Mara Thistle found the doe at first light, bedded under a split cedar with a snare wire buried in her foreleg. The wire was council-issued, set on the wrong side of the preserve line. Mara cut it free, packed the wound, and watched the deer limp back into the brush, antlers branching like wet twigs against the bark. Then she sat down in the leaves and opened her journal to the page where she tracked every misplaced snare this season. The doe made fourteen. Fourteen was enough to take to the hall. She walked into town with the journal under her arm and mud still on her boots. The council met in a stone building with tall windows and a single long table inside the front room. They called her in when a buck wandered into a garden or a fawn drowned in a cistern. They listened, they thanked her, they sent her back to the trees. They had never once asked her to sit down. Councillor Veth was already speaking when she pushed the door open. He stood at the head of the table and was reading numbers about feed costs and fence repair. He stopped when he saw her. He did not invite her forward. Mara walked forward anyway and set the journal open on the wood, the pressed ferns and the inked maps facing the seated members. She told them about the snare wire. She told them whose stamp was on it. Veth said the snares were a budget matter and that Mara was here to treat animals, not to read ledgers. Two members nodded. A third did not. He sat on the far end of the table, on a worn stone bench fitted into the wall, its nameplate softened by lichen the cleaners never scraped off. He was the preserve's oldest seat, and he had said almost nothing in the three years Mara had been called in. Now he leaned forward and asked her to turn the journal toward him. He read for a long minute. He asked where lot seven was. He asked who signed the requisition. Then he closed the book and told the table that fourteen snares on the wrong side of a line was not a budget matter, it was a violation, and that he would not vote on another wildlife motion until Mara Thistle had a chair in the room. Veth's mouth opened and shut. The vote to seat her as an advisor, non-voting, was called before the hour ended. It passed four to three. Mara walked out with her journal and a folded paper naming her advisor to the council. Advisor was not member. Advisor could speak but could not vote. Veth caught her at the steps and said he looked forward to her first real session on Thursday. He was smiling. She understood then that he had already started counting how to make an advisor useless before she ever sat down.