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By Root 674 0

he had wanted to come to Deadman’s Pond to see if coming here, where this thing had happened, would change his mind or confirm in his mind that he wanted to remove the possibility that Derek Warford could ever do this again to his son, or daughter, or to anyone else’s daughter. He could remove that possibility, he saw now, looking at the landscape. There was little difference in a wilderness like this between trapping a wild animal and hunting a man. There were several ways Treadway could do it. He could use a trap like those he used at home, but that would mean he would have to go buy the trap, and he did not want to go to Wilson’s outfitting shop on Water Street and meet any of the Wilsons or have them remember him. What he had thought about doing, the possibility that seemed most careful to him now, was a thing he had done one winter when he came across a live lynx caught in a trap belonging to Roland Shiwack.

The fertilizer bag in which he had brought his socks, underwear, and toothbrush was a multi-purpose bag. It was light and portable, which made it good for transporting sawdust, yet it was strong enough to carry fifty pounds of fifteen-thirty-fifteen fertilizer, and it could carry more weight than that if need be. Treadway saved fertilizer bags the way he saved wire and any kind of rope, and he had brought this one to St. John’s because it fit easily into his sleeping bag with his clothing in it and because he knew what else he could do with it.

It would not be hard to find Derek Warford and appeal to his vanity and to his wallet.

“They told me at the shop on the corner,” he imagined himself saying, “that of the young fellows around here, you’d be the one who best knows your way around. I’d like to see what all visitors come for: Cabot Tower and the trail down over the cliffs, but I can find those myself. What I want is to get off the main road.”

What this reconnaissance trip was for was to see if everything he had thought of doing was in fact feasible, and it was. Treadway took the fertilizer bag out of the waistband of his trousers. At the pond’s deepest shore he found a large stone. He put the stone in the bag and hid it under the bushes, marking the location in his mind. He had to use the steeple of St. Andrew’s Church in the distance down below as one of his markers, and for the other he used the tip of a transmitter tower on the Southside hills. He was not used to using manmade markers for trapping, and he kept thinking this would work only as long as the same men who had built the steeple and the tower did not decide to come and remove them, which could not happen with a mountain or a river bend or any of the markers he used when hunting in Labrador.

He hid the stone and the bag and he remembered the lynx. Roland Shiwack was a man who was not careful enough with his traps, in Treadway’s opinion. Treadway had trapped many a lynx but he had rarely trapped one that remained alive in the trap. He had used the right kind of trap in the right terrain, whereas Roland Shiwack made do with substitutes for the best trap, and that was why Roland’s lynx had been going crazy when Treadway found it. Treadway had not had his gun at the time, but he did have snare wire, and he had a bag like this one, and he was in a part of the land where there were boulders and a river with rapids that contained a deep pool. Any kind of cat will instantly calm down when you haul a bag over its head, even a wounded lynx, and then you can tie the bag with wire at the animal’s neck, and if you are lucky enough to be beside deep water you can carry the lynx to the pool, and as long as you have tied the snare wire properly and the stone inside the bag is the right stone, you can drown the lynx, and thus end one of the little pieces of torture that plague the secret corners of this earth.

This is what Treadway had in mind to do with Derek Warford. He had doubts, as he had done when he drowned Roland Shiwack’s lynx. What if the bag did not calm the lynx? What if the lynx clawed through the bag before the stone plunged him deep enough? What