78 Zi’da, Arc 719
Oram stared mutely at the stiff, frayed cord swinging in the cold breeze. He had come out here to check his line, half a trial from his travelers’ camp, to discover that his best sets to date had been for naught. The snare in front of him had indeed caught something, almost certainly a rabbit or hare, but another creature had arrived after and eaten it right off of the noose. Earlier he had found that a similar fate had befallen a marten in one of his deadfall traps; there only the quarry’s crushed head had remained, wedged between the heavy logs. All the hunter could do, now as then, was stare at the wreckage and mull what a fickle bitch Karem could be sometimes.
All sorts of animals roamed these woods that might steal a catch thus: wolves, lynx, mountain lions, even bears. In fact, Oram found prints at both scenes that resembled those of a bear, although they were quite small for such; however, when he spotted similar prints in the snow of a nearby clearing, lined up in distinctive slanting rows, he decided that it wasn’t a bear, after all. He knew of only one animal that left tracks like that: a running wolverine.
Regardless of what the thieving critter might be, Oram knew that he couldn’t just reset his traps and hope for the best; once an animal had found a good place for food, it would keep coming back. The best remedy would be to catch the creature itself; obviously it couldn’t keep stealing his rabbits and martens if it was dead. Oram would have to come up with a new method, though, for trapping such a beast, which was clearly bigger and more powerful than his usual game. In the meantime, the best he could do was try to modify his traps to protect his quarry from poaching.
Oram reckoned he could at least do this for his rabbit snares; he just needed to set them to lift their catch high enough that another critter couldn’t reach it from beneath. That would prove easy enough; it didn’t take that much additional force to hoist something as small as a bunny as high as you pleased. In fact, on his first try, the hunter made a trap that yanked his water-skin so high over his head that he couldn’t then retrieve it with his outstretched hands; he had to hook the lug of his boar-spear into the skin’s carrying strap to pull it back down. A large bear might still be able to reach that high, he guessed, but not much else. Rabbits didn’t come with carrying straps, though, so he tied a non-slip loop onto the snare cord just above the noose, to give his spear something to hook onto when the time.
Oram modified three rabbit snares thus, but there was little he could do at the moment about his marten deadfalls. He simply abandoned the one that had already been poached, and let the others be. It was late in the afternoon when he was finished, so he decided to set up camp nearby and head back to town in the morning. He wanted to talk to his brother Osric. Osric was smart; he might know how to make something that could catch a wolverine.