Beauregard Ashworth III's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

By dawn the cage had shifted a full foot through the mud. Beauregard stood over it with his knives and knew the truth. The old iron would not hold the red beast another night. One eye, three legs, and it had already bent two bars wide enough to fit an arm. If it broke loose, his bait was gone. If it died pinned in that muck, his bait was gone. He needed the thing alive, whole, and stuck fast. He went under his shack and dragged out what he had. A drop log from an old trap. Coils of cable. A stack of rusted iron bars he had pulled from a wrecked pen years back. He worked all morning in the heat. He drove the bars deep around the cage in a ring, each one hammered past the mud into the hard clay below. He lashed them together with cable, then ran the drop log across the top as a lid weight. A cage inside a cage. The red beast watched him the whole time. It did not scream now. It pressed its single eye to a gap and followed his hands. When Beauregard leaned close to tie the last knot, it lunged. Bars rang. The new ring held. A claw raked his forearm and opened a thin red line. He laughed and did not pull back. "Not you," he told it. "You I keep." He tested the pen at dusk. He shook every bar. He hung his weight from the drop log. Nothing gave. The red beast threw itself sideways, favoring the strong legs, and the whole ring shuddered but stayed rooted in the clay. Beauregard felt his chest loosen for the first time in three days. The bait was secure. His nemesis would come for its kin, and the pen would still be standing when it did. Then the water changed. Across the flooded ground, past the cypress, something big set the surface rolling. Not the frogs. Not the wind. A slow wake pushed toward the shack, low and heavy. The red beast in the pen went still, then began to whine, high and frightened, backing against the far bars. Beauregard climbed halfway up his ladder and turned to look. He could not see it yet. But he knew the weight of that wake. He had felt it dragging him under as a boy. He had counted its marks on his own skin forty-seven times. His trap had worked too well. He had wanted his enemy to come. Now, with the pen finished and the bait screaming, it was already coming, and he had not yet loaded a single trap of his own. He drew the machete and let the ladder fall. "All right," he said. "You heard your boy."