The Trap in the Snow

The snow over Green Ridge Village never seemed to stop falling. Old Xun squatted by the hearth, feeding sticks into the fire, and listened to the wind outside, which sounded like someone walking through the woods. He was fifty-three, the last man in the village who still made a living by hunting. The wild things in the hills grew scarcer every year, and the young had all gone down to the towns, leaving him with nothing but an old yellow dog called Heizi.

When the first snow of winter finally settled, Old Xun shouldered the homemade shotgun he had carried for twenty years and went deep into Green Ridge to set three iron snares. He knew the boars' path down the mountain and hid the traps under the dead leaves, certain the snow would cover them from sight. Coming home at dusk, Heizi ran ahead, then stopped suddenly and gave two low whines toward the white expanse of forest before shrinking back to his master's feet. Old Xun patted the dog's head and thought nothing of it.

On the third morning he waded through ankle-deep snow to check the snares. The first two were empty, but the third hung heavy and shut. Old Xun's heart lifted; he knelt and brushed the snow aside—and found no boar, no badger, only a thin leg severed clean by the jaws. The flesh was bluish white, the foot split into toes, the nails black and glistening, like nothing that walked these hills. Stranger still, there were no marks of a struggle in the snow, only a few dark-red drops leading deeper into the woods.

The hair rose on Old Xun's neck. A hunter learns not to flinch at blood, yet this thing he could not name. He freed the severed leg from the trap, dared not throw it away, and tucked it into his cloth pouch. Then he followed the drops inward. Heizi would not come, but crouched with his tail between his legs, eyes fixed on the forest's depth, a growl rolling in his throat.

The trail led to a windless hollow beneath a stone cliff. Old Xun parted the bare branches and saw the creature curled there, a small thin shape wrapped in ragged hide, its back to him, shoulders hitching as if it wept. Wind slipped through the cliff's crack carrying a sour, unplaceable stink. Old Xun leveled his gun and called out, "Who's there?"

The shape turned slowly. It had a child's face, ash-gray, with the soft lines of youth; but the eyes were wrong—vertical pupils filmed with moisture, like stones soaked too long in a mountain stream. It did not lunge, did not flee. It only looked at him, lips moving as if to speak, or to smile. Far off, Heizi let out a broken bark and bolted.

Old Xun's finger rested on the trigger, gone cold through. He remembered what his grandfather had told him as a boy: deep in Green Ridge lived the mountain's watchers, who took lost children into the hills and raised them to guard the paths, and who came knocking in the night at any man who set a trap and wounded their own. He had laughed at the tale then. But this face, these eyes, brought back a memory he had nearly buried—the day he was eight and lost in the woods for half a day, led home by an old trapper whose eyes, he now recalled, had been just as vertical.

He did not fire. The powder in the damp air would have misfired anyway, and his finger had not pulled. Old Xun stepped back, bent, and laid the severed leg gently on the snow, then turned and walked the way he had come. Heizi waited on the far slope and nuzzled his trouser leg when he returned.

After that, Old Xun set no more snares. He hung the shotgun on the wall and sat by his door watching Green Ridge's snow. When the villagers asked, he said only that the wild game was gone, that there was nothing left to catch. Only Heizi still growled now and then toward the forest's depth, and Old Xun would pat him and say no more. The mountain stood as it had always stood, the snow fell as it always fell, and no one ever went looking for those dark-red marks deep in Green Ridge.