Usen was not a god in the way Ran had been taught to imagine God as a boy, not a distant figure seated somewhere above the clouds. What Aina described was something woven through life itself, the force that allowed springs to rise from stone. The power that brought the deer back through the mountains, the presence that let the pines bend beneath winter storms and still stand when spring returned. Ran did not argue. He did not compare what she believed with what he had been taught.
He simply listened. And when Aina finally stopped speaking, the silence that followed felt different from every silence they had shared before. It was no longer distance. It felt almost like trust. Ran reached into his vest and pulled out the folded map where he marked every trap along his line.
He opened it across the table. One by one, he showed Aina the locations. He pointed out where each trap had been placed, explained why he chose those spots, and showed her how often he wrote out to check them. Aina leaned over the paper. For several minutes, she said nothing.
Her finger followed Ran's rough pencil lines across the map. Then he realized she was doing more than simply trying to understand his drawing. She was comparing it against another map, one she carried entirely in her memory. Aina knew those mountains differently than Ran did, but no less precisely. Her finger finally stopped over a stretch of country northeast of his property, beyond the fence, where the forest became steeper and rougher.
She tapped the place. Then she said several words in Apache and looked at him. Ran did not understand the words. He did understand the question in her eyes. "That's outside my land," he said.
Aina gave him a small deliberate gesture that seemed to say that's exactly why. The next morning, Ran saddled up and rode toward the place she had marked. He did not have to search long. Two more oversized iron traps lay concealed beside a deer trail that cut through a narrow hollow. They were buried carefully enough that a man on horseback might never have noticed them.
Ran did. He dug both traps out, hauled them back, and added them to the pile with the others. As he stacked the heavy iron against the pine, one thought stayed with him. Whoever had put them there knew what they were doing. And somewhere in those mountains, those men had to be camped.
Ran got his answer sooner than he expected. It was the 12th day. That afternoon, he was repairing a broken stretch of fence along the upper pasture when movement at the edge of the timber caught his eye. Three shapes were coming through the pines. Two men rode in front.