Brianna Chance knelt at the base of a briar and tied a strip of red cloth to the thorns. It was her fourth marker that morning. She was mapping a path through the Sycamorefall woods that no hunter would find useful, a green tunnel wide enough for a fox, narrow enough to snag a snare. She wanted a garden the deer could cross without dying, where a rabbit could sleep under bramble instead of hanging from a hook. She had been planning it since the last frost. The trouble was the man watching her from the ridge. He wore a canvas coat and carried a wire coil at his belt, and he had followed her for three days now, keeping just far enough back that she could pretend not to notice. If he understood what she was building, he would lay steel along every gap she left open. So she gave him something else to see. She walked openly to a clearing near the creek, dropped her satchel, and pretended to set stakes for a deer blind. She hammered loud. She measured wrong on purpose. After an hour she left the stakes and doubled back through the brush to her real work. Halfway there she froze. A cottontail sat on the trail she had been marking, ears the color of wet ash, nose ticking at the air. Behind it, a fresh boot print pressed into the mud, toe pointed at her briar tunnel. The hunter had already come through. Brianna crouched and looked past the rabbit. No wire yet. No trigger stick. He had scouted, not set. She gathered every red marker she could reach and stuffed them in her coat. Then she took a burnt stick from an old fire ring and drew a new false trail across the clearing floor, thick and obvious, leading toward the deer blind she did not want. The cottontail watched her work and did not run. When she stood, her hands were black and her map was gone from the woods and folded into her head, where no boot could follow. She had bought herself one day, maybe two, before he came back with his wire and found the wrong path waiting for him.

Brianna turned to leave the clearing, but the rabbit did not move. It tipped sideways into the leaves. Blood matted the fur along its flank, dark and fresh. She saw the tear then, a clean slice under the ribs where a wire had bit and slipped. The cottontail's soot-gray ears twitched once. Its pink nose worked at the air, slower now. She knelt beside it. The sun sat low already. A rabbit bleeding like this would not last the night on open ground, and she had no shelter close enough to matter. Except one. She pulled off her coat and wrapped the rabbit inside it, careful of the wound. The bundle weighed almost nothing. She cut straight through the brush, away from the false trail she had just drawn, toward the low ridge where her cottage stood among the oaks. The porch boards knocked under her boots. Inside, she cleared the kitchen table with one sweep of her arm and laid the coat down. She lit the lamp. She fetched clean rag, the small bottle of pine spirit, a needle, and thread from the sewing tin. The rabbit's eye stayed open and fixed on her. She pinched the skin closed and stitched, six tight stitches, the way she had learned on torn snare lines. She poured spirit over the seam. The rabbit kicked once and went still, breathing shallow. She set it in a shallow crate lined with straw and pushed the crate under the stove, where the heat would hold through the night. By dark the rabbit was asleep and breathing even. Brianna sat at the table and stared at her black hands. She had bought one animal a night indoors. That was not a garden. That was a kitchen. If she wanted her briar tunnel to save creatures without carrying them home one by one, she needed a hidden shelter out in the woods, dug into the ground where wire could not reach and boots would not think to look. She got up and found a scrap of paper. She began to sketch. Outside, somewhere past the ridge, the hunter was walking a false trail toward a blind that meant nothing. She had until he found the trick. Maybe a day. Maybe less.