down here, Tansy. Down here we're the hunters, and it's the one shut out.'

And it was true. For the warren had heard them come, and the rabbits knew, and the runs ahead were filling with the terror of them, a sound below even the squeak of a vole, a drumming of paws upon packed earth far down in the deep galleries, the whole dug city waking all at once to the thing that had got in among them in the dark. And the terror-smell of them was to Rust a light in that lightless place, a beacon, and it drew the hunger up through him so hard and so pure that the very fear of the stranger fell clean away from him, sloughed off and forgotten in the black, until there was nothing in the whole of him but the need, and the nose, and the face reading the narrowing run toward the warmth.

'Burr,' he said. 'Where are you? You went down ahead.'

'Far down,' came Burr's voice, breathless and high with the hunt. 'Far down and there's a rabbit coming up, Rust, I've turned it, it's coming up the run straight at you, it's big, it's coming, it's. .'

And the rabbit broke past Burr in the black and came up the run in a blind and heedless bolt, all weight and panic, large enough to drive Rust hard against the wall of the tunnel as it sought to hurl itself toward the open mouth and the night and the very killer that waited there. And the body of Rust did the thing the body of Rust was made before his birth to do. He did not see it, for there was nothing to see; he felt it, the shape and the heat and the great soft drumming pulse of the life of it filling the run, and his face found the place where that warmth ran thickest, and the whole of him uncoiled along the single line the narrow earth allowed, and his jaws closed behind the skull where the spine runs close beneath the fur. He bit down, and felt the give of it; felt the great soft panic shudder once, hugely, through his teeth, and then felt it stop; felt the drumming go out of the warmth and the warmth turn from a fleeing thing into a still thing, into held warmth, into the very end of the hunger; and he held his bite, and did not loose it, until the last of the shudder had passed up through him and was gone.

'It's down,' he said into the dark. 'Come. All of you. Come and feed.'

And the dark filled with the dook of his kind, crowding up the run in the black, and the clatter of their joy was loud now in the close warm earth, all the held terror of the open ground turning over at last into this: into plenty, into the warm and the wet and the heavy bulk of a thing that would fill the whole of them.

They fed in the dark, and the dark held them, and the dark was safe.

There was no order to their feeding and there was no need of one. They tore in where they could reach, and the warmth went down at last into the cold hollow places of them and pushed the cold back out into the earth where it belonged. Rust fed until the wrenching at the root of him eased for the first time since the waking, and around him in the black the others fed, and dooked, and shoved, Burr gorging until his sides grew round, the kits pushing in beneath the larger to reach the tender parts, Sorrel pulling a haunch away to share with Tansy in a quiet corner.

'Eat, little one,' Sorrel was saying. 'Eat all you can hold and then eat more. This is what the fear was for. This is what your uncle Rust ran into the cold mouth of that thing for. So eat, and grow, and one night it'll be you turning the rabbit for someone smaller than you are now.'

'Will it always be like this?' said Tansy, her mouth full, her voice losing its fright now in the warm and the plenty. 'The fear, and then the warm? Every night?'

'Most nights it's only the cold and the wall and a vole if you're lucky,' said Bryony, from where she lay working at a bone with her old teeth. 'The nights like this one, with a river-thing on the bank and a whole warren won out from under it, those are the nights you'll tell the kits about when you're a grandmother as broad and as bad-tempered as I am. We don't get many of them. That's why they're worth the telling.'

'I shall tell it,' said Burr grandly, 'as the night I cleared the run and turned the rabbit single-handed.'

'You shall tell it,' said Sorrel, 'as the night you ran into the open after a scuttle and got scruffed for it like a kit, and then did one useful thing afterward.'

'That,' said Burr, 'is a much worse story, and I shall not be telling it.'

And in the warmth and the safety the laughter went round them, the low chuckling dook of a business at its ease, while above them on the cold bank the stranger raked and screeched at a hole it could not pass, and gave up at last, and went grumbling back to its water.

When they could eat no more there was still meat, more than the bodies of them could hold, and so they did the deep old thing the cold had taught into their blood long before any of them had drawn breath. They cached. They carried what was left down into the dead black corners of the run where no air stirred, and dug it into the cold patient earth, and packed it down, laying it by against the next waking when the fullness would be gone again as it was always gone, and the hunger would rise as it always rose. They salted the dark galleries of the dead rabbits' city with warmth, so that when the engine fired in them again they need not go out past the killer into the freezing open to feed it.

Then Rust went up alone through the dark to the mouth of the warren, and the stranger was gone. Its smell hung yet, rank and thwarted, in the round black throat where it had jammed and raked and failed, but the thing itself had given over and gone back down to its water. Rust did not go out into the night. He stopped at the threshold, where the warm packed reek of the warren met the cold blue edge of the dark, and he turned, and there he laid down his own mark, full and deliberate and unhurried, his own clean rankness over the rankness of the stranger, claiming the dark city and all the warmth salted away within it; and he worked it deep into the earth until the stranger's reek was wholly buried beneath his own, writing into the very ground where the trails crossed the only word his kind has ever needed: this is ours now.

When he came back down, his kind had made the pile already, deep in the warm of the warren, in a gallery ringed round with the smell of the kill and the caches and their own warm bodies, folded into one another in the way they had always folded, a single knot of warmth in the dark with all the cold of the world shut out beyond the earth.

'You came last,' said Sorrel softly, as he poured himself in among them, into the heart of them where the heat lay thickest.

'I came last,' he said. 'But I came.'

'You did,' she said, and pressed the curve of her spine to the curve of his. 'You always do. One night you won't, and I'll never forgive you for it. But you did tonight.'

'Not tonight,' said Rust. 'Tonight I'm here, and you're here, and the kit's here, and there's meat in the corners for three more wakings. Tonight there's nothing at all to forgive.'

Little Tansy was already gone down into sleep, her breath slow and even and unafraid. Burr lay gorged and still at last, his dreaming jaws working faintly on remembered rabbit. And old Bryony, half asleep herself, murmured into the warm dark the way the old do, half to them and half to the long line of the gone, 'A good night. A bad night and a good night both, the way the best of them always are. Sleep now, all of you. The bright will come up over the cold ground without us, and ask us for nothing, and we'll sleep through the whole of it, warm, and fed, and together. And when the hunger wakes us, as it will, we'll do it all again, because that is what we are, and there has never been any shame in it, and there never will be.'

The pile rose, and fell, and rose again, with the slow tide of their sleeping, as it had risen and fallen over their mothers before them, and their mothers' mothers, back and back into a time none of them could reach but all of them carried in the blood. The hunger was gone out of them, for now. It never lasted, and somewhere in each of them they knew that too. But that was the next dark, and the next hunger, and they were not yet come.

For now there was the pile, and the deep warm earth, and the breathing of his kind about him; and a stillness at the heart of it all that was deeper than the hunger and older than the fear, into which, breath by shared breath, Rust let himself at last go down.

For now there was enough.