Canary Trap

Halloran had been in the hills three days when he found the cabin. The wind had come down from the ridge the night before and turned the rain to ice, and the ice had glazed the spruce and bent the saplings, and walking was a matter of footing rather than direction. He carried a bottle of corn liquor, a coil of brass wire, and the patience of a man who had been disappointed before. He had been told there was a woman in the cabin who sang. He had been told she sang in a voice that carried down the draw on still nights and brought the dogs in the valley to attention. He had been told the man who could bring her down to the railhead would be paid in coin, not in promises.

He came at the cabin from below, on his belly, through the laurel. There was one window and one door and one yellow lamp inside. She was there. She sat at a plank table with a cup in front of her and her hair loose down her back, and she was singing something he did not know, something with the slow pull of a hymn but the words turned. He watched her for an hour. She did not move except to drink. The lamp guttered once and she trimmed it. He smelled the woodsmoke and, faintly, something else — apricot, perhaps, or the dried skin of an orange laid on the stove. She had small comforts in there. She had built a life.

He waited until the moon was behind the ridge. He crawled to the doorway and strung the wire two inches above the sill, anchored to the jamb on both sides, taut enough to sing if struck. It was a snare for a deer, used on a woman. He told himself it was no different. He told himself she would only fall, and falling, would be still, and being still, would be his.

He went back to the laurel and drank from the bottle to keep the cold out of his chest. The liquor tasted of toasted grain and of something red and floral the still had picked up from the wood. He waited.

She did not come out that night. He slept against a stump with the bottle inside his coat and woke to a sky the colour of slate. The wire was on the ground. The cabin door stood open. The lamp was out.

He found her at the bottom of the ravine, a quarter mile down, where the creek ran black under a skin of ice. She had taken the wire with her. It was still wound around her right hand, the brass bright against the blue of her fingers. She had gone over the edge in the dark with the wire in her grip, and whatever she had thought in the falling she had not let go of it. Her face was turned up. She was smiling. He could not tell at what.

Halloran sat down on a flat rock above her and drank what was left in the bottle. The taste had changed. It was thinner now, and the sweetness was gone, and there was only the burn and the cold air behind the burn. He thought about the coin he would not collect, and about the man who had sent him, and about the song he had heard the night before, which he could not remember a single line of, only the shape of it, the way it had bent at the end of each phrase like a thing trying to come home.

He stood up. He walked back down the hill. He did not look at her again. The dogs in the valley did not bark for him. They had nothing to bark for.