just above the ankle. Her leg below the knee was a mess of blood and torn
buckskin. She had a stick in one hand and had evidently been trying to pry
the jaws apart, and she looked up at him with eyes that held no fear at all,
which frightened him more than fear would have.
"Don't," she said, in English, before he could speak. "Don't you dare feel
4
sorry for me. Get this thing off."
She was young โ mid-twenties, maybe โ dark hair pulled back in a single
braid gone half loose, her face streaked with dust and sweat. A beaded band
crossed her forehead. There was blood on her hands from where she'd fought
the trap. What struck him, standing there with his rifle suddenly useless in
his grip, was not her pain but her fury. She was furious the way a cornered
mountain lion is furious: not panicked, not pleading, simply and completely
enraged at the indignity of it.
"I'm going to set the rifle down," Silas said. "Then I'm going to help you. All
right?"
"Talk less. Pry more."
He leaned the rifle against a rock where she could see it and knelt by the trap.
It was a big one โ a number four, meant for wolves or cougar โ and the
springs were set hard. The chain had a drag iron on it, the kind a trapper uses
to slow an animal without anchoring it fully. Whoever set this had expected
something to fight.
He studied the set the way he'd once studied a bad bridge timber โ looking
for the logic in it. The trap sat dead center on the foot trail, the chain run out
to the juniper and wrapped twice around the bole. Pan tension filed light; it
would have fired under a child's weight. No scent lure, no bait. It wasn't
placed to catch something passing by chance. It was placed to catch someone
walking home.
"How long?" he asked.
"Since a little after dawn," she said through her teeth. "I tried the stick. I tried
the rock. I was working on the chain when you came."
5
Her voice was steady, but her hands were shaking, and there was blood under
her nails from clawing at the juniper bark. He did the arithmetic without
meaning to: hours, alone, in a steel trap, with the sun climbing. And she'd
spent it cursing in two languages instead of screaming. He felt something in
his chest shift โ respect, or the beginning of it, arriving uninvited.
"I'm Silas," he said, working his hands under the spring levers. "Silas Wren."
"Saya."
"Hold still when Iโ"
"I know how a trap works."
He got the levers down with his full weight and a pry bar from his saddlebag,
and the jaws gaped, and she pulled her leg free in one motion and then made
a sound โ not a scream, something smaller and worse, a sound punched out
of her โ and went white to the lips and toppled sideways into the dust.
Silas caught her before her head hit a rock. She was out cold. Her pulse beat
fast and thready under his thumb. He looked at the leg and swore softly,
because it was bad โ the jaws had crushed and torn, and it had been hours,
by the look of the dried blood, and the nearest doctor was in Juniper Flats, a
day's ride, and she would never survive a day's ride like this.
He did the only thing he could think of. He built a travois out of two juniper
poles and his bedroll, loaded her onto it as gently as eight years of doctoring
his own stock had taught him, and led Slate at a walk toward the one shelter
he knew within reach โ a rocky overhang off the canyon floor, dry,
defensible, half a mile back the way he'd come.
She woke once on the trail, eyes unfocused, and said something in her own
language, and then was gone again.
6
The trail back was half a mile of rock and dry wash, and Silas walked it the
way he'd learned to walk behind a mule team โ steady, no wasted motion,
eyes reading the ground three steps ahead. Slate followed on a loose rein,
placing his big feet with a care that always surprised people who thought of
him as just a lot of horse. The travois poles bumped and swayed over the
uneven ground. Twice Saya cried out in her sleep, a sharp bitten-off sound,
and twice Silas stopped and put his hand on her shoulder until she settled, the
way he'd once settled a foundered mare by just standing beside her and being
the calmest thing in the vicinity.
He found himself talking to her as he walked, the way he'd talked to the
mules on long freight runs. "Easy now. Almost there. You're doing fine." It
embarrassed him a little, and he kept doing it anyway.
The overhang was where he remembered it โ a scoop out of the canyon's
south wall, twenty feet deep, the floor sandy and dry, a blackened patch near
the back where other travelers had built fires before him. Good drainage
above it; no rockfall scars. He'd sheltered there himself once, caught out by a
blue norther three winters back, and he'd left a small cairn of stones by the
mouth without quite knowing why. It was still there.
He got her off the travois and onto his bedroll, built the fire up slowly so the
smoke would thin before it cleared the rim, and then sat down hard on a rock
and realized his hands were shaking again โ not from the work this time,
but from the simple arithmetic of it: a woman, a trap set for a person, riders
in the canyon. None of it was his business. All of it was, now.
The overhang was deep enough to keep off the wind and shallow enough to