#technically this is about thrawn 2017 but my white ass could not figure out how to work character names in organically so fuck it!

[milfglupshitto]

the snare

The company most assuredly had enough rations to last weeks, if not months, while holding position. But anyone who has ever starved before will tell you that no amount of food is ever really enough, and anyone who has ever been left to hold a position will tell you that it is so very easy to end up waiting a long, long time for anyone to come back. Thusly armed with sharp knives and strong rope and these two hungers lodged deep within their bones, they set off into the woods away from the fires and the rest.

The forest was conversational, and so was the human. The further away they walked, the lesser the tension in his shoulders.

“Ever hunted burrobun before?”

The memory is not-pleasant and knife-sharp. Worlds and lifetimes away, in a wood much the same.

“A similar creature, once. They are rabbit-like, colloquially known as twitch-tails.”

“Only once?”
 “Only once.”

They continue into the woods.

After one thousand and thirty-seven paces, with the setting sun melting golden on the leaf-dappled forest floor, they find an ideal spot. A choke point between trees on the edge of a clearing- a logical ambush site, and a well-traveled one, based on the bare earth below. He gathers branches to further narrow the corridor while the human ties the snare.

Four more traps in similar locations, and then it is time for a silence that will prevent the enemy from learning of their position. But the insects buzz and whir, the leaves shudder in the wind, and the human remains conversational.

“Tell me about it. The ‘once’, from before.”

His hand rests on the hilt of the hunting-knife, catching dying light-from-sun. The human is clever enough to know this direction unwanted, but not clever enough to fear the knife or the hand holding it.

Clever and stupid rabbits can be caught both by a good snare. The thought whispers through his mind like a gentle breeze, and it is both clever and stupid. He begins.

“The fifth night of my exile. There were sufficient rations, but I had deemed it wise to set traps before the first snow-fall. The ground would keep the meat, and the pelts might be of use. I walked from my shelter to a clearing with rope and knife and set the first snare.”

One thousand and thirty-eight paces. Fortune, then, had made this clearing a little closer than the one past.

“Not long after I finished with the rest, I heard noise from that end of the clearing. There was a rabbit, a twitch-tail, caught. But it was… done wrongly. The neck unbroken.”

He sees it there in front of him. The glint of a sharp knife reflected in the wide, dark eyes of the trapped creature. Accompanying the spectre, the calm voice of a man in a clean white coat. You have to hold them correctly, or they’ll break their legs trying to get out of your grasp. We don’t want that now, do we?

“So what did you do?”

He looks away from the eyes of the rabbit and banishes the thought of the clean white coat.

“Nothing. I had killed it once-wrongly, and feared to with knife kill twice-wrongly. It twitched for a long time and then did not. I cut it free, carved away the edible from the non-edible and held it over flame, and when it all was done I could not bear to eat.”

He pauses, glances back. Still the rabbit stares, dark eyes unblinking.

“Only once, then.”

“Yes. I learned better snares for smaller things, and other traps for larger, and went to the rivers often, but never again a rabbit.”

“Larger things like humans.”

“Yes.”

The human sighs, glances away. “Hunting isn’t the same as killing. Lots of folks do both and never catch onto the difference.”

For a long time there is silence. It is broken by the sound of snapping twigs and snapping bone, and in an instant both are standing before the first snare.

The creature, the burrobun, is limp in the collar of rope. The human kneels to extract it. He watches the chest rise and fall, the dark eyes catching starlight as they scan the clearing. He hears the not-beating heart of the one and the exhale-prayer of the other.

The apparition-rabbit of before vanishes, as the ever un-still hands of the human, now steady, close gently around the neck of the already dead thing and twist.

All precautions taken and mercy granted thus twice, the human stands upright. He envies the dead beast, the collection of bones and sinew and fur held correctly. As they return to their place at the clearing’s edge, his heart beats rabbit-fast in his ears, and cradled inside the cages of both their ribs grows a third kind of hunger.