Brianna Chance's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Brianna Chance knelt at the base of a briar and tied a strip of red cloth to the thorns. It was her fourth marker that morning. She was mapping a path through the Sycamorefall woods that no hunter would find useful, a green tunnel wide enough for a fox, narrow enough to snag a snare. She wanted a garden the deer could cross without dying, where a rabbit could sleep under bramble instead of hanging from a hook. She had been planning it since the last frost. The trouble was the man watching her from the ridge. He wore a canvas coat and carried a wire coil at his belt, and he had followed her for three days now, keeping just far enough back that she could pretend not to notice. If he understood what she was building, he would lay steel along every gap she left open. So she gave him something else to see. She walked openly to a clearing near the creek, dropped her satchel, and pretended to set stakes for a deer blind. She hammered loud. She measured wrong on purpose. After an hour she left the stakes and doubled back through the brush to her real work. Halfway there she froze. A cottontail sat on the trail she had been marking, ears the color of wet ash, nose ticking at the air. Behind it, a fresh boot print pressed into the mud, toe pointed at her briar tunnel. The hunter had already come through. Brianna crouched and looked past the rabbit. No wire yet. No trigger stick. He had scouted, not set. She gathered every red marker she could reach and stuffed them in her coat. Then she took a burnt stick from an old fire ring and drew a new false trail across the clearing floor, thick and obvious, leading toward the deer blind she did not want. The cottontail watched her work and did not run. When she stood, her hands were black and her map was gone from the woods and folded into her head, where no boot could follow. She had bought herself one day, maybe two, before he came back with his wire and found the wrong path waiting for him.