Poppy Fernwood found the third rabbit before the sun cleared the pines. Its back leg was crushed inside a wire loop staked to a root. She knelt in the wet leaves and worked the wire loose with shaking fingers. She had walked these woods every morning for six years, ever since she started patching up hurt animals in the vine-covered hut behind her cottage. She wanted that hut to grow into a real sanctuary one day, a place where every mistreated creature had a bed and a name. But she could not build a sanctuary while someone was seeding her woods with snares. She carried the rabbit home in her apron and laid it on the workbench inside the hut. Dried herbs hung from the beams. A one-eyed fox watched from a crate. Poppy splinted the leg, fed the rabbit water from a dropper, and made herself a decision she had been dodging for a week. She took the heavy garden shears down from their hook. The blades were nicked from cutting bramble, but the spring was tight. She wiped them on her skirt and walked back into the trees. She found six more snares along the deer path by the creek. She cut each one, coiled the wire, and dropped it into her basket. On the seventh, a boot scuffed behind her. The trapper was younger than she expected, red-faced, a hatchet in his belt. He told her to put the wire back. She told him the woods were not his larder. He stepped closer, and she raised the shears, not to strike, but so he could see her hand did not shake. Then a second voice cut through the ferns. The village warden came down the slope in his green hood, staff in one hand, the other resting near the knife at his belt. He had heard shouting, he said. He asked Poppy to show him what she carried. She emptied the basket at his feet. Seven snares. He turned to the trapper and told him snares were banned within a league of the village, and that he would be walking to the magistrate before noon. By afternoon the trapper was gone from the district, his license pulled, his cabin locked. Poppy sat on the step of the hut with the shears across her knees and the rabbit breathing steady in its box. The warden lingered at her gate. He said word would spread now. People would bring her the ones they found in ditches, in barns, in the roadside grass. He said she should think about how many cages she had, and how soon she could build more. Poppy looked at the small hut behind her, then at the empty field beside it, and understood the woods had just handed her a bigger problem than the one she had solved.