wabbit hunting [private]

It wasn't like Ellie had a hard time hunting -- she was a good shot like all the other Hunters, and she could make traps and snares as well as any hunting expert who's been alive for almost 100 years. Typical hunting experience. She shouldn't have any problems.

But there was her damned dog trying to play fetch again.

The dork was sitting at her feet with a stick in his mouth, tail wagging a mile a minute as Ellie checked her metal wire snares for any faults before she started setting them up. The wires, purchased from some hardware store back in Kansas, had served her well over the past year -- it was a lot less messy trying to shoot the rabbits with her arrows than trapping and dispatching with her snares, and also a lot less work trying to creep around and shoot them in the right spots or else the good parts would be ruined. The wires were durable in all sorts of weather and thrashing and very easy to find again, enough so that Ellie wouldn't forget where they were like the airhead she was.

Of course, with Alastor making so much noise, she might as well consider her mission a failure already. For a hunting dog he sure was dense sometimes... but he was her little buddy. She'd probably forgive him in five minutes.

With a slightly sour look, she looked down at him and nudged his foot with hers. "Buddy bear, could we stop with the tail action? We can play fetch later, we have work to do now."

Cue head tilt and ear twitch.

The hunting grounds were usually a good form of stress relief. You had to be resourceful and make sure not to take for granted the life of an animal; always use every last bit of its remains that you can. It was the best form of target practice there was, as they were generally distant, moving, targets, sometimes even small ones. Abigail was still a very youthful hunter, her true age having not been even 23 yet. It was peculiar to wake up looking 18 when most people around you looked younger, but actually severely out-aged you.

Abigail had never seen an accident involving a hunter shooting another hunter, though she had ran into a boy on the hunting grounds once and had to beat sense into him to get him to go. She'd seen something past a relatively distant treeline and drew her bowstring back, having an arrow notched in place. It could have been a rabbit, she figured. Abigail, however, hadn't released the notch back. She silently padded slightly closer, and as she changed her angle slightly, she noticed a girl that had been with the animal, who had turned out to be a dog.

Knowing your target and having patience could be key. It was that reason that no hunters ever had accidents with one another. That, and, nobody wanted to be on Artemis's punishment block.

Abigail approached the duo. It had been an unusually empty day, when it came to the animals, anyway. Abigail raised her arms to raise awareness she was approaching in peace. "You find anything yet? I swear, it's like a damn Sears out here." Abigail spoke softly, as to not alert animals, blinking afterwards. "They uh. They're a place that people haven't gone to in a long time."

"Sears? I suppose." Ellie knew Sears. The name had been familiar back when she was still a child in New York, although that memory was very faint -- perhaps the owner Sears had been a friend of her grandparents', a bygone face she had maybe seen during one of her family's parties when she was still a child. All those old men and their snobby wives had looked the same to her, though.

Shaking the memory off, she pointed into the distance at a dead tree, collapsed against another still-living one, marking the area she had last seen any living thing besides her own dog. The rabbits she had seen then had seemed skittish, gazing around a bit too fast and hopping out of view at lightning speed before Ellie could ready an arrow to try shooting at them from her hiding spot. 

"I saw maybe two rabbits twenty yards from here," Ellie whispered in reply, "but that was half an hour ago. I fear the weather may be driving them back into their dens -- or maybe my dog is scaring them away with all his fetching nonsense, the rascal. I'll still set up traps around those areas in case they come out again and have my dog attempt to flush them out for easier shooting... and all."

Hunting speak was so overly complicated, she could never really grasp all the intricacies or the specific names of every little piece of equipment or knot or technique -- she could definitely act on it, as a near-century of experience and many friends had taught her to, but she could never explain herself properly. She remembered distinctly talking to an old man several years ago (not by her own choice, he wouldn't leave her alone) when the Hunters had been stationed in, what was it, some Floridian diner where she and her partners had taken a rest on the hunt for some dangerous hellhounds -- when Ellie had failed to explain how she made snares properly he had given her a half-hour lecture about various knots and materials in a rather condescending tone, as if girls like you didn't know nothin' about hunting. She was probably as old as his mother, for Zeus' sake.

[ooc: gotta find a new color for her lol]