Beck stepped out onto the clear ground with more confidence than before, now that the sun was well past the tops of the trees and all the grass was in shadow. To anyone not right in front of him he would just be one more shadow on a plain of shadows.
The absence of light strangely made what he wanted to see more visible. Animal tracks — the routes that small creatures had grown accustomed to taking to get from A to B. Blades of grass were subtly pushed aside; the ground was minutely more trodden than the area around it. Almost invisible by daylight, but the pre-sunset twilight picked out all the darks and greys so that they stood out clearly.
That raptor they had heard earlier — hawk, buzzard, eagle, whatever — had been looking for something here, and Beck intended to catch it instead. Using the wire he had taken from the van, he had already made up some snares before leaving the shelter of the trees — more than one, because you couldn’t just rely on one trap to work.
Each snare was a noose tied with a slip knot, so that anything that moved through the loop would catch on the edges and pull it tight. He guessed that the most likely prey in a place like this would be small hares. For rabbits, Beck knew a fist-sized loop was best, so for hares he estimated the same.
He set them up at five different locations, each where an animal path passed between two objects — maybe a couple of tussocks, or a pair of fallen logs. For each snare, Beck pushed twigs lightly into the ground and balanced the top of the loop on top of them. It had to be placed clear of the ground so that the bottom of the loop was at the level of the animal’s chest. The hare might see the twig but just think, oh, a twig, and push past it — and by then its head would already be inside the snare.
He tied the loose end of each snare firmly to a pointed piece of wood which he drove into the ground next to the animal path. It had to hold the animal in place no matter how much it struggled. Most animals, when they realised they couldn’t get free, would stop trying. They might also try to gnaw their way free, but the wire would prevent that.
And that was how one or more hares tonight, hopefully, would become tomorrow’s breakfast.
Beck straightened up from the last trap and looked around. The edges of the trees were now just a shadow and the clear ground was a mess of flat shades of grey. Somewhere out there was the animal, or animals, whose life he intended to use to help both he and Jonas to survive.
“Please provide us with just enough to keep us alive,” he murmured to the forest. “And in the morning I’ll take the traps down and we’ll be gone.”
No answer came out of the forest, so he turned and trudged back to Jonas.