36. Snares
Snares
He rode up to the Copper Kettle the next morning. Sasha was waiting at the bar when he came in, and Kain nodded to her.
"Ready for the next part of it?" Sasha asked.
"I think so." He paused. "You don't have to come if you'd rather not."
"I don't mind. Matthew's with Carol already, and I've got Oren minding the place." She tipped her head toward the back. "No food today, but he can pour a drink without burning the building down."
Oren came out of the back room and crossed his arms at her. Kain almost smiled. "If that's settled, then. Let's go."
Sasha went down to the stable for her horse while Kain mounted up on Roan. Before long she had come around, and the two of them rode out across the hills toward the ridge.
Kain knew. Sasha knew it because she had grown up in these hills. As they came up on the great dead tree she began to talk.
"That tree died when I was small," she said. "Lightning took it, in a big storm that came through. I was out here the day after, and I remember standing there wondering what a person would look like, hit the same way."
"Nothing good," Kain said.
"No, but would the skin split the way the bark did?" She shrugged. "Anyway. Once it dried out hard like this it made a fine landmark, so my father and I went on using it."
"He came out here a good deal, then," Kain said.
"Every chance he got. He loved these hills near as much as the tavern." Sasha looked off through the trees. "I think he'd have been a farmer, if the world had let him. But we had the Kettle, and it kept us fed, so that was that."
They reached the dead tree and swung down.
While they tied the horses and set out food and water, Kain took down several lengths of cable lashed to Roan's side.
They were another loan from Sam, the heaviest snare-line he stocked, sold as proof against a bear or anything worse.
Kain doubted even that would hold a gryphon, but it was what Sam had, so it would have to serve.
"How many snares?" Sasha asked.
"Three." Kain weighed a coil in his hand. "I'm not trying to catch it like a rabbit and come back to check the line. Even this cable, it'll break. I just need something to lure it through, something to slow it or hold it the moment I need to put a shaft in it."
"Then you want them on the bigger game trails. Not so big a deer sets them off, but big enough the thing might come through."
"That's it." Kain shouldered the rest of the cable. "I've got some idea of it, but I'd rather you tell me exactly what I'm after."
"Come on, then." She started off. "Let's see what we turn up."
They started up through the trees, climbing the slope at an easy pace. Somewhere off in the distance the wind moved, and they both went still. The gryphon, or only the wind. There was no telling, and after a moment they went on.
Kain kept half an eye on the sky the whole way, wanting to see the thing coming before it ever saw him.
As they went, Sasha pointed off to the right. "That big oak there. See it?"
Kain followed her arm through the trees. "I see it. What about it?"
"My father got himself treed by a bear up that one, years back. Sat up there the best part of a day before it lost interest and wandered off."
"And down there by the creek." She pointed. "That was our fishing hole. It used to pool out wider than it does now. You can still read where, in the banks."
Kain nodded along as they walked, and she pointed out other places as they passed, a spot where she'd learned to set her first snares as a girl, a flat rock where the two of them used to stop and eat.
The whole of it was thick with her memories. Kain listened closer than he meant to. He wondered whether he could walk the city he'd grown up in and find a single thing he knew.
Likely not. The city had always been half torn up, something new always going in where something old had stood. It would be a stranger to him now.
Out here things moved slower. Even a forest, living and growing the whole while, could hold still across the better part of a life.
They came to the foot of the cliffs and climbed up through the pines. Kain pointed out the scrapes raked down the rock face, and Sasha nodded.
"That's something to work with." She held out a hand. "Here. Give me a line."
Kain handed her the first of the snares, and she set to work without a word, her hands moving like they remembered the shape of it on their own. She'd done a great deal of this once.
She laid one end out in a loop across the path, a circle near four feet across.
"Big enough to take a foot, with any luck. Now the far end."
She carried the far end off into the trees, to a larger pine a few feet on, slipped past the needles to the trunk, and made the cable fast to the good solid wood.
"There." She stepped back and gave it a tug. "That'll hold it a moment, anyhow. Where are those stakes?"
「Skill Gained: Trapping F」
Kain passed her the stakes he'd brought, and she set to pinning the cable to the ground, driving them in on either side and crossing them over the top.
"These aren't to hold it once the gryphon's in. It'll tear through them in a blink." She tamped one down with her heel. "They're just to keep the line from jumping while it sits set. Wind or rain, you don't want it shifting on you."
"You've done this a time or two," Kain said.
"Once or twice." She almost grinned. "This is the biggest I've ever set, mind. We tried for a bear, once. It did not go well. Made the thing madder than a wet hornet, and we near got eaten for the trouble. It's funny enough to think on now."
"I've a few stories that end about the same," Kain said.
With the line made fast she stepped out to the middle of the path and finished setting the snare, drawing the tension up between the loop and the tree and pinning it with a few more stakes. When it was done she scattered a handful of dead leaves over the top of it.
"Not that the leaves do much good. A thing like that hunts by its nose more than its eyes. But it makes me feel better, and it might cover the smell of us a little." She brushed off her hands. "Come on."
They moved on with Sasha in the lead, her eyes down on the ground, reading it. She drew out the map she'd sketched on a sheet of butcher paper, the one Kain had marked up after, and struck off north through the trees.
"There's a good spot just up this way. If we come at it through the trees instead of the path, we don't lay our scent down right where it walks."
Kain couldn't argue the sense of it, and he'd set snares for rabbits in his time, but this was another thing entirely. He'd never laid a trap for something that would fight back, and he was glad enough to let Sasha run it.
They walked a while in the quiet before Sasha spoke again. "That bread I brought down last night. That was Carol's doing, you know."
"It was good bread."
"It was." Sasha let a beat go by. "She doesn't bake like that for just anybody."
Kain didn't rise to it, and she let it lie, though the corner of her mouth gave her away.
She had the second snare set without much trouble, and they moved on east, around the north shoulder of the ridge. They walked a good while before they came to a cluster of boulders with a narrow path running between them, the rock scored down both sides with gryphon claws.
"Now this," Sasha said, crouching to string the line, "this is a proper choke point."
"That so," Kain said.
"It is." She hooked one end to the nearest tree, a big hackberry, easy as anything. "It's also where Mark kissed me the first time."
"All the way out here." Kain watched her work. "I don't believe you."
"Believe what you like. We went for a walk."
"He was never gone from the camp more than a few hours."
"In the daylight, anyway." She turned and winked at him.
Kain didn't answer. For a moment he only looked at her, the woman his brother had loved, the mother of his brother's boy, down in the dirt of these hills with him to help run a snare for a thing that could kill them both. Something sat in the quiet between them, and neither one reached for it.
"All right, all right. I'm having you on." Sasha went back to the line, and the moment let go. "The truth of it is I broke my ankle right here. Chasing a unicorn."
"A unicorn," Kain said.
"Thought it was one, leastways. My mother used to read me a story about one, when I was small, and I was dead certain I'd seen it out here in the trees.
" She drew the loop wide. "I was going to catch it so it'd grant me a wish.
My father found me here after I'd been on the ground the best part of two hours, ankle swelled up like a melon.
Lord, I was furious. He was half out of his mind till he got the story out of me.
Then he just laughed and carried me home. "
Kain crossed his arms and looked at the ground where she'd laid the loop. A girl out here once, chasing a wish on four legs, and her father carrying her home with a broken ankle and a story. Now he was down in the same dirt stringing a wire for a real beast, and the real ones granted nothing.
None of them did, made-up or rare as the white stag the old men still swore was out there somewhere.
The one wish that had ever mattered to him wasn't the kind a creature could hand back.
You didn't catch a wish. You built it, if you got it at all, with your hands and the days you were given, one after the next.
He squared his shoulders and got back to the work.
「Trapping: F → D+ (↑)」
「Source: Three-snare line for B-rank avian, choke-point set, instructed under field conditions」
「Yield: 3 snares confirmed taut; choke-point line on stone-narrowed approach」