He patched the roof, stretched fence across the rough ground, repaired what could be repaired, and slowly made the place into something small, quiet, and undeniably his. He had a good hand with horses. He spent money carefully, and when trouble could not be avoided, he knew his way around a rifle. Mostly, though, Ran kept to himself. It was not because he hated people.
He simply had very little left that he trusted himself to care about. Nearly everyone who had mattered most to him was already beneath the ground, and he still had no idea what a man was supposed to put into the empty places they left behind. There were weeks when the only living creatures Ran spoke to were his horses. He cooked plain meals and rarely cared whether they tasted worth eating. He kept the cabin clean because his mother, Adeline Treadwell, had always kept a clean house, and some habits were hammered into a man too deeply to disappear just because nobody was there to notice them anymore.
But Ran never hung the sort of curtain Adeline would have put over the window. He never laid a woven mat beside the door. He kept the place orderly, but he never made it warm. Most evenings he ate at one end of a table built for two people. His nearest neighbor lived 11 mi south, a weathered man named Marin Halcott, who kept a few head of cattle, and ran a small trading post where a traveler could buy flour, ammunition, salt, and not much else.
Ran and Marin knew each other well enough to exchange a few words when their paths crossed, but neither man made a habit of visiting the other. During the first cold months of the year, Ran ran a modest trap line. Marten mostly, sometimes fox, now and then a beaver along the creeks. He sold the hides at Marin Halcott's trading post, and the extra dollars helped carry him through the lean stretch of winter when the ranch itself brought in almost nothing. Ran was particular about how he set his traps.
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.