A boy's father ties trout flies. When the boy cannot sleep at night, his father teaches him how to do it. The boy becomes entranced with the hare's mask, the face of a dead rabbit used to add to the trout flies. At first, because of its lack of eyes and soft fur, he does not associate the hare's mask with an actual rabbit until, one night, he overhears his parents discussing his father's narrow escape from the Holocaust. When the boy's father was young and living in Czechoslovakia, he used to be tasked with killing rabbits each Friday night for the family dinner. He was attached to the rabbits, however, and loved tending to them, thus making his chore of killing them especially difficult. In 1942, the father's family hid a man, whose name the father does not know for sure but suspects is Milos Werfel, a Jewish poet, in the rabbit hutch for nine days. The father as a child was tasked with taking food out to the man on his way to tending the rabbits; it had to be the boy, who the neighbors often saw at the rabbit hutch, so as to not raise suspicion. The boy did not think about the Jewish man hiding in the rabbit hutch very much; he was too busy thinking about the rabbits. He had become especially attached to two of them and named them Jenda and Eliska. He avoided killing these two rabbits, but as the supply dwindled down, he realized he had to choose one of them to be the family's dinner. He sobbed and made a scene but chose one. Two days later, Werfel was gone. Five days later, his parents and sister were taken away while he was in a neighbor's garden. Now, in 1968, the boy's sister insists on having a rabbit for her birthday. The son protests and tries to convince her to adopt any other pet, but the sister insists. The parents agree she can have the pet since she has been a good girl. They adopt one, and the boy avoids it at all costs. When his father shows him a hare's mask as part of the trout fly-making process, the boy steals it and hides it under his pillow. One night, the boy takes the hare's mask and puts it over his face, mocking the sister's rabbit with it. When his father catches him doing so, the boy breaks down and cries. The father seems to understand, in that moment, the bigger problem. Years later, the boy asks his father about that night. He tells his son that he could not choose between Jenda and Eliska, but Milos, overhearing the dramatics, told him to kill Jenda, the weaker of the two.