Alice's Arc

Chapter 2 of 20

The next morning Alice came back to the trailhead to collect her stone marker and scout new country. The three flat rocks were still stacked, but the note was gone. A boot print pressed the moss beside them, larger than her own and fresh. Biscuit's ears went flat. He sat down hard. Alice froze with her stick raised, the ball of light pale in the daylight. Somewhere uphill, a branch snapped once and stopped. She understood then that the trapper had read her note and stayed. He was watching to see who had cut his line. Alice did not run. Running would teach Biscuit the wrong lesson, and it would show the man her back. She knelt, opened her satchel, and took out her map. On a blank corner she wrote a second note in pencil: I am sixteen. My father knows this ridge. I have marked every snare on a map and left a copy at home. Set your line elsewhere or the ranger reads the map on Friday. She weighted it under the top stone where the first note had been. Then she waited, one hand on Biscuit's collar, until the small red-headed bird with blue wings and a white breast dropped onto the sapling above her. It watched the slope where the branch had snapped. It did not fly. Alice took that as her second permission. "Up," she whispered. Biscuit stood on his own. She stood with him and walked the ridge line away from the snare ground at a steady heel, not looking back. Half a mile on, Biscuit's ears lifted and his tail swung. Whatever had been behind them was no longer following. Alice let out the breath she had been holding since the boot print. She had traded silence for a threat the man could measure, and he had chosen to fall back. But the note named her age and her father, and she had promised a ranger she had not yet spoken to. By Friday she would have to make that promise true.