Three nights running, something had climbed the stilts and stolen Beauregard's food. Now he sat on the sagging porch of his shack with his last strip of jerky in his fist, counting scars instead of stars. Forty-seven claw marks across his chest and arms. Every one of them belonged to the same beast, the thing he had sworn since boyhood he would trap and gut. He could not hunt it starving. He could not stay fed if the thief kept coming. He was sixty years old and lean as a heron. His white hair hung in wet ropes down his back. He wore cut-off jeans and boots cracked from swamp water. Once, a long time ago, there had been a family with money and a big clean house. He did not think about them. He thought about meat. He set the trap before dusk. He dragged the old iron cage out from under the shack, the one with the dead trapper's bones still curled inside. He did not bother pulling the skeleton out. Bones made good weight. He propped the cage door open with a notched stick and tied his last smoked catfish to the trigger. Then he climbed the ladder, pulled it up behind him, and waited by the window with a rusted machete across his knees. The moon came up green through the cypress. Frogs quit singing. Something big shifted the water below. Beauregard saw one red eye first. Just the one, low and burning, chest-high to a tall man. Then the shape resolved — red fur, matted black at the belly, and three legs pushing through the muck like a stool walking on its own. It sniffed the fish. It ducked into the cage. The stick snapped. The door dropped. The beast screamed, and Beauregard screamed back, laughing. He came down the ladder shaking. Up close the thing was bigger than the cage wanted it to be. It slammed the bars. Rust flaked into the water. One arm punched through and swiped at him, and he stumbled back into the reeds. Then he saw its face clearly. The single eye. The heavy brow. No scarred muzzle. No missing ear. This was not the beast that had cut him. This was something else. Something's mate, or its child, or its neighbor. He stood in the mud and understood. His thief was caught. His hunter was not. The cage groaned. The bars would hold a night, maybe two. He had a live animal now, red and furious, and whatever had carved him would come looking for it. Beauregard wiped his mouth. He picked a small clump of leaves off his sleeve, a tidy little bunch shaped like a grinning mouth, and flicked it into the water. He climbed back up to fetch his knives. "Come on then," he said to the dark. "Come get your boy."

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."