《《3584Black Ice》.doc

Black Ice by Cate Kennedy September 11, 2006 When I went up to check my traps, I saw that the porch lights at the lady’s place were still on, even though it was morning. “That’s an atrocious waste of power,” my dad said when I told him. His breath huffed in the air like he was smoking a cigar. The rabbit carcasses steamed when we ripped the skin off, and it came away like a glove. Skin the rabbit—that’s what my mum used to say when she pulled off my shirt and singlet for a bath. Mr. Bailey gives me three dollars for every rabbit, to feed his dogs. I take them down to him in the wooden box with a picture of an apple on it. At the butcher’s, rabbits are only two-fifty but Mr. Bailey says he likes mine better. I’ve got fifty-eight dollars saved. I want to get a bike. Dad thinks it’s good to save up your money. The tourists who stand around the real-estate agent’s window pointing and touching each other on the arm—he reckons they’re loonies. When the lady up the road bought that house, my dad went over after the “Sold” sign got stuck on and everybody had gone. He took one of the clapboards off the side of the house and looked under at the rotting pilings, and made a noise like he was holding back a sneeze. “That lady’s a bloody wacker,” he said. “Those pilings are bloody atrocious.” He stood there looking at the house and rolled a cigarette. “Throwing good money after bad,” he said, and kicked the clapboard. I kicked it, too. After she moved in I didn’t set no more snares up there on the hill. I walked in the state forest on the tracks round the lake, the tracks the rabbits make. I made myself small as a rabbit and moved through them on my soft scrabbly claws. I saw everything differently then. Saw the places where they sat and rested, the spots where they reached up with their noses and ate tiny strips of bark from the bottoms of the river willows. You’ve got to set a trap so that it kills the rabbit straight off. On the leg is no good. All night the rabbit will cry