Forever Magazine Issue 103 by Christopher Rowe & Rich Larson & James Sarafin

Author:Christopher Rowe & Rich Larson & James Sarafin [Rowe, Christopher & Larson, Rich & Sarafin, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2023-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2017.

Trapping the Pleistocene

James Sarafin

The gray clouds had lifted over the bottomland, taking with them the threat of more rain. The creek ran high and muddy, near to overflowing its banks. Dead leaves of autumn swirled in back-eddies and jammed up against the protruding sticks of the beaver dam. Leaves clung to the man’s boots at waterline as he shuffled across the waterlogged top of the dam. Floating leaves rose and fell with the waves of his wading; some went spinning free and sliding down the band of water that poured over the top of the dam where the main current flowed, where the beaver crossed the dam.

Sometime in the night, after the rain stopped, the temperature had fallen and the air had become still. Jack’s breath plumed around him as he waded. The rocks along the banks and the edges of the dam were rimmed with the season’s first ice. Early in the year for ice, but here it was.

It’s winter again, Katie. The season when you left me.

He saw that the trap and guide sticks were gone from the crossover. He stooped to grope around the trap’s anchor stake. The water immediately numbed his fingers and made the back of his hand ache. His hands were getting a bit arthritic from years of immersions in winter water. He caught the tie-down cable with his index finger and began hauling it in, hand over hand, feeling more than the weight of the trap on the end. It never got old, the thrill of this moment, almost as strong as when his father had first taken him trapping as a boy: when you realized you had something but still weren’t sure what it was. We know that thrill, don’t we Katie?

The other end of the cable was looped to a body-grip trap his grandpa had made by bending and welding quarter-inch-diameter spring steel. The leading spring of the trap had twisted sideways after firing, and the dark, slender form of an otter, locked in the trap’s square jaws, corkscrewed just under the surface as he pulled it in. The otter’s long body and tail waved snakelike in the current, causing the cable to throb electrically in his hands. He could have been here hauling in the same kind of trap and animal in his great-great-grandfather’s time, if not for the rush of cars from the skyway that crossed overhead.

He compressed the trap’s springs, opened the jaws, and shook the dead otter free. A nice big male, in prime condition, its wet fur matted flat to its body and a little gritty with mud carried by the stream. He shook the otter again and blew against its fur.

Do you see how it’s primed up for winter? One of the Amish enclaves will trade us for this otter, Katie.

Jack reset the trap in the center of the overflow, bracing it upright with sticks taken from the dam. He still had one beaver,

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