Sia found the wire before Xu Hao saw the deer.
She was walking a few paces ahead on the lower trail when she stopped, lowered her head and made a soft sound in her throat. Not the growl she used when someone threatened Xu Hao, but a worried whine he knew from the time she'd found an injured pigeon behind his apartment building.
"What is it, girl?"
Sia looked towards the ferns.
Xu Hao followed her gaze. Something brown moved between the leaves. At first he thought it was a fallen branch shifting in the wind. Then a narrow head lifted and two dark eyes turned towards him.
A young deer.
It attempted to stand. One hind leg came up, caught, and jerked back to the ground. The animal stumbled and kicked wildly before sinking into the ferns again.
Xu Hao crouched. Around its leg ran a thin dark loop attached to a cord disappearing beneath a fallen log.
"A snare."
Er Bao, who had been examining tracks farther up the trail, came back immediately. Da Bao followed with the other huskies.
"Keep the girls away," Xu Hao said. "It's frightened."
Da Bao called Little One, who reluctantly abandoned a promising hole beneath a tree. Grey sat beside Er Bao. Sia remained close to Xu Hao without being asked.
The deer struggled again, twisting the loop tighter.
"Can we cut it?" Xu Hao asked.
Er Bao studied the line from a distance. "Perhaps. But don't touch it yet."
"It's hurting the animal."
"I can see that. What else do you see?"
Xu Hao looked around. The log lay across a narrow run through the undergrowth. There were broken stems where the deer had thrashed, and a small upright stake partly concealed beneath dead leaves. He traced the dark cord to it. The cord wasn't wire after all, but a thin, tightly twisted fibre rubbed with something that made it look almost metallic.
There was another line attached to the stake, stretching towards a sapling bent under tension.
"A spring snare," Xu Hao said.
Er Bao nodded. "If you cut the wrong part, that branch will come back through your face."
Xu Hao leaned away at once.
* * *
They approached slowly. Er Bao held the bent sapling steady with one hand while Da Bao secured it with another cord. Xu Hao remained beside the deer, talking quietly even though the animal couldn't possibly understand him.
"Easy. You're all right. Well, you're not all right, but we're trying to improve the situation."
The animal's sides rose and fell rapidly. A little foam gathered around its mouth. When Xu Hao reached towards its leg, it kicked, missing his wrist by inches.
He withdrew.
"That would have been educational," Da Bao observed.
"I already understand the lesson."
He pulled off his coat and folded it, keeping the cloth between his arm and the animal's hooves as he approached again. Er Bao crouched opposite him, one huge hand resting gently against the deer's shoulder to limit its movement without crushing it.
"Ready?" the giant asked.
Xu Hao nodded. "Hold it steady. Don't push down on the chest. It needs to breathe."
He felt the cord beneath his fingertips. It had cut through the fur into the skin, leaving a raw ring above the joint. He worked a blunt twig beneath the loop to lift it away from the wound, then guided Er Bao's knife through the tightest part.
The cord snapped.
The deer tried to leap away. Xu Hao pulled back just in time as its free leg struck the ground beside him. Er Bao kept it from rolling into the log while Da Bao released the bent sapling carefully.
"Done," Xu Hao said.
But the animal still couldn't bear weight properly. It made one attempt, then collapsed again.
Xu Hao examined the limb. No obvious deformity. The lower leg remained warm, and the animal pulled away when he touched its hoof. That was encouraging, though hardly enough to rule out serious damage.
"The skin's been damaged," he told Er Bao. "And it may have strained the joint. I can't fix everything here."
"Can it move?"
"Probably. Not quickly."
Da Bao looked towards the trees. "Other beasts will find it."
Xu Hao knew that. He also knew that taking it to camp would draw attention and create a problem none of them was equipped to solve. A frightened wild animal wasn't a patient who would lie quietly while he changed a bandage.
"We can wash the cut and leave it somewhere sheltered," he said. "Then give it room to go when it's ready."
Er Bao agreed. They carried it only a short distance to a sheltered patch beside the stream. Xu Hao rinsed the wound and left the animal on soft ground where it could rest without tangling the leg again. It watched them with enormous, frightened eyes.
"I can't promise you'll survive," he told it.
Da Bao tilted his head. "What did you say?"
"Nothing useful."
He backed away. The deer remained where it was, trembling but breathing steadily.
* * *
They returned to the snare rather than continuing their hunt.
Er Bao examined the stakes and the knots. His expression became serious in a way Xu Hao recognised immediately.
"What?"
"These weren't made by an animal."
"I'd gathered that much."
"The cord isn't old. Whoever set it came through recently."
Da Bao inspected a cut in the sapling, then rubbed the bark between his fingers. "Not more than a few days."
Xu Hao looked towards the trees. He'd been thinking about tigers for so long that he had nearly forgotten the other reason the brothers avoided people.
"Hunters?"
"Perhaps," Er Bao said. "The lower trails sometimes see travellers. Most are looking for meat or materials to sell in town. But we shouldn't assume everyone has harmless intentions."
Xu Hao glanced at the trees above them. The path climbed towards their ridge. Anyone following this run might eventually discover the camp.
"Should we remove the trap?"
Da Bao shook his head. "If someone returns and finds it gone, they'll know somebody came through."
"If we leave it, another animal gets caught."
They stood for a moment considering the small loop of cord hanging beside the log.
Er Bao took a knife and cut the line near the stake. Then he unwound the cord and scattered the pieces among the roots, where they could no longer tighten around a leg.
"If the hunter returns, he'll know," Xu Hao said.
"Possibly. I'd rather have him wondering about a broken snare than leave another beast to strangle itself."
Da Bao nodded. Xu Hao was grateful that the decision had required no more argument.
They inspected the ground farther along the run and found another stake with the same dark cord. This one was empty. Er Bao disabled it too.
"Two traps," Xu Hao murmured. "Same method. Same person, probably."
"Probably," Er Bao echoed.
There were no clear footprints. The trail was damp in places but rocky in others, and whoever had come through had left no objects behind. Xu Hao could not tell whether the traps belonged to one hunter or several. He wrote the location down on bark, but didn't attempt to follow the human scent.
* * *
They returned by a longer route, keeping the dogs close. Sia glanced back more than once. Xu Hao couldn't tell whether she was thinking about the deer or detecting something Er Bao had missed.
At camp, Da Bao set down his pack and inspected the warning line again. Xu Hao had never seen him do it twice in one afternoon.
"You think someone's looking for you," Xu Hao said quietly.
Da Bao kept his eyes on the ground. "Somebody set those traps. That doesn't mean they're looking for us."
"But they could be."
"Yes."
For once, the giant didn't offer a joke.
After supper Xu Hao sat beside Er Bao, who was cleaning the knife used to cut the snares. The dark cord lay in a small coil beside him, one length kept as evidence.
"What would your father have done?" Xu Hao asked.
"About the traps? He'd have removed them. He didn't like needless suffering."
"And about someone coming through the forest?"
Er Bao looked towards the dark. "He would have watched. Sometimes danger passes without seeing you. Sometimes it doesn't. The mistake is treating every traveller as an enemy, or pretending no traveller could ever become one."
Xu Hao thought of the club that had knocked him unconscious on his first day. The brothers had mistaken a lost scholar for someone hunting them. They'd nearly sold him because of that fear, then changed their minds when they came to know him.
"I suppose I'm evidence for both sides of that argument," he said.
Er Bao smiled faintly. "You are."
The next morning, when Xu Hao returned to the sheltered patch beside the stream, the deer was gone. The grass where it had lain was flattened, and there were three uneven hoofprints leading into the ferns.
He couldn't know whether it would live.
But it had been able to leave.
He stood for a moment with Sia pressed against his leg, then turned back towards the ridge.
There was no triumph to record in his little chart. Only a snare cut, an animal given a chance, and the knowledge that humans had begun using the lower trails again.
On the way home, Sia stopped at a tree and sniffed a fresh cut in its bark.
Xu Hao looked closer.
A narrow mark, clean and deliberate. Not the pale cuts he'd made to guide himself along the escape route.
Somebody had been marking a path through the forest.