He placed them deep enough in the timber that wandering cattle were unlikely to reach them. Every location was marked on a rough map he had drawn himself, and kept folded inside his vest pocket. He checked each trap every other day. He had no objection to killing an animal when there was a reason for it, but he saw no need to make anything suffer longer than necessary. What Ran did not yet realize was that someone else had been laying traps in those woods for nearly a week.
He had been seeing signs that did not belong there. Horse tracks appearing beneath the tall pines after dark. The blackened ring of an abandoned campfire in a clearing north of his fence, one he knew he had not built. And then there were the traps. Three heavy iron traps hidden along deer trails above his property.
They were larger than anything Ran used. Heavier, too. Built with cruel springs and thick jaws, capable of holding far more than a fox or a martin. Ran pulled every one of them from the ground. He carried them to the base of a pine tree, damaged the mechanisms enough to make them useless, and stacked them where whoever had placed them would have no trouble understanding the message.
Then he went home. He did not give the matter much thought. Poachers drifted through that country every season. Some stayed a day, some stayed a week. Most moved on before anybody bothered to learn their names.
Ran assumed these men would do the same. What he did not know was that the men who had set those traps were not hunting animals. On the morning of October 14th, Ran saddled up and rode into the woods above the mesa to check his own line. On the return trip, he followed his usual route through the high draws beneath the pines. The sky had gone pale gray.
Low clouds pressed over the mountains, and the forest smelled of cold resin, damp bark, and the faint promise of snow somewhere higher up. Ran heard the sound before he saw where it came from. It did not belong in the natural rhythm of the woods. First came the hard metallic snap, then the heavy sound of something striking the ground. A heartbeat later came a low cry of pain, abruptly cut short, as though whoever had made it had forced the sound back down through sheer will.
Ran pulled his horse to a stop. That had not been a deer. It had not been a wolf, either. Whatever had been caught was alive, and it was trying very hard not to make another sound. Ran Treadwell turned his horse between the pines and followed the noise.