Page 22 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

Four hundred calories a day for a three hundred and forty pound frame is a controlled demolition and I have been on it for three days. Junie is running the same deficit at a hundred and eighteen pounds, which sounds worse and is actually much better, because she has less machine to run and she is not carrying the rock.

So: food. Today has to be food.

Here is my honest accounting, and I have had three days to arrive at it.

I can build anything on this mountain. I can put up a structure that will still be here in ten years, and I did, and it has a deck.

I cannot catch a single thing that lives.

This is not modesty and it is not a joke, although Junie has begun treating it as one. I have set eleven snares in three days. Every one of them is correct. The wire is set at the right height, the loop is the right diameter, the anchor is solid, the run is a genuine run with sign on it, I have handled nothing with bare hands, and I have checked them morning and evening.

Nothing.

The problem, as best I have it, is that I am building the snare instead of setting it. I put it where it belongs. Structurally it is a beautiful thing. The animal, however, is not consulting the drawing.

Junie comes up while I am kneeling at the eleventh one.

"How's the barn?"

"It is a snare."

"It's got a little frame on it, Ghorlan."

"That is a support. It holds the loop off the ground."

"It's got a roof."

"It has a lintel."

She crouches down beside it with her hands in her armpits, which is where she keeps her hands now, and she considers it in silence.

"Can I say a thing that will annoy you?"

"Yes."

"It looks like a place." She points, not touching. "That whole thing. It's a structure sitting in a game trail. If I were a rabbit and I came around that bend, I'd stop."

I look at the snare.

She is right.

She is entirely right, and it takes me about eleven seconds to work out that she is right, and I have set eleven of these and there are eleven small buildings in the woods around this camp announcing themselves to everything with eyes.

"You have been setting them the way you build," she says. "Which is like a person who wants somebody to admire it later."

"That is a hard sentence."

"It's a true sentence."

"It can be both."

I pull all eleven and reset them in the afternoon with no supports at all, loops hung off bent grass and a single twig, and everything about it offends me, and I do it anyway.

At four we go down to trade.

That is the other thing about day four. The teams have started moving, because the sites are nine miles across a ridge and everybody has something they need and something they can spend, and production allows trade because trade makes television.

The east bench is Ovid Cassabon and Rooney Pike, and Ovid is a hospitalist who has stopped sleeping and Rooney is a large friendly man who has never in his life had a bad idea he did not act on immediately.