roof. Then he had fed it to the fire a corner at a time and watched his name
curl and blacken, and the next morning he had gone out and run his line in
the rain and not thought about it again, except that he thought about it every
time it rained. He had never answered, and no second letter came. The Army
6
had a long list of men willing to draw maps. It did not need the one who had
learned what maps cost, and Elias supposed that was the nearest thing to
mercy the whole business had ever produced: it had let him go, and it had
taken his silence as the end of the transaction, and only he knew the
transaction was not ended, because only he was still paying on it, eleven
dollars and forty cents at a time.
The morning he found the man in the trap began like the others, and he
would think about that afterward — the ordinariness of it, coffee, cold, the
mare's breath, the line waiting in the white country like a sentence he had
written himself and read every day to keep from reading anything else.
The beaver ponds gave him nothing. The spruce deadfall gave him the
marten, prime and heavy, and he skinned it where it lay and rolled the pelt
and went on with his hands smelling of musk and iron. By midmorning he
had crossed the saddle and started down toward the north fork, where the
creek ran narrow between banks of willow and the ice was already thick
enough at the edges to bear a man, though the middle still ran black and fast
under its skin.
It was Apache land on the far side of that creek, and had been since before
there was a territory to argue about it. Elias set his side and no farther, a
discipline he kept the way he kept the tin under the hearthstone, exactly. He
was checking the last of the fork sets, a fox trap bedded in a drift where the
trail came down to drink, when Ash threw up her head and stood, ears
pricked east, and would not be gentled.
He heard it then. Not the mare's doing — it came through the cold from
across the creek and downstream, a sound he knew in his hands before he
knew it in his ears. Steel. The clank and scrape of a trap chain against stone,
and then a pause, and then the sound again, weaker, and under it something
7
that was not steel at all.
A man makes certain sounds when he is fighting a thing that has him by the
leg. Elias had heard the sounds once before in his life, years ago, from a
soldier whose horse had rolled on him in a wash, and he had hoped in a
general way to go to his grave without hearing them again.
He stood still with his hand on Ash's neck and listened to the sounds come
again across the frozen creek — the chain, the scrape, a breath dragged in
and let out through teeth — and everything in him that had been arranged so
carefully, stone upon stone, eleven miles of silence and three years of it,
understood at once what was being asked. The sensible thing was to ride the
other way. The sensible thing was to finish the line, go home, light the lamp,
count nothing, and let the country have what the country had caught. He had
done the sensible thing once in his life, at a place called Salt Creek, standing
in the smoke with his hands empty while other men did the work his map had
aimed.
He tethered Ash to a willow, took the hatchet and the wire and his rifle, and
crossed the creek on the ice, testing each step, going toward the sound.
He found him a quarter mile downstream, where the creek bent around a
shoulder of pine and the bank shelved down to a gravel bar. The man was on
the ground at the edge of the willows with his back against a boulder, and the
first thing Elias saw was the blood — not a great deal of it, but spread wide
in the snow where he had fought, kicked and dragged and fought again, so
that the whole place looked like the site of a small war. The second thing he
saw was the knife. It came up as he came around the boulder, steady despite
everything, a long hunting blade held by a man who had clearly decided that
whatever came out of the trees would have to finish its work at arm's length.
8
The third thing he saw was the trap.
It was a bear trap, the largest pattern made, a Newhouse number six or
something near it, with jaws like the rim of a wagon wheel and springs that
took two men to set with levers. It had him by the lower leg, a hand's breadth
above the ankle, and the teeth had gone through hide and wool and into the
meat, and the chain — stout chain, new chain — ran from the trap to a pine
root at the bank's edge and was padlocked there with a new lock. Elias knew
traps the way a preacher knows scripture, and he knew this one's lineage in a
glance. It was not his. He owned nothing like it and would not have set it if
he had. It was not Apache-made; the Apache did not set steel for bears on