The cold came down out of the Mogollons in the second week of November,
earlier than the country had any right to expect it, and it stayed. Elias Ward
read it in the mornings the way other men read a newspaper. Ice on the water
bucket inside the cabin, not just at the edges but skinned clear across. Frost
ferns on the one glass pane he had hauled up from the trading post two
summers ago and set into the wall with more patience than skill. The gray
mare stamping in the lean-to before full light, her breath going up in twin
plumes, impatient with the dark and with him.
He was thirty-eight years old and he had arranged his life the way a man
arranges stones in a wall, each one fitted so that nothing could get through.
The cabin stood alone in a high valley where a creek bent around a stand of
ponderosa, two days' ride from Fort Apache in good weather and
unreachable in bad, which was how he wanted it. One room. A bunk built
into the wall. A stone hearth he had laid himself, badly, so that it smoked
when the wind came from the north and he had learned to cook on the days it
came from the south. A table. A chair. A shelf of tins. Nothing in the place
asked him a question, and nothing in the place could answer one, and that
was the whole design of it.
He rose in the dark and worked by lamplight, because the days were short
and the line was long. Coffee first, strong enough to stand a spoon in. Then
the panniers: traps, wire, a hatchet, a skinning knife, a length of chain, the
waxed canvas sack for carcasses, the small tin of scent bait wrapped twice
against the cold. Ash watched him through the lean-to door with the patience
of a horse who has learned a man's habits better than the man has. She was
twelve, gray as woodsmoke, with a scar on her near foreleg from a wire cut
in her filly days, and she was the only living thing in the territory whose
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company he sought out on purpose.
"You've got the easy half," he told her, saddling. "You just carry it."
The line ran eleven miles in a rough loop: down the creek to the beaver
ponds, up through the spruce to the high meadows where the martens worked
the deadfall, across the saddle and down the north fork where he set for fox
and the occasional lynx. He had built it over three winters, shifting a set here,
abandoning a draw there, until the loop fit the country the way a boot fits a
foot worn to its shape. He trapped the edges of things. The edges of the
meadows, the edges of the creeks, the edges of the land that belonged by
treaty and by older right to the White Mountain Apache, whose camps lay
east of the fork. He had never set a trap deep in their country. A man could
make a living on edges if he was patient and did not get greedy, and Elias
Ward was patient in the way of men who are afraid of what they might do
with time on their hands.
The work suited him because the work was mostly silence. Snow squeaking
under Ash's hooves. The creak of saddle leather. The small iron music of the
trap chain when he lifted a set to check it. On a good morning there was a
marten in the deadfall set, stiff as a carved thing, its coat thick and dark and
worth real money at the post. On a poor morning there were empty traps
sprung by wind or by the light feet of things too clever for him, and he reset
them and moved on and did not curse, because cursing was a conversation
and he had given those up.
The line taught him other men's sign whether he wanted the lesson or not. He
could read the country the way the sutler's clerk read a ledger, and most of
what was written in it was not his business, and he kept it that way by rule.
Apache sign he read and left alone: the print of an unshod pony in the snow
along the fork, the two long furrows of a travois, the cold gray eye of a
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one-night fire ringed with stones and left clean, the way hunters left a place
they meant to come back to. The White Mountain band wintered on the East
Fork, sixty souls or thereabouts under old Tolin, and in three years Elias had
never seen their camp and had never tried to, and had twice found their sign
crossed with his own and had moved a set rather than share a creek bend
with men who had not invited him. It was not friendship. It was not even
peace, exactly. It was a border kept by both sides without a word being spent
on it, and he valued it the way he valued the walls of his cabin.
White sign read different and he liked it less. Boot prints with the hobnails
worn to a pattern he half-knew. A gut pile left to rot in the open where the
ravens would advertise it for a mile. And traps — not his small, tended sets,
but big steel bedded and left, chained to roots and stumps, sometimes found
sprung and empty and rusting, sometimes with a leg in them, a fox's leg,