Juniper's Arc

Chapter 3 of 7

Juniper walked north for a day and a half before the forest changed. The trees thinned, the moss deepened, and she picked up the hunter's old sign on a fallen log. She was reading the cut on the bark when she heard a sound below her on the slope, a wet dragging through ferns. She froze. The sound was not a man. She followed it down to a smear of red across the moss. The trail ran broken between crushed fronds, dark drops thick on the leaves, then thinner, then thick again where the animal had stopped to rest. At the end of the trail lay a fox the size of a small dog. Its coat was orange and pale blue, its tail shaped like a fan of yellow ferns. Its mouth hung open and the two long fangs there were a clear violet. A wire snare was buried in the meat above its back leg. The wire had cut deep. The fox saw her and did not move. Juniper measured the choice in one breath. The hunter's sign was fresh. If she stopped here, she would lose him by nightfall, and with him the witness the court needed. If she walked past, the fox would bleed out before dusk. She knelt and set down her pack. She carried the fox half a mile to a cabin she had built three summers back for work like this. The walls were bark over log, the porch wide enough to lay an animal flat. She put the fox on the boards and worked the wire loose with pliers. The leg bled hard once the pressure was gone. She pressed a folded cloth on it, then opened a tin from her pack and lifted out a pad of silver web. The strands were stiff and dry. She laid the pad over the wound. The web softened against the blood and pulled tight around the cut, sealing the edges. The bleeding slowed, then stopped. The fox's breathing eased. She gave it water from a bowl, banked a small fire, and sat against the wall to watch its chest rise. By morning the fox could stand. It limped to the door, looked at her once, and slipped into the trees. Juniper washed the porch and packed her tin. She had lost a full day, maybe more. The hunter would be deeper into the range now, and the moon was already past its first quarter. She shouldered her pack and stepped off the porch, headed north again, slower than before and certain she could not afford another stop.