Alice's Arc

Chapter 5 of 20

Alice woke before dawn and packed a scent rag from the ranger's map into a sealed tin. She wanted a clean first session on the ridge before the sun cleared the pines. Biscuit trotted ahead on the path, ears loose, tail level. She set three drag lines through the brush above her old practice ground, then hid the tin at the end of the longest one. She was clipping his lead when she heard boots on the scree behind her. The trapper stepped out from between two cedars. He was older than she had guessed, heavy in the shoulders, with a coil of wire on his belt and both hands empty. He stopped ten feet off and looked at Biscuit first, then at her. "You brought a ranger onto my line," he said. Alice kept her hand on Biscuit's collar. The dog's ears stayed up. That steadied her more than the light on her stick. She said she had done what she told him she would do in the note. The trapper nodded once, like he was checking a box. "I moved the line," he said. "Two ridges east. Legal ground." He looked at the drag rope in her hand. "You're training him wrong. Open ridge, wind switches every ten minutes. He'll false-alert all morning and learn to guess." She didn't answer. A small bird with a red head and blue wings dropped onto a branch between them, watched, and lifted off. The trapper watched it go. "There's a park in town," he said. "Flat grass, fence on three sides, steady wind off the lake. I run my nephew's beagle there. I'll be there Saturday at six. Bring the dog. I'll set the drags. You call him." Alice asked why. "Because you wrote a real note," he said. "And because a ranger on my ground costs me less than a bad dog on this ridge costs you." He turned and walked back into the cedars before she answered. Biscuit stood up on his own. Alice let out the breath she had been holding and coiled the drag rope. On the way down she thought it through. The park meant open ground, honest wind, and four weeks that might actually be enough. It also meant standing beside a man who set dog-height nooses and calling that a lesson. She stopped at the trailhead and wrote Saturday, six, town park on the back of her hand. A raccoon in a blue-green shirt watched her from the lodge bins across the road, chewing something it had stolen. Alice clipped Biscuit's lead and started home to pack a fresh tin.