The light came into Cañon Seco the way it always did, thin and amber at
first, spilling over the eastern rim and sliding down the far wall in slow bands
until it reached the canyon floor and found Silas Wren already awake and
already moving. He had been up before the light for years. Sleep was
something he did the way a man holds his breath underwater — in short,
necessary spans, and never with any comfort.
He built the fire with last night's coals, set the coffee pot on the grate, and
stood in the doorway of his cabin while it boiled, watching the dun gelding
crop at the sparse grass near the corral. Slate lifted his head when Silas
whistled, ears forward, and Silas nodded at him the way a man nods at the
one creature whose company he has never had to apologize for.
The coffee came up bitter. It was always bitter. Silas had long ago stopped
measuring and drank it black out of a tin cup with a dented rim. On the shelf
above the stove sat one clean cup, porcelain, white with a blue stripe, washed
and set there the week Martha died and never used since. He dusted it in
spring. That was all.
He drank the coffee standing up, the way he did everything in the cabin —
quickly, as if lingering might invite company, even his own. The cabin was
one room and a lean-to, chinked logs, a roof he'd re-shingled three summers
back and needed to do again. Martha's trunk sat at the foot of the bunk,
latched. He hadn't opened it in eight years. He dusted it in spring, same as the
cup.
The porcelain cup caught the morning light through the doorway. White with
a blue stripe. Martha had bought it in Juniper Flats the spring before Lucy
was born, carried it home wrapped in her shawl like it was made of eggshell,
and declared that a house wasn't a house until something in it was too fine for
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everyday. Then she'd used it every single day, because Martha had never
been able to keep a good thing saved. After the flood, Silas had found it on
the cabin's one shelf, unbroken — the water having taken everything else
worth taking and left this one small, useless, perfect thing. He washed it. He
set it down. He had never picked it up again.
He wasn't a hermit by philosophy. He was a hermit by attrition. He ran
fourteen head of cattle on the thin graze at the canyon mouth — his own
brand, a W with a bar through it, registered back when he'd thought the
future was a thing a man could file papers on. He did fence work for the
Barlow place and the Jensens when they asked, took his pay in coin or in
kind, and spent as little of it as possible in Juniper Flats, where people knew
his story and handled him the way you handle a man carrying something
breakable. The Jensens' boy had asked him once, two winters back, if he was
ever going to get married again, with the terrible directness of the young, and
Silas had said, "Son, I'm still married," and the boy had nodded like that
made sense, and Silas had walked home faster than usual.
Slate was waiting at the corral gate, dun coat dusty gold in the early light,
big-boned and calm as a church. Seventeen hands of steady. Silas had bought
him off a retiring stage driver six years ago, and the gelding had never once
surprised him, which was the highest praise Silas had for any living thing.
He rode the fence line that morning because it was Thursday and Thursdays
he rode the fence line, and if there was no particular reason for the schedule
anymore, there was no particular reason to abandon it either. Eight years of
habit had worn a groove in him deeper than any canyon, and he followed it
the way water follows a wash — not out of hope, but out of the shape of the
land.
The country was hard and beautiful in the way of things that ask nothing of a
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man. Red rock rose on both sides of the canyon, banded like old sediment in
a dry riverbed, and the sky above it was a blue so deep it looked poured.
Juniper and piñon dotted the slopes. A hawk turned slow circles over the rim.
Silas checked wire, tightened a staple, spliced a break where an elk had gone
through in the night, and thought about nothing with the practiced discipline
of a man who had spent eight years learning how.
He was coming back along the north side, near the mouth of a side draw he
didn't often ride, when he heard the sound.
It was not an animal's cry. He knew animal cries the way he knew his own
hands. This was a woman's voice, low and furious and steady, cursing in two
languages — one of them his, one of them not — with the rhythmic patience
of someone who has been at it a while and intends to keep at it until
something changes or she dies.
Silas reined up. Slate's ears swiveled. The voice came again from behind a
stand of juniper, and this time Silas caught the metallic clink underneath the
words, and his stomach dropped in a way it hadn't in years.
He dismounted with his rifle in his hand and walked in slow, quiet.
She was caught in a steel leg-hold trap.
It was chained to the bole of a juniper, the chain short, and the trap itself sat
square across a foot trail — a human foot trail, worn narrow between the
rocks, the kind of path no deer and no elk would ever use. The jaws had her