Work Text:
Statement of Theron Weber on… on unusual incidents in the Canadian arctic.
Statement begins.
Oh, don’t look so put off, Archivist. That’s always how it is with you academic types, isn’t it? It’s not an insult to be captured. To trap an educated person is not terribly different than to trap an uneducated person. You are here because I want you here, and there’s nothing in that clever little brain of yours to get you out of it.
I will tell you my story, I will, but I don’t want you to go on looking so sullen. Let’s walk this back. Have you ever snared a rabbit? Well, you look like you’ve never wandered far out of the library, but perhaps you’ve read about it. You don’t use bait for a snare. You find a trail, set your snare, then you design the real trap. You need a funnel, until the only way it will go is through the wire that’s waiting for it. You can’t make it obvious, or the rabbit will be scared off, but you can’t do too little or the rabbit may simply choose another way through. The rabbit must believe it is safe, but more importantly, it must believe it is making the only reasonable choice.
That’s true of all traps. The difference between trapping you and trapping the rabbit is how to go about that. You want to feel special, intelligent. You look for funnels and announce that they’re too good to be true, so you walk through the brambles instead. That’s not any less predictable, my dear. All it took was leaving an address with a name on your desk, and suddenly you were convinced that you couldn’t go that way. You sniffed at the funnel and didn’t think to ask why only one bramble patch was to your liking.
I’m sorry. I digress. I just don’t want you walking out of here thinking you’ve been duped—and yes, you will be walking out of here. I’m here to tell a story, not spill your guts over the beautiful white snow.
Where to start, though? That’s what I don’t like about the English. They like neat definitions, beginnings and ends. That’s the first thing you need to learn. There are no beginnings, there are no ends. All else is arbitrary.
So, let’s pick an arbitrary point. I had just finished university and found myself in the place I hated most. The exact location doesn’t matter, not really, but I will go so far as to say that it wasn’t arctic. I’d spent eighteen years of my life in this empty, yawning place. It was a place that you could stand on a rock and see it for what it was—nothing. We all grew up thinking we would escape, go somewhere that mattered. I watched as my classmates made breaks for big city careers or transitory work, but small towns are a funnel of their own. They would lose their jobs, have a breakup, snap some twig on the path of life and find themselves choosing the only option they knew how to take. Remember, when all else fails, you can always come home.
I thought I was different. I thought I saw the trap for what it was and so I set off to make my own trail. I applauded my own cleverness as I walked down the stage for graduation. But then the job market collapsed just as I sent out my first applications. I tried to stick it out, worked odd jobs in Edmonton in hopes of surviving long enough to find something in my field. For a few months, it worked. Then rent went up and the restaurant I was serving at closed.
Remember, when all else fails, you can always come home.
My parents were… torn on how to receive me. My mother treated me like the prodigal daughter, returned after a wayward spell at university. My father saw through my ruse. He had heard my complaints about how dead our town was, how nothing it was. He thought I was climbing up in life just to look down on him and, in a way, he was right. So he made it his mission to drag me back down. There were no jobs in our town, so he gave me every task around the house he could think of. He would set me to cutting firewood while mocking my weak arms, say that my generation expected everything to be handed to them. I kept my mouth shut, but he only saw that as proof of how arrogant I had become. Nothing I could do would make him happy. Everything was proof how arrogant I had become.
I don’t know if he had me trap as a punishment. It had always been something he did to get a couple of dollars on the side. Nothing much, just enough to sell a couple of rabbit or ermine furs and have us in rabbit stew for the month. I had helped him on the lines before I graduated high school, and he no doubt remembered my complaining about the bitter cold, or the smell of hot game and coppery blood. I remember at one point making a snarky comment about it not being a fair hunt, and he sat me down and harangued at me for two hours about how trapping was the very essence of hunting, and just because there was no gun didn’t mean we weren’t hunting.
As you can imagine I wasn’t ecstatic at the prospect of walking a ten mile trap line in the dead of winter in hopes of finding dead rabbits. What was worse was that he insisted I set the traps, and he wouldn’t tell me how. “Think like the rabbit,” he would say, “you’re smart, you’ll figure it out.”
I tried. I put the snares right where their necks ought to be. I put them in front of the tastiest morsels I could find. I measured the diameter of the snares to the millimeter after I found several that had been engaged, but were too small to actually choke the damn thing. All my father would say about it was “you’re still thinking like you”. That didn’t mean he was pleased when I kept coming back empty, though. Weeks went by where the most I would get was a tuft of fur on a nearby branch.
It was nearing the spring thaw when I got sick of it. I wanted to tell my father to shove it, that I was sick of driving out to the middle of nowhere day after day for no reason. But of course I couldn’t make it that easy on myself. No, I decided that first I would catch something, and it would be something big. I didn’t know if we had a permit for wolf, and I didn’t care.
I don’t know when exactly I set out. It was later in the season, but the sun still set at six o’clock, if not earlier. I remember thinking that if I was fast I might be able to finish before dark, but it must have been dusk when I left the house. I still remember the cast of blue and grey light against the ice-slick snow.
The sun set while I was still driving. Night there isn’t like night in the city—it’s whole, complete. Night here is a sodium-lit haze. There… it goes on forever. There’s only enough light to see the trees overhead, creating a window in which to see infinite stars. You assume that the crunch of snow underneath you is from your boots, but you can’t see where you begin and the world around you ends. You expand to fill every nook and cranny of the silent woods. It’s a beautiful feeling, Archivist. I hope one day you understand.
I was still small and petty, then, though. I had come to prove my father wrong, and I had the length of wire in my hand to do it. It was thicker than what we used on ermine and hares, but I wasn’t about to ask him what gauge I was supposed to use. Instead, I packed a battered old rifle in case I needed to finish the job.
It won’t surprise you that the line was empty. Each snare was exactly where it had been when I set it the day before, and exactly as wide. I could see the rabbit trails I had based my sets on, but new tracks curved around the wires. Each and every one, indents of paws circled the trap, dancing around me, mocking me. I didn’t care. No, I didn’t want to care. I didn’t want to realize that I had failed in so simple a task. But despite the boiling rage at being slighted yet again, I could see an opportunity for what it was. I set a wolf trap to the side of an empty rabbit snare. The rabbit could get through, but any pursuing wolf would not be so lucky.
I would have called it a day, gone back to the house empty-handed to continue a miniscule, pointless life if it weren’t for that flash of white disappearing between the trees.
I didn’t know what it was at first. A bird of some kind, maybe, or an ermine. Nothing worth the ammo. But I couldn’t shake off the curiosity. It had been too large for an ermine. A snowshoe, then? I turned around, told myself I would be back the next day, but I couldn’t bring myself to take even the first steps back to the truck. I needed to know what was there. I needed it like I needed my next breath. I would say I chose to follow it and come back afterwards, but there was no choice.
I was certain that it would have disappeared by the time I turned around and ran after it. No doubt it already knew I was there, so I didn’t care about the pant of my breath filling the empty air, or the echoing crack of the icy crust on top of the snow. But there it was, just a moment, just a glint of white fur against the ever-darkening woods. The trees got closer and closer, but it always stayed the exact same distance away. I couldn’t hear its footsteps, but I would see the sudden brush of its tail against a bush and be urged onwards by a force I couldn’t understand.
My throat was raw from gasping in frozen air by the time I came to the clearing. It was nothing more than a strip of snow between two thickets of trees, but above I could see the glow of the aurora that cast the world in watery green light. I remember thinking it was too late in the season for it, but the thought soon left my mind. At the end of the path, I could see her—a wolf, beautiful silver and white, standing at the end of the path. She stared at me like I was nothing more than an idle curiosity. She could see the gun over my shoulder, and she didn’t care.
My numb fingers fumbled with the magazine as I loaded the bullets. Still, she didn’t move. My world narrowed to include her and only her, her in ethereal emerald light, her in a world I needed to take for myself. Too far, though. I clicked off the safety and stepped forward, then again. She seemed to get no closer. I continued my march step by painstaking step—I could see the trees move around me, but there she was, just as distant and impossible as ever. I broke into a run.
That’s when the light tightened around my neck.
How to describe the feeling of a snare around your neck? Well, I suppose you know. That mark must have come from somewhere. So you know what I mean when I say it is a feeling of perfect helplessness. It is the feeling from going from a world of a million choices to just a single one in the blink of an eye. You’re never prepared to die, dear Archivist, no matter what you think. We’re human, we cast ourselves outward into every possible future, and we find ourselves only in one, struggling against something we can’t see, gasping for air that only burns our lungs.
The light around my throat looked as ephemeral as that above me, but it tightened like a wire as I writhed, clawing at my throat only to find nothing to tear away. As my head pounded and my vision dimmed, I saw the same green cord around my quarry. She hung still, not out of curiosity but from the twist in her neck. We were the same, each lured here to this place of beautiful light. I would become bait just as she had, used to catch even bigger prey.
The last thing I remember before my vision finally went black was looking up to see the infinite green threads between the stars.
I don’t intend to bore you with the details of what came after. I’ve gone on long enough, and certainly that was an arbitrary enough end for your sensibilities. Suffice to say that my god has used me admirably, just as I have used her. And we’re both very happy to have you here.
Statement ends, I suppose. You’re free to go.
Supplemental: I… I attempted some cursory follow up of Theron Weber’s statement, but found little of interest. All official records of her cease after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Alberta. She is still quite active online, however, and sells fur and bone trinkets online under the name Theron Hunts. I put in a request to acquire an item from her store in order to determine if they are of interest, but have not received word back.
End supplemental.