Trapline by Mark Stevens Read Free Book Online

boundaries.
    At the rate Trudy’s business had bloomed, the center of gravity in the culture might be shifting. You didn’t just buy Trudy’s products, you bought into a culture of eating well, of doing things the right way. A bottle of anything from Down to Earth in your grocery cart was a signal to yourself and the world that you understood that eating well was an active choice and that it went hand in hand with the idea of community togetherness. Like Birkenstock sandals or Tom’s of Maine toothpaste, the product shined a light on the user as a thoughtful citizen of the planet.
    â€œI know you’ll square things up right with your business, even if there is a problem,” said Allison. “And I doubt there is one.”
    â€œWhat if I have to let somebody go—just because their paperwork isn’t right?”
    â€œCross that bridge when you come to it,” said Allison. “And you’ll do it in the most humane way possible.”
    Trudy looked quiet. She’d gone deep inside herself, still reeling. “I want to go back a day,” she said. “And start over.”

seven:
monday, mid-day
    Allison squatted in sandy rocks and bunchgrass at the top of the ridge near the half-corpse. The summer sun warmed her cheeks. Behind her up the slope and under the cover of the woods, three Garfield County Sheriff officers and the county coroner busied themselves with measurements, photographs and a careful examination of the b ody.
    She slowed her breathing, played statue. She watched the tops of a fireweed flutter under the spell of a gentle breeze. She quieted her mind. At least, she tried. She wanted the cops to be done, wanted the body picked up and packed up—she wanted their conclusions oh, about an hour ago.
    She stopped naming the individual plants and flowers. She let them be as the living things that they were before human beings came around and tried to order and organize the world. King Philip crossed over France going south . Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Her father had taught her the first mnemonic. She preferred the ones her high school girlfriends giggled about, King Philip came over for good sex.
    No order to anything. See. Feel. Sense. Absorb.
    She moved five slow steps north, squatted again. Her working theory was rickety but as good as any other. If it was an animal attack, the only two truly eligible critters were bear or mountain lion. If it was one or the other, her theory went, the closest stand of woods were their likely cover. Allison planned to follow an arc that should have intersected where the animal would have raced out of the woods and where the attack would have happened. She hoped to come across some feline or ursine track or, better yet, some indication that she needed another line of thinking.
    She faced the open valley. Lumberjack Camp plopped in the middle of the otherwise treeless bowl like a pin cushion at the bottom of the town water tank.
    Allison scanned the ground again, overlapping each view in the grid. Marmot tracks? She’d seen plenty. These were about seven inches apart, a right and a left. A V-shaped print with four elongated toes. The fifth vestigial lined up like a forgotten finger.
    Allison moved again, squatted. What she wanted to see was a paw print or scat from something feline. Uncovered scat would be the real prize, suggesting the cat was comfortable, moving and working on its own turf.
    Five more steps, another squat, another moment, another chance to ice-down the percolating brain and live in the moment, to expand her thoughts and senses so she could pick up what was happening for hundreds of yards—or a mile or ten—around. A deer could do it, why couldn’t she? An elk could do it, why couldn’t she? Coyote radar had a hundred times her sensitivity, why couldn’t she channel that power, if only for a minute?
    A daisy. A sunflower. More fireweed. A scattering of