Alice's Arc

Chapter 1 of 20

Alice was three weeks into mapping the Hollow Path when Biscuit's ears went flat and he sat down hard on the moss. She stopped mid-step. Her walking stick tipped forward, and the ball of light on its top swung across the ferns. Biscuit was sixteen months old, a golden retriever she was training to be the best tracker the woodland realm had ever seen. He had never been wrong before her. She lowered her pack and crouched beside him. "Show me," she whispered. He pointed his nose at a bent sapling six feet ahead. Alice lifted her light. A wire noose hung open at dog-height, tied off to the sapling with a slipknot. Two feet past it, half-buried under leaves, she found a second snare. Then a third. A trapper had strung a line of them across her practice ground. She sat down beside Biscuit and made herself think. If Biscuit had run ahead the way he used to, the wire would have caught his throat. She pulled a folded map from her satchel and marked each snare with a pencil dot. A bird landed on the sapling above the first noose, red-headed with blue wings and a white breast. It watched her work and did not fly. Alice took that as permission. She cut every snare with the small knife from her belt. She coiled the wire and stuffed it into her pack so no other animal would find it. Then she stacked three flat stones at the trailhead as a marker for the trapper, and tucked a note under the top stone: These woods are worked. Set your line elsewhere. On the walk back, a raccoon in a blue-green shirt watched them from a stump, holding half an apple in both paws. Biscuit did not lunge. He looked at Alice first, waited for her nod, then passed the stump at a steady heel. Alice felt the change in him land in her chest. He had chosen her signal over his own hunger. She knelt and pressed her forehead to his. The practice ground was no longer safe, and she would have to find new country tomorrow. But the dog she was building was already better than the one she had brought in this morning.