Cassie smiled at Peyton. “It’s fine,” she said. “It’ll do just fine.”
When they brought the salmon to market in St. John’s they met with the recently appointed governor, Charles Hamilton, and he confirmed that the reward for bringing out a Red Indian to the coast stood at one hundred pounds sterling. Given the extent of the Peytons’ losses, he offered the blessing of his office to the proposed expedition. For a while this comforted Peyton. He even enjoyed a period of carefully concealed exhilaration, thinking he had outflanked John Senior for once, taken control of the situation. But that assurance left him soon enough. He saw again now how the expedition would take its own shape regardless of his wishes, gathering momentum until it was a careening downhill surge he would be helpless to direct or divert.
He sat up in the lean-to and stretched, pushing his arms out at the sides as if he wanted them to come free of their sockets. He placed more stunned wood on the fire, the flame licking up around the dry surface like a living thing feeding a hunger.
The fox was taken just above the right front foot and was lying as far from the set stake as the chain allowed when Peyton first came upon her. Fresh snow had blown in and covered the ground. He could see from the tracks around the stake that the animal had been there some time and had done a bit of wild dancing to pull herself clear. There were three or four bright circles of piss within the circumference of the trap chain.
The fox raised her head and looked at him when he came into view but she didn’t get to her feet. The dummy trap in the set that he had deliberately handled with bare hands lay on top of the snow nearby. She had sniffed it out as soon as she arrived, dug it free of the ground and tripped the bed by using her paw or her nose to flip it upside down.
He stepped off the trail to cut a sturdy truncheon of birch wood and then walked to within twenty yards of the animal, crouching there, speaking quietly across the distance. “There you are now,” he said. A medium size, maybe fifteen pounds, he guessed. A beautiful creature, the fine coat a mix of silver and red, the thick tail almost black. The perfectly symmetrical face like a sign of her craftiness, her intelligence. Bright yellow eyes sizing him up. There was no show of panic or fear, only the light of her calm stare of assessment. He recognized that stare, he thought, the sense of being observed by it. He could see a ring of raw skin above the clamp of the metal jaws where the fox had been trying to gnaw through her own leg to get free.
Without standing he removed his gloves and pack, then picked up his rifle. Shooting the animal would ruin the pelt, which he wanted to avoid if possible, but it was best to be careful. Either the stake or the animal’s foot could have worked loose in her struggling and one last lunge might be all that was needed to finish the job.
He stood up and walked forward carrying the gun and the stick of birch. The fox stayed low on her haunches and tried to back further away, but managed only to move slightly from one side to the other at the end of the trap chain, jerking at the clamped foot. She gave a sharp bark and rolled onto her shoulder in the snow, baring her teeth at the man standing above her. Peyton struck the skull once with the truncheon, solidly but not hard enough to draw blood, and the fox flopped completely onto her side, her tongue lolling onto the snow, her eyes half closed.
Peyton lay the rifle aside and knelt beside the animal, placing a bare hand against the fur where he could feel the short panted breaths through the thick coat. He moved his other hand up to the neck and stroked under her ears. “There you are now,” he said again. He set his right knee just behind the fox’s foreleg and used his weight to stove in the rib cage, forcing the broken bones into the internal organs. Peyton placed his hand back against the fur then, waiting as the blood pooled in the lungs and the light leeched from the animal’s eyes.