and got it between steel and torn flesh as the leg came free — and Sekan did
pull it free himself, dragging backward with both arms, the knife clenched in
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his fist forgotten, hauling his ruined leg out of the teeth with a cry he did not
bother to cut off this time. The trap snapped shut on empty air with a clang
that rang off the boulders and sent a raven up out of the pines, complaining.
The leg was bad. Elias had seen worse on battlefields he did not think about,
and he had seen men lose legs that looked better. The teeth had torn the calf
to the bone in two places and the ankle was swelling black and the whole
limb had been squeezed half the morning like a tourniquet that would not
quit. He worked fast and plain: the leg straightened and splinted with two
lengths of willow cut green and padded with moss and wool; the wounds
packed with clean cloth torn from his own shirt tail and bound tight enough
to matter; snow water from his canteen, first, to wash, because a wound
washed cold stayed cleaner than a wound washed never. Sekan endured it the
way he had endured the trap, with his jaw set and his eyes open, watching
Elias's hands the entire time, and only once, when the splint was drawn snug,
did he speak.
"You have done this work before," he said. It was not a question.
"I've done most work before," Elias said. "That's the trouble with living
long."
"That is not an answer."
"No," Elias said. "It isn't." And he tied off the binding and sat back on his
heels and looked at the sky, which had gone the flat iron gray of early
afternoon with weather behind it, and at the far bank, and at the problem of a
man who could not walk, in country that would kill them both by nightfall if
he got it wrong.
He built the drag out of two pine saplings, cut with the hatchet and lashed
crosswise with his spare chain and strips of the waxed canvas, and spread his
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own bedroll over the frame, and got Sekan onto it with a labor that left both
of them shaking — Sekan from pain, Elias from the memory of the man's
weight, which was the weight of a person and not a carcass and so belonged
to a different accounting altogether. He chose the far end of the chain and
carried the trap itself out of the willows and sank it, springs and all, in the
black middle of the creek under the ice-skin, where the current took it down
out of sight. He could not have said why he did that, or rather he could have
and did not want to: a trap was evidence, and a man who had spent three
years being no one had no business carrying evidence. But a trap left set on
that bank would catch again — a horse, a child, the next hunter who came
down to the water in the dusk — and Elias found that his hands had decided
the matter before his mind had finished arguing it.
Ash took the sledge traces with the offended dignity of a horse asked to do a
mule's work, but she took them, and Elias led her up out of the creek bottom
and onto the high trail, walking at her head, one hand on the lead rope and
one walking the saplings over the worst of the rocks, while Sekan lay lashed
and silent on the drag behind, his Henry rifle recovered and lying beside him
under the blanket. Three miles. It took the rest of the daylight. Twice Elias
stopped and went back and checked the binding and found the cloth
darkening and changed his pressure on it, and once Sekan caught his sleeve
as he straightened up, with a grip like the trap itself, and said, "Leave the leg
alone. Save your strength. If it takes the leg it takes it — I have seen men live
so," and Elias said, "I've seen them too. I'd rather not add you to the
collection," and the grip loosened and they went on.
At the second stop, where the trail leveled along the ridge and the timber
thinned enough to show the whole white valley below, Sekan stirred on the
drag and spoke with his eyes still shut, as if the talking cost less that way.
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"What are you, in this country?"
"A trapper."
"A trapper who cuts game out of traps." The eyes opened a slit. "That is a
poor living, I think. You will starve at it."
"I've eaten regular for three years," Elias said. "You'd be surprised what a
man can live on when his appetites are modest."
"I am surprised now," Sekan said. "That is the fever, perhaps." But he said it
with the ghost of humor from before, and then the trail dropped and the drag
lurched over a root and the humor went out of his face all at once and did not
come back, and Elias walked the saplings over the root with his hands and
said nothing, because there was nothing in his store of sayings that fit a man
being carried home through the snow on a frame of saplings with his leg torn
open, and in his experience the only honest response to such a moment was
to keep the drag level and go on.