FICTION
48
And Beavers Have Beautiful Pelts By Sariah Smith
Night falls around him, dark as congealed blood. Blood drips from his leg and sizzles in the snow in a quick pitter-patter, but not quick enough to kill him—not yet. Yet he can feel the frail stuttery beat of his heart, the fog of his brain going numb, the paralyzing urge to lie down and sleep. Sleep beckons like a long-lost lover, but he refuses to give in. In that cabin, the cabin where he was kept with his hands zip-tied behind a chair back, he slept sitting up. Up above his head, on the second floor, he could hear the Trapper moving around day after day, attending to the messy business of skinning and butchering squirrels, rabbits, beavers. “Beavers,” the Trapper told him, “are delicious, and they have beautiful pelts. Pelts can go for a hundred dollars easy.” “Easy,” he remembers the Trapper saying, not “easily.” “Easily” wouldn’t have evoked that casual sense of familiarity, as if they were just two friends having a conversation, as if one of them was not a serial killer who gained notoriety from his penchant for trapping animals and people both. Both animals and victims find the killer’s traps not with their eyes, but with their limbs. Limbs do not stay limbs in traps like these—bones shattered like porcelain, flesh gored by the teeth of reinforced steel jaws. Jaws painted white, hidden beneath a shrewd layer of snow. Snow falls soft and feathery around him, and he remembers. Remembers the crisp, snowblurred morning when he left his own rental cabin to do some hiking, maybe a little ice fishing. Fishing and hiking were warned against in areas near recent killings, but then again, the sort of cabin sites the Trapper bounced around were too. Too many skinned bodies found with their legs all mangled. Mangled like his; but he was lucky. Lucky that he’d only lost his foot, and that the mutilated stump had partially healed. Healed, that is, until he staggered, limping, leaning on a fireplace poker, from the cabin where he spent those hellish weeks. Weeks ago, he had heard of the Trapper, had briefly considered cancelling the solo cabin trip he’d planned, but he couldn’t convince himself to take the risk seriously. “Seriously,” he slurred to a friend one drunken night, “what are the odds? Odds are he’s in Wisconsin by