and loud, the trails dissolving and re-forming, the first green showing in the
protected places along the water where the sun got in early. And on a
morning when the air had softened enough that a man could ride without his
coat buttoned to the throat, Sekan came to the agency yard leading his own
horse, with Elias's saddle over his arm, which he had taken from the tack
room without asking, the way a man does when the asking has long since
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been settled.
"Ride with me," Sekan said. "There is a thing in the pines I want finished
before the ground goes soft all the way. You know the place."
Elias knew the place. He had known it from the moment Sekan appeared
with the saddle, the way a man knows which tooth aches when the cold water
hits it. He saddled Juniper and said nothing, and they rode out of the agency
in the early light, up into the Mogollons, through the ponderosa country
where the snow still lay in the shaded places but had gone mealy and rotten
in the sun, giving under the horses' feet with a sound like tearing cloth.
The pine stood where it had stood, at the edge of the clearing above the
creek, a great scarred tree with its lower branches broken from some old
storm. Elias's eye, unbidden, professional as a wound, read the ground as
they came down into the clearing, and found nothing to read. Fourteen
months of weather had taken the sign. The snow that remained lay smooth
and undisturbed, and the creek below ran half open, black water sliding
between shelves of ice that would be gone by the week's end.
The trap hung from the pine's lowest sound branch, where Marsh's patrol had
left it in December, chained up out of the reach of animals, with the chain's
other end made fast around the trunk. It had rusted over the winter into a
thing the color of old blood, its jaws shut on nothing, its springs cocked and
holding their terrible patience, waiting with the mindlessness of iron for a
foot that would never come. A trap does not know when the war is over. It
was the same trap, and Elias stood under it with his hand on Juniper's rein
and felt four months go through him like weather through a canyon, all of it,
the metal sound in the frozen silence, and a man in the snow with a knife in
his hand and his leg in the iron, telling him to go, telling him he should not
have stopped, and Elias's own voice answering out of the oldest and worst
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knowledge he owned.
Sekan had dismounted without hurry. He stuck his cane upright in the snow
beside the pine, where it stood by itself like a thin planted thing, and he
stepped under the branch on his ruined leg and reached up with both hands
and took the trap's weight off the chain, and held it, and looked at Elias
across the rusted iron.
"Together," he said. "It took one man to set it and it will take two to finish it.
That seems right to me. Take the other spring."
They lowered it between them to the snow, Elias's hands and Sekan's hands
on the cold iron, the trap heavy as a plowshare, heavy as the whole year it
had made. To open a set trap a man must press the springs down against their
strength and hold the jaws while the strength is beaten, and it is work meant
for levers and young backs, and they did it the slow way, boot and hand and
knee, Sekan's bad leg braced against the pine's root, Elias's shoulder against
the frame, the iron fighting them with the stored will of the winter, until the
first spring gave with a shriek of rust and the jaw sagged, and then the
second, and the trap lay open in the snow, sprung and empty and harmless,
its teeth spread flat like a hand unclenched at last. They left it so, chained to
the pine, open to the weather, a marker with its mouth wide and nothing in it,
for whoever came that way in whatever year to read as best they could.
Sekan stood looking down at it, breathing hard from the work, his weight on
the cane again. "That day in the snow," he said, "I told you you should not
have stopped."
"You did," Elias said.
"I was wrong about one thing that winter. That was it."
They mounted in the clearing and rode down out of the pines side by side,
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the horses picking through the softening snow at a walk, neither man ahead
of the other, the thaw running in every draw below them and the whole high
country loosening, drip and slide and the first smell of wet earth coming up
through the last of the winter. The snow would go, as it went every year, off
the trails and out of the shadowed places, down the creeks to the valleys, and
it would take with it every track either of them had ever made in it, the
trapper's and the hunter's, the column's and the child's, all of it carried off in
the melt and none of it recoverable. But the snow would remember all of it,
the way the country remembers everything that has been done on it, keeping
its own counsel and its own record. And so, now, would he. And that was no
longer a punishment.
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