their own hunting ground in the winter, and no Apache trapper padlocked a
chain like a man locking a shop. It was a poacher's trap, a hide-crew trap, set
for bear or for whatever the country offered, set deep on land where no white
man had leave to set anything, and left to do its work alone, the way such
men always left their traps — because the trap does not care what it catches,
and neither, in the end, did they.
The man in it was young, twenty-seven or so, broad through the shoulders,
with black hair fallen loose over a face gone the color of old paper under its
weather-brown. A White Mountain hunter, by his dress and his gear: the bow
stave broken where he had fallen on it, the quiver spilled, a fine rifle — a
Henry, well kept — lying out of his reach in the snow where it had been
knocked or thrown. His leg below the trap was swelling against the teeth and
the wool of his legging was black with blood that had frozen and thawed and
frozen again. He had been there hours. By the marks in the snow, by the
half-dug trench his free heel had cut, by the hoarseness of the breath he was
dragging, he had been there most of the morning, working at the springs with
his hands until his hands gave out.
9
"Stay back," the man said, in English roughened by pain. The knife did not
waver. "Stay back, white man."
Elias stopped where he was, in plain sight, and set his rifle down in the snow
with the deliberateness of a man laying a card on a table. Then he unbuckled
his gun belt and laid that down too, and held his hands out at his sides, open,
and spoke in the tongue he had not spoken above a murmur in three years,
the Tonto and White Mountain words coming back like a trail half-snowed
over but still there under the snow.
"I am not the man who set this," he said. "I trap the far side of the creek. My
sets are small. This is not my iron."
The hunter's eyes went to the trap and back, measuring him. Hatred was in
the look, and pain, and under both a hard clear intelligence working the
problem of Elias the way Elias would have worked it. "You speak well," he
said, in English this time, as if to make the contract plain. "White men who
speak well are the worst kind. I know about white men who speak well."
"Then you'll know I'm not lying about the trap. Look at it. Look at the lock.
Your people don't set locks."
"It is a white trap. You are a white man. It is all one thing from where I sit."
"From where you sit," Elias said, "you'll freeze to death by dark with your
leg in it, and the men who set it will come in a day or two and find what's
left, and they'll tell it at the post as an accident, same as they'd tell it about
anyone." He let that sit in the cold between them. "Or I open it. Those are the
choices the day has made. I didn't make either one."
The hunter was silent a long moment. His free hand had come up, without his
seeming to know it, and pressed hard against his own thigh above the trap,
the way a man presses a wound he cannot reach. When he spoke again his
10
voice had dropped, not softer but lower, a man spending from a smaller
purse.
"My name is Sekan," he said. "Of the East Fork. My father is Tolin. If I die
here you will tell no one, and they will find me or not. If I live — " He
stopped, and the knife dipped for the first time, not surrendered, just heavy.
"Open it, then. But know the knife stays in my hand, and if your hands do a
wrong thing, it will not matter that I am dying. I will find the strength for one
more thing."
"I'd expect nothing else," Elias said, and went down on his knees in the
bloodied snow, and set about the ugliest piece of work he had done in years.
A Newhouse six is not opened by strength alone; it is opened by strength
applied in the right order, with the body as the lever, and it fights the whole
way like the animal it was built to hold. Elias got the hatchet's poll under one
spring for purchase and bore down with his chest and shoulder while his
hands walked the jaw back tooth by tooth. The springs were stronger than his
arms. He used his knee. He used his boot heel on the lever bar and felt
something in his back go bright with warning. Twice the jaw gave a fraction
and slammed back and Sekan made a sound that he cut off with his teeth, and
the second time the knife came up hard and Elias said, "Easy. Easy. That's
the iron, not me," and Sekan said, through his teeth, "Then make the iron
understand you," and Elias almost laughed, in the snow, in the blood, with
his shoulder screaming — because it was the first thing anyone had said to
him in three years that he had wanted to answer.
On the third effort he felt the mechanism go over center. The jaws opened a
finger's width, then two. Elias had a folded strip of his own spare shirt ready