The Hunger Trace by Edward Hogan Page B

LOVE MAGS .
     
    The door of the weighing room was ajar, and Louisa entered to find striped bags of beef and quail neatly packed in her reclining freezer. Louisa sighed and read the post-script of the note, which explained that Foxton’s butcher’s had suffered a powercut.
    THE MEAT WAS GOING FAST OR GOING OFF. DIDN’T THINK YOU’D MIND
    ME BREAKING IN. XX
     
    Louisa thought of Maggie kneeling above her with the frozen coffee. Money was tight, and the extra food for her hawks was welcome. She regretted what she had said about shipping Christopher out to his mother.
    And so, in late October, Louisa took Maggie lamping. She called at the big house around midnight, knowing that Maggie would be awake. This time she answered the door in a skirt and a silky white top, the straps radiating from a wooden circle above her breasts. Her nipples pressed at the surface as the night cold hit her. Louisa did not consider the details at that time. ‘Get your kit on,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’
    Squinting into the headlights of the van, Maggie took a moment to make her decision. ‘Give me five minutes,’ she said.
    Maggie brought the warm fragrances of garlic and a musky perfume into the van. She turned around and looked at the Harris hawk, boxed and secured in the back. ‘What are we up to, sweetie?’ she said with relish, the streetlight slipping over her jeans.
    ‘ No good , hopefully,’ Louisa said.
    They took the narrow off-road track, cut onto John Salt’s fields, stopped and got out. Maggie looked confused as Louisa took Fred from his box. The eyes of the bird popped with red flashes in the brake light. ‘Jesus, can he see in the dark now, too?’ Maggie said.
    ‘Only when you turn the light on,’ Louisa said, nodding at the lamp.
    ‘I get it,’ Maggie said, strapping the lamp battery round her waist and turning on the light. Fred tuned his vision to the end of the beam. Louisa taped his bell, for silence.
    They walked out into the open together, the sky fringed with pallor from the villages, but moonless. Maggie revealed the world in silver arcs of lamplight. Louisa usually hunted alone, and had not prepared herself for the rush of feeling and the memories of that time she had gone hunting with David. Her legs began to shake. She tried to concentrate on the technical details of hawking.
    ‘You need to move over to the side,’ she whispered to Maggie. ‘So his wings don’t block the light. You see a rabbit, you keep the light on it, everywhere it goes. If he misses, cut the lamp. Fred’ll go to ground. Then turn the light on me, and he’ll come back to my fist.’
    ‘Okay. Jesus, this is some crazy shit.’
    The first rabbit was too close to cover, but Fred gave good chase on the second – an old bunny who kept the hawk in a shaky line until the last second, when it switched direction, spinning out from under his elevated right wing.
    Later, in the van, Maggie would say that the time just after the lamp went off was the strangest time, because it was so dark she could barely believe that the drama she had just witnessed had happened at all. And that was a strange time for Louisa, too. As she waited in the darkness she could hear the private shifting of the hawk in the field, and her own heartbeat, which seemed much louder now that she had human company. At first all she could see was the cooling bulb of the lamp across the way, but soon Maggie’s belt buckle and coat buttons started to gleam, followed by the rest of her appearing in violet as Louisa’s eyes adjusted, as though light was a falling formative powder.
    Maggie shone the lamp on Louisa, blinding her. Louisa stuck out her meated glove and Maggie’s beam found it, as did Fred, who looked like a bleached, giant moth gliding out of the dark. ‘Your turn,’ Louisa said. They took a break before swapping, ate biscuits.
    ‘What do you think?’ Louisa said.
    ‘Strangest, most incredible thing I’ve ever done,’ Maggie said. ‘If