The coastal road began at sea level, and ran past the docks, forming the eastern border of Vena Cava proper. You could take it south-ways all the way to the corner of the continent, Amity had been told: eventually, if you followed long enough. Shrubs and long-grasses, the type that could survive ocean spray, flanked the roadside as it followed the beach, but thinned to stony dirt as the elevation rose. The road climbed the beach as it became a ridge, and followed the ridge until it became a cliffside. As it did, the fallow earth grew richer, and berry bushes mingled with spindly trees alongside the path. Before long, a lush canopy closed in above Amity, keeping the heat of the day off her head.
She knew the way well enough. She knew the little post that told her when to turn off the road, and the half-cleared path that led towards Alvin’s door. She’d been out maybe a half-dozen times for reports of strange catches - canny foxes and the like. The sort of thing Victor liked to take apart. Alvin knew her well enough, too. He’d staked in a wind chime in about twenty-five feet from his door, after a few startling encounters. Amity punched the thing as she passed it by.
“‘S that you?” came a hollered response from within.
The cabin rattled as Alvin exited bed and opened the door in one motion. A cat brushed past Amity’s leg as the door swung inward, revealing the trapper in all the glory of his mid-day torpor. He was all red in the face, presumably from drinking, and his eyes were bloodshot from some combination of bad habits - alcohol and meat, she presumed. His eyes had more angularity than was healthy, for someone his age, though he’d done a good job making himself look older. Victor looked older when drunk and unshaven, too.
The trapper scowled at her, leaning on the doorframe to take the weight off of his injured leg. He loomed in to expect her, and the booze on his breath soaked through her bandana.
“‘Course it’s you. And your arm’s broke. You’re out here like that? You’re no better than me. Gonna get killed, you little fool. ”
Amity’s brow lowered, and she let her head roll to the side, just far enough to be reminded that it was sore. “I don’t need to run on it, do I?”
You might. Got no fuckin’ sense in your head, that’s why you’re green. You got one hand for this? You gonna reset my traps with that?”
“Could do,” she muttered. “I can try.” What she wanted to say was ‘Of course, I’m a Barber!’, but she had no firm image of what such a trap even looked like, which made her feel plenty ‘green’. Unconsciously, she raised her hand to clutch her necklace- ring through her top.
After a moment of processing, Alvin swore with passion by way of reply. For a moment, he turned back into his cabin, as if he were searching for something within. He found his words, if nothing else, and turned to face her once more.
“Fuck. God. Okay, smiley. I’ll get one of the tanners’ boys to do it, next one who comes by. Here’s what you do: take the old trail out past the back, there, til it curls back onto the road. I’ve got red ties high on trees near each trap. There’s twelve in total. Don’t try skinning with one hand, either. You’ll ruin the pelts. Can you carry twelve on one arm?”
“I got a sack.” Amity didn’t mention the piss- it’d wash out. The tension in Alvin’s face loosened and pulled downwards, as if taken by gravity. He looked beaten, more so than he had when she arrived. Displeased, as if the question were meant to catch her unprepared once again. But the things could only be ten pounds or so, at the most. She could do it.
“If any’re rotten, just… Burn ‘em, or whatever you do. Summer pelts sell for shit anyhow. ”
“Okay,” Amity said. “Need your ankle looked at?”
Alvin grunted, screwing up his face a moment before he replied. “I twisted it,” he said. “It’ll be fine, it’s better’n it was yesterday.”
“Get a tight wra’ on it. A ‘andage. Snug. And kee’ it ele’ated. Like… Like this.”
Amity kipped up her own leg, propping it against the cabin’s side. Alvin looked at her like she had sprouted a second head, his frustration fading into something entirely more bewildered.
“Like, lie down, and stick so’nthing under it,” Amity continued. “ And don’t drink as it heals. Not a lot.”
“If I do all that, will you get my traps before they go bad?”
Amity nodded, Alvin sighed, and the door shut between them. “You want me to drink less, you hurry the fuck back! I’ll pour you cups from what’s left, if you’re fast enough there’s aught to have.”
Amity blinked at the door, then nodded at it. She could hear the cat begin scratching at it as she turned away. It was hard to tell if Alvin liked her or not, but he wasn’t afraid of her, and that made her like him plenty.
The trail was easy to find but difficult to follow. Summer growth had closed in on the poorly-trod and never-cleared path. She found herself using her cast to push through bushes and branches, holding those in most danger of snapping to her eyes with her hand. It was the second day of work in a row she’d wished she had a sword close at hand. She had the damn ring now, didn’t she? It seemed a reasonable ask, even just to bushwhack.
The first red tie marked a metal-jaw trap that had been staked to the ground through the end of its chain. It was snapped shut, but empty, safe for a tuft of fur caught in the teeth. Amity examined the mechanism for a few moments, placed her hand on the top, and tried, with little success, to pry it apart by splaying her fingers. After another minute of inspection, she managed to loosen it by standing with her weight on the ‘pedals’ to the side of the jaws, but only so far as to clack the teeth against one another. It quickly became clear that, indeed, she wouldn’t be able to reset it. Her weight wasn’t enough to fully release the mechanism, and even if she could grow a hundred pounds heavier, she wouldn’t have the leverage to pry it open.
The second marked a dead fox. Flies had set on the corpse, and they’d eaten holes into where it’d been caught at the ankle. She put as much weight on the trap as she could and pulled the fox free, prompting a few lingering insects to flee the orifices of its face. Trapping, Amity decided, was a horrible job. The thing felt light in her bag.
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The third marked trap was empty, but the fourth had caught a hare. The thing had a few bugs buzzing near its head, and it twitched, once, as Amity drew near, letting out a tiny sound. She hesitated before she reached down to touch it,but it didn’t move again. This, she supposed, was about as fine as a pelt could be found in that. There was no joy in that for her, but it meant a job better done. Alvin, she hoped, would be pleased.
The fifth was disgusting. Some bigger animal had gotten to the stuck raccoon, and nature had mostly taken what was left. There was hardly anything left to burn, and what was left, Amity didn’t want to touch. The thing was an omnivore, so it was arguably a waste of fire, anyway. She nudged the mess with the toe of her boot until the majority tore free from the trap, then kicked it into the bushes nearby. The bugs could have it, she figured - the ankle bone still stuck in the trap would come out easily enough.
The sixth trap was empty, though it took some time to find. The branch its red marker had been tied to had come down, presumably in the recent storms, and the ribbon had blown into a nearby shrub. Amity stepped on one of the thing’s jaws as she searched for it in the overgrowth, and the thing flipped over. A reflexive kip back from the object slid her boot free as the overturned trap snapped shut upside-down, taking a bite out of the earth. Her heart rate elevated, Amity began seriously considering the drink Alvin had offered.
She’d hardly calmed down by the time she came across the seventh. It was hard to miss- she saw the fiery coloration of the trapped fox before the red of the marker itself. The fox saw her, too. Although it had been motionless at first, the sound of her made it yelp and yip and scramble in the dirt. Doing so twisted its leg in the trap, which elicited more cries and frantic clawing. Likely, that was how the thing had exhausted itself to begin with: desperate, useless complaints, and desperate, useless attempts to escape. She could see where blood soaked through the fur of its leg.
It had begun making a great deal of sense why the traps needed to be checked. The animals died slowly and badly, if left alone. Amity’s hand went to the knife on her belt as she approached the frantic thing. Alvin needed the pelt, and the fox had already spent so much energy that its chances of survival were slim. The thing made an awful, screaming noise as she lowered her blade.
The knife slid deep between the jaws of the trap. Amity twisted it gently, trying not to damage the already ruined blade more than necessary, but felt a new roll building on its edge. The fox’s ankle slid a little ways out with its kicking, then a little ways more as Amity shifted her weight onto the trap’s pedals. The creature became entirely silent, and fled: slower than it might’ve uninjured, but with plenty of haste. It looked back at her, for a half-second, then entirely disappeared into the brush.
The fox had been wounded by filthy metal. It was hard to say if she’d done the thing a favor, but Amity figured she’d have felt worse for not indulging the selfish desire to free it. It was a different matter to put down something dangerous. She was a barber, not a trapper, and she was glad for it. She’d make it up to Alvin, somehow, she figured.
The forest felt especially dense on her way to the eighth trap. The growth was dense enough to force her off the path entirely, so as to loop around an impenetrable section of brush. She’d accrued numerous little cuts on her unbroken arm from fording so many branches on the ‘trail’, in so far as there was a trail. Now that the pretense of walking on one had been temporarily abandoned, she took extra care not to acquire any more, paying careful attention to the way she gripped the branches to pass under, and even more attention to the way she released them. It was as Amity stepped through one of these temporary arches that she tripped.
Something beneath her leg clattered as she fell forward, and her efforts to catch herself entangled her firmly in the brush. One branch cut near her eye, and she swore desperately as she kicked herself out. At the least, she avoided falling on her cast, but her arm hurt anyway, as did some of her older cuts. She’d protected the dead animals, at least. As she struggled to untangle herself from the shrubbery, she glared down at the thing that had tripped her.
Someone had piled a series of stones perhaps a foot tall, enough years ago that they’d been covered mostly in moss. It had been a little cairn, maybe - something to mark the trail, perhaps, before the forest had set about reclaiming the path and its markers alike. Closer inspection from nearer to the ground revealed perhaps a few more, nearby, off further northwest. Above them, visible through a gap in the canopy, was the eighth little red marker.
Progress towards it was cautious, and Amity paid special care to her footing. She glanced at the ground before every step, and counted a few more cairn-piles, some toppled, but no trap. She stood directly beneath the ribbon and looked straight up at it, just to check. It was still red, and she was still under it. But there was no trap.
After a few minutes of searching, and a few pokes from the shrubs she searched beneath, Amity was ready to move on. But she’d already given up on the one pelt, and the guilt from doing so compelled serious effort towards the others. But, undeniably, the damn thing was gone.
As she inspected the forest floor, however, she found a place that it had been. A shallow, triangular divot in the earth: one with a broken twig in the center. Trailing nearby it was a subtle disturbance in the forest floor. A shifting of twigs, leaves, and the earth alongside a length impression. And then, a few feet along the trail, another divot. The trap had caught something large enough to walk with it. She couldn’t make out the other footprints, but after spotting one, the missing chunks of ground were easy enough to follow.
Amity’s hand traveled to the hilt of her knife as she crept from hole to hole. There was no tip on the thing, still. And she’d damaged the blade, at least a little, prising open metal jaws. And her arm was broken, and it was hot as all get-out. There were other excuses besides, she was sure. But anything canny, or worse, would be long gone, she imagined. Hoped, rather. Amity resolved to follow the divots just a little ways longer, to make sure the trap was irrecoverable. It was her job, and before that, it was Alvin’s. She prepared herself mentally to run.
More mossy cairns littered the forest floor as Amity shoved her way through thicker and thicker brush. There was no sign of a great creature’s passing, at the least. Nothing like Bella could’ve made it this way without obliterating local flora, but the bushes, much like the cairns, seemed undisturbed. Undisturbed until she’d been through them, at least. Between the divots, the cairns, and her own trail-blazing path of destruction, Amity felt confident she could find her way back.
The trail gave way to a sudden, fifteen-foot drop in elevation. The incline was sheer dirt, save for a few unhealthy saplings and exposed bits of stone. A trio of impacts stood out on the soil of the bluff, where gravity and the eighty-degree slope had presumably disagreed with her quarry. At nearly eye level with her, perhaps thirty feet from the fall, rose a lengthy crag of dark gray stone. Slabs of the stuff created a natural clearing where only a few scraggly plants grew in crevices. A stone ‘floor’ extended from the rocky ridge to just beneath the ledge Amity found herself atop. The far end of the stone extended proudly, forming a natural shelf.
Amity winced as she envisioned the trajectory the creature had taken down. Even from atop the ledge, she could see a chunk of stone that had been chipped away, presumably by the trap. Amity lowered herself into an easy slide and drew nearer the point of impact. The powdered rock surrounding the break was speckled red with blood. And though the smaller chips in the stone the dragging trap may’ve left were too well-disguised by natural wear for her to see, some fresh wound from the fall had left a trail of blood, spaced out by yards. Amity rubbed her fingers against a splotch, and some came away wet on her skin.
Even in the heat and the humidity, it could only have been spilled about an hour ago. Amity slowed her breathing and lowered herself as she advanced, holding her cast-arm out as a baying shield. Her footfalls fell on the stone heavier than she preferred, and tension crept into her jaw. And, as she followed the trail around to the jutting fore of the ridge, she caught sight of it: a trailing chain, half-wrapped around the entrance to some hollow beneath it.