Nell Briarwick's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Nell Briarwick found the first snare on a Tuesday, strung low between two birches on the path she used to reach the fox den. The wire was fresh. The loop sat at fox height. She knelt and pried it loose with her pocket knife, then sat back on her heels and listened. Somewhere past the ridge, the old matriarch was feeding kits Nell had heard but never seen. Nell had been leaving scraps at the tree line for two years to earn a look from that fox. She was not going to lead a hunter to the den to finish what a road had started with another one. She walked the woods in a slow grid and found four more. Knotted cord webs softened with moss and dead branches, staked flat where a paw would land. One held the stiff body of a rabbit. Another had been sprung and reset. She cut them all. She coiled the wire and buried the cord under leaves, then wiped her prints from the stakes with her sleeve. Her hands shook by the last one. If the hunter came back and read her tracks, he would know someone was working against him, and he would look harder for whatever she was protecting. So she gave him something else to find. At home she cut bread and cheese and set them on a wooden plate with a handful of late berries, arranged in a neat circle the way her mother used to. She carried the plate a full mile from the den, to a clearing she had never used, and left it on a flat rock with her scarf beside it. Then she walked the long way back through the creek so her boots left no line toward the kits. On the bulletin board that evening she pinned a small notice: Lost scarf, gray wool, near the north clearing. Reward. She signed her name. Let the hunter think a woman was wandering the wrong side of the woods looking for wool. Let him set his traps there. She did not go near the den that night. She left scraps at the usual edge and waited on her back step until the dark thinned. Near dawn the matriarch came to the tree line, took the food, and stayed a moment longer than before. The fox looked at her. Nell held still and did not let herself think about the low, rounded mouth of the burrow past the ridge, or what it would feel like to be allowed inside. She had bought the kits a week, maybe two. The hunter would move his snares once he found her scarf, and when he did, she would need a new lie ready.