Cassidy Blackwood's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Cassidy knelt beside the dead cow at dawn. The cuts were clean. No blood pooled in the dirt. Something had taken the heart and tongue with the care of a surgeon. Three weeks of this. Her father couldn't walk the fields. Her brother was gone. The sheriff didn't answer. So she would find this thing, and she would kill it. She wiped her hands on her jeans and pulled a battered field guide from her pack. The cover was scuffed, the pages dog-eared from late nights at the kitchen table. She had been working through it animal by animal, ruling out coyotes, mountain cats, even things her grandmother used to whisper about. Nothing matched a bloodless cut. Nothing matched silence. The problem was simple and ugly. She had never seen it. Not a shadow, not a track she trusted. A trap built blind could catch a stray dog, a neighbor's calf, or her own boot. She closed the book and stared at the carcass. Then she saw the path. Crushed ferns led away from the cow in a narrow line. Broken branches at waist height. Whatever walked through here was tall, and heavy, and didn't bother hiding. She followed it as far as the tree line and stopped. The trail kept going. By afternoon she was driving fence posts into the soft ground of the lower pasture. She tied a young steer to a stake in the center. Around it she dug a pit six feet deep and laid branches across the top. She covered the branches with torn ferns from the woodland path, matching what she had seen. A trap shaped to a thing tall enough to break those branches. It was a guess. It was the first guess she had earned. She climbed out, brushed the dirt from her knees, and looked at her work. The steer chewed quietly. The pit waited. Cassidy loaded her rifle and settled into the brush to watch. She still didn't know what was coming. But tonight, for the first time, something would come to her.