Trapped.

“I’ve been a trapper most of my life. It was good money,” he says to someone off camera, “too good, really. On a bad month I could bring in five thousand, a good month, forty.” His smile is embarrassed, a swirling mix of nostalgia and misgivings. He wears a green jacket, dark brown pants, and heavy worn-out boots. His hair is thinning on the top, a riot of black and grey and white all fighting for dominance. His beard is full and long, without any hint of the black that still resists above, wiry and forgotten. The creases on his tanned face scream of weather and wildness more than age. A crow calls out from the thick evergreen canopy above where he sits, sprawled out in the pine needles and bark that coat the landscape with a sappy scent which lingers on the clothes for weeks. He doesn’t turn to the bird, but listens, waiting, watching with his ears for a telltale sign that he alone knows. He takes a deep breath, then turns back to the person off screen.

“You have to understand, it wasn’t like it is now. Back then, it was just a job. Damn good one too. A Fool’s Gold could net you two hundred, three in the nineties when that heavy Dragonscale Jewelry was in fashion. I’d average three a week, between the snares and cage traps. And the Fool’s Gold’s aren’t big, you know. Bout the same as a raccoon. Turtlebacks could get you fifty a shell, they were small and common then. I might catch up to eight a week. Didn’t need the skin, just the shell, which was a whole lot easier to manage. But the neon glow of those things, the moving veins of brutal color, they were a sight to see. Then of course you have the Quicksilvers, the Frog Herders, the Ember Nurses, and the Fanged Beetlefaces. Mind you, as far as dragon skin went, these were all just bread and butter. You could rely on them to get you to the next week.” He shifts his position and turns back to the forest, a pinecone falls like a rock and clacks against branches and needles before thumping into the ground and sending up a plume of tiny Detritus Wings, their miniscule bodies glittering like jewels as their long slender wings buzz franticly about them. He watches, for a moment, as the cloud lands and the most adventurous of the little things inches toward the pinecone, sniffing the air and tiptoeing forward on folded wings.

“Common,” he laughs to himself, either ignorant of the pain writ across his face or indifferent to it. “But what we really wanted, the things that would set you apart and set you up, were the big three: the Nubbed Glowworm, the Waddling Gulper, and Solaris-Rex.” He stops for a long time. He looks worn, ragged. The scars that trace his body glint in the flickering scales of sunlight here. Squirrels chatter and chase each other around the trunks of the still young forest, sending bits of rough bark raining in their wake. He continues; his hand absently toying with the smooth glasslike leaf of an amber fern.

“Most people don’t realize this, but the Nubbed Glowworm is doing fine. They’re everywhere. You don’t see them, of course, because they’re really only active at night and they hate people.” He pinches the amber fern, and the sweet smell of honey fills the air. “you’ve all seen the documentaries,” he pauses until someone off screen nods, “good. Now, the Glowworm gets a bad rap. It’s big, to be sure, but the longest I’ve ever caught was 12 feet. Remember, a third of that is tail. Then you got it’s flappers; fleshy, almost finlike nubs where it used to have limbs and wings. And some people look at those and think it’s scary, some kind of abomination. But really, what we’ve found is that those flappers are important for moving through deep debris,” he says, scooping up several handfuls of loose-leaf litter and barky soil, “like so. There could be half a dozen juveniles within a hundred feet of us. Of course, this is too shallow for an adult. You only find those in old growth, or loose sandy soils, swamps, bogs, or more commonly these days, dumps. Not so much in these new forests.”

“With Glowworms, it’s the tail you want. And it’s important you make sure anything you catch is dead. Because they like to play possum, then when you come to collect, usually in the dark on account of resetting the trap, they strobe their tail and your night blind. Ugly bastards, glowworms, faces like thistles. Each one of those barbs loaded with enough venom to make you wish it’d just killed you. At least until it gets to work, and the jaws break through the femur like its old wood, and you realize you never knew what pain was your whole life. Saw a buddy of mine go that way, back in the eighties. Young guy, good man, dumb though, dead now.” He flicks the mushed bit of fern from his finger.

“Tails didn’t grow back, of course, so mostly we just killed them and hacked off what we needed. Seemed safer, simpler. The skin had some kind of protein that reacted to sharp movements; cure it just right and it will keep working, albeit dimmer. Party scene loved it; shirts, pants, swimsuits, and underwear, all of it. At its peak, in the late nineties, a tail could get you four thousand. Just the raw tail, right off the carcass. You skin it and do the basic prep, do a good job, eight thousand easy.” Something snaps in the softly sloping hollow behind him, and he turns his head.

Deer. A flood of them, doe’s with spotted fawns dancing underhoof. Older females with gnarled fur pocked by disease and scars and still fat with unborn young. Younger males stomp around inside the heard, their little horns bestowing upon them both arrogance and pity. The older bucks trail after, eight or so, the biggest sporting a regal crown that could have intimidated a small pickup truck. The soft crunching shush of their hooves tilling the soil mumbles around them as they walk. They stop to nip off the tops of the hardwood seedlings that were growing in a low, desperate matt. Five or so Brown Trees mingled in the heard. Their long bark-colored necks towering over the deer, their eyes huge and round, alert and intense, just behind their blunt, scarred beaks perpetually coated in drying wood pulp. Their wings useless for anything other than turning logs in search of softer wood. Along their head and trailing down their necks, a series of green, fragmenting spikes completed their disguise. The sentinel of the group was always lost to the eye, another tree in the forest. When they moved on, the saplings were gone.

“See, that right there. That’s on me. Maybe not all of it, but I did my part. Not knowing I was doing it doesn’t change a damn thing.” He listens, eyes closed, and the forest is quiet and broad; the noises of life somehow insulated by the sheer expanse of it, muffled, identifiable, expected.

“Course the Glowworms mostly eat rodents, rabbits, amphibians. And they were generally considered higher risk than the other two of the big three. Mostly on account of them being so long. You’d never know if a snare or trap really had a hold, or it had killed em, until you were close enough to bet your life on it. That, and the way they could hide, meant that we never really made a huge impact on their numbers. The population dipped in the early two thousands, but only in the wild. Nowadays, estimates put almost a third of them in urban areas, especially landfills. That’s why you can’t dump your own loads anymore, too many people got skewered and sued the city,” he laughs. “Opportunists, man. Half the world is going extinct, and these guys are thriving. Right up there with coyotes, raccoons, rats, house cats, and Sewer Wurms.” He smiles at this, but not at the camera.

“You really want to talk money though; you want to talk about Waddling Gulpers. And you want the old ones, because it’s not just about the skins, it’s about the size of the scalestones. Back in the day, the easiest way to make sure you got the best Gulper in the pack was to hunt. You couldn’t rely on traps, traps are indiscriminate, but also because the whole pack would protect any injured one, circle around it and attack anything that came sniffing. Number one cause of dismemberment in the profession. I should know,” he smiles and raises his left hand, a glossy patch runs the line where half his hand disappears in a wide crescent, the thumb and pointer held in a V.

“Roving packs. Nomadic, not territorial. The whole unit just went wherever it would. Family, in spite of what some of the ‘researchers’ claimed. All females. Obviously, its rare to find a male older than two since the larger female tends to eat the male after mating. And the shape of them made them perfect for skinning. There’s a lot of talk now about convergent evolution, and I think there is something to that. They do look like massive toads. Wide mouths, wide bodies, short tails, the wings stunted into rhinestone clubs. Of course, that’s if you ignore the fact they’re as big as a German shepherd. Hell, even the wolfpacks up north will avoid them. But you get an old one, huge gecko scales centered with glassy beads, that was serious money. Five grand on average, ten if its ancient.”

A sound flowed through the trees, sweet and low and trailing at the end into a twitter. The smile freezes on the man’s face and trembles around his eyes, his deep brown eyes glisten. “They’re coming,” his voice shakes as he says it. Sporadic shuffling sounds follow the call, getting louder in broken spurts. He looks at the person behind the camera and brings one of his two fingers to his lips, before turning carefully to the clearing behind him. A burst of wings and a flock of sparrow’s billow into the air and disappear into the canopy.

Then it was there, at the ridge, eyeing the tilled topsoil and licking at the hoofprints. Two feet wide, two feet tall when squat, four from the nose to the tip of the tail. Its skin a dotted matrix of pinpointed shifting color reflecting the forest around it in an oil-like cloak that strains the eye. Its huge, froglike mouth opens wide as it calls out its strange tune, revealing inch long serrated teeth. Another appeared beside it, bigger by half, the pinpoints of color become marbles, bouncing fractal images flowing as it stands up like a bulldog on its front legs, its shifting club wings twitching as two more Gulpers appear beside it. Suddenly, its head shifts and it’s looking right at the man, eyeing him. The camera shakes for a moment before the man’s arm shoots out and grabs the camera man, whispering, “stay still. You run, they chase.”

The thing watched them, cocked eye looking directly into the lens. One of the smaller ones calls out, questioning, and a moment later the group is darting along the deer trail, in bursts of horrifying speed and jarring stillness, until, moments later, they disappear on the other side of the clearing. Their scattered calls fade into the distance. When the man turns, he doesn’t look at the camera, but at someone beside it. His breathing is ragged, his smile raw, tears struggle down his cheeks and the forest reflects in their wobbling descent.

…..

“I made a little over seven million dollars, over my career,” the man says, now walking with a bobbing gate through the forest. The camera jiggles and sways as it tries to keep up and its clear the man is talking to someone whose arm keeps drifting into the shifting shot. “Back then it was different. Simpler. No one thought there would be cities out here. No one thought people would ever come this far into nothing. You see how that went, of course,” he says, pointing vaguely at the smog-line, hazy and low, briming above the distant valley and overflowing the the peaks there in brown-grey misery. “Even then, all this,” he gestures to the forest, “it was all so big back then. Trapping was a job, you know. And we couldn’t see it then, not like later. So, you could go out for a season, make a hundred thousand, and then do whatever you wanted for the rest of the year. Always, always, more skins to be had. More money to be made. Until, of course, there wasn’t.” The bitter smell of ash drifts through the trees here, the camera man coughs but the man takes a deep breath and his face falls into a state of nostalgic bliss.

“People look at this,” he says, carefully toeing his way down a shallow hill, “and you hear them say things. Oh, it’s so beautiful, so green, so wild, so majestic. Like they know. Like they’ve ever seen something truly majestic. And I’m here to tell you, this aint that.” He picks up a pinecone, looks at it. His hand starts shaking before he hurls it into the forest. “This, all this, is grotesque.” A woodpecker starts beating a rhythm somewhere nearby, the knock knock knock like gunfire in the silence.

“Used to be rich, here. Not the rich I came for, of course. The rich I dream of now. Back then these mountains were lush, vibrant, diverse. A tangle of hardwoods and soft, oaks and pines and bays and ash and fifty more besides. In between there were fire meadows, brimming in grasses and shrubs and flowers, riparian oasis that forever smelled of mint and coyotebrush. The skies were full of flight, finches and sparrows and robins, blue bearded gliders, whipsails the size of a cat, hawks and more. Things lived here in numbers that people today can’t even imagine. Many of those things lost now, to time, to ignorance, to greed; to me.” The light ahead is too bright for the canopy.

“Course, we didn’t know. None of us, back then. Some came for a quick buck, then disappeared. More than is right died for being stupid. Some just made enough to stop. Some would never make enough. But there were a few of us, longtimers, who saw the changes. Colors started to disappear. Birds that were common got rare. The variety of plant and animal thinned out, like it was watered down. Then, one day, the voice of the mountains was quiet, its golden meadows and mighty oaks suddenly replaced by needles, all cut just so, nipped to uniformity and monoculture by endless herds of dear. The Glowworms, of course, are a steady predator. But they can’t compete with these numbers. That job mostly fell to the Gulpers, and until a year ago, there were only twenty in the state. We’re up to two-thirty and growing fast now.” A hillside appears, scarred black, with shifting drifts of powdery ash swirling in the breeze, the charcoaled nubs of pines reaching only just above the blackened corpses they once held up.

“Turns out,” the man says, looking out at the scrorcheland, “the biggest factor was the Rex. Single most dangerous predator in the north. Covered in thick silver scales with quartz overlays in every color of the rainbow. Hard to get and very much in demand. It was the wings, though, with those wide oval crystal, that really mattered. Couldn’t fly, but it could glide. Used to stand on mountaintops in the summer, wings outspread, start fires with the lenses there then glide off to safety. Biggest fire, best mate. This here, trail cam suggest it was a Rex. First seen in twenty years.” His expression is twitchy with uncertainty, then settles grim and firm.

“Only ever caught one of those. Purely by accident. Snagged in a trap I’d thrown out on a whim. Its leg all messed up. Never seen one that close. People wonder at the skin, at the beauty of it, but that s only because they never seen one look you in the eye, all power and fury as un-refutable as a wildfire. It was late then, already the forest was a murmur of its past self, the meadows springing up pines, the oaks quickly outgrown and drowned in shadow. I had to put it down, no question. It’d die terribly if I left it. So, I took the shot… it was like killing God.”

The only color black and gray ahead comes from the towering green grass like plants that sprouted after the blaze, four feet tall now, each with a single hearty stem raised high but hung low by the weight of the bulb there. “Can’t sell teeth and fangs, though, even to save a world. Too much bad blood, too many nightmares. The everything of it, the enormity, the overwhelming complexity,” the man says. “Instead, we say we’re bringing back the Starfield Lily.” he says, and gestures at the green as the sky overhead sinks towards a rusty orange.

“A life built on death, riches, adventure, and all that bullshit. And now, here I am, giving it all up to save a ‘flower.’” The sky shifts to sunless-bright, then deep blue, and in a moment the stars are everywhere. The lilies, spread across the hillside, backed in the night by depthless char, are alight and open. The petals ablaze with a glow that sways and bobs in the night air, a breathless mirror to the galaxies above. “That we might ramble amidst true majesty again, I give it gladly.”