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knife at the back of his belt.
    When he had finished, he and Voy looked carefully over the whole warren, found three holes they had missed, and netted them. Voy brought the ferret bag and opened the mouth a couple of inches. A long, quivering nose poked out and sniffed the air, then the head followed, and the little pink eyes glittered.
    ‘He’s a white ‘un,’ Jason whispered.
    ‘All the French ones are white,’ Voy whispered. ‘Careful of him, he’s sharp with his teeth.’ He grabbed the ferret by the back of the neck, slipped it under one corner of a net, and replaced the peg. The ferret turned its long body round and round in the mouth of the hole and stuck its nose through the meshes of the net, trying to get back. Voy flicked its nose with his finger, and it turned round again, a furred snake, slow-moving, the pink eyes burning in the moonlight, and went slowly out of sight under the ground.
    ‘Stand the other side now, and quick, Jason!’
    Jason waited, crouching like a runner in the edge of the tree shadow, watching the moonlit hummocks of the rabbits’ home. The supple murderer was down there now, sneaking on, half blind, his teeth gleaming and his eyes like coals glowing in the black tunnel. Oh, the blood of Jesus, to be a rabbit down there with the burning eyes at the end of the tunnel, to thump the ground with your legs, jerk them down, and turn and run, crazy mad with fear, the strong waves of the ferret stench rolling with you, and the eyes and teeth snaking on and on and on behind you, earth crumbling over you, in front of you, to burst out at full jump into the poured moonbeams, into the net, kicking the net, all silent.
    He shook his head. He was a man. He’d like to pull off the nets and go home, but it was always the same. Times, when he’d set a running noose on his father’s land and left it out at night, he’d lie on the bed and could not sleep until he managed to wrench his thoughts away from the moon-bathed hedge and the dead shape of fur, stinking of fear and cold as it died.
    He heard the thump-thump deep under the earth. A long minute passed, and a rabbit dashed out of a burrow into a net. Jason threw himself on it, all thought gone, hauled it out by the back legs, ran his fingers down its jerking neck, felt the place, squeezed, and bent. He dropped the rabbit, reset the net, dived on another. Voy darted from side to side, and the white bellies of the dead rabbits gathered in the moonlight.
    After ten minutes no more rabbits came out. Nor did the ferret. ‘He’s sucking,’ Voy said. ‘Get the line.’
    Jason walked into the trees. The ferret had killed inside the warren and was gorging itself deep underground. Now they must line another ferret, send it after the first, measure how much cord it dragged after it, and then dig down for them both. He wanted to get it over quickly so that they could go down into the copse below and knock a few pheasants off their roosts with his sling. Sometimes the birds perched so low you could grab them by the legs and pull them down. Voy would have sulphur matches to burn, which made them giddy.
    Searching about in the trees for the ferret line, Jason found he had come to the wrong place. There was nothing here but a big stick leaning against the bole of an elm. He took it curiously in hand as he walked across to the other tree, thumping it on the ground and thinking it must be Voy’s--and clang, a low shape bounded out of the earth at his feet, snapped the cudgel from his hand, and fell back with a groan. The cudgel stood there, upright of itself beside him, and his wrist ached, and he was biting his lips to keep down the fierce yell of fear.
    Voy hurried over. ‘What was that? What? Whose staff is that? Don’t move.’ He knelt and peered at the earth. He said softly, ‘A man trap, it is. I’ve heard of them--in Prussia, not in England. Oh, the whoreson pigs!’
    The cold sweat burst out on Jason’s forehead. Tremblingly he took hold of the