They started up the upper terrace line an hour after dawn the next morning.
Deyun made slow, stubborn progress on his pine crutch, sweating through his wool shirt despite the biting frost. Where the shale pitched steeply between limestone outcrops, Ashaun walked on his injured side and let him brace his hand against her translucent stone left forearm—a steady, unyielding bar that neither tired nor slipped when his crutch tip skidded on loose gravel. Behind them, Osha carried Deyun’s leather tool-roll containing a heavy iron cold chisel, a pair of wire-nips, and a stone-headed maul, while Chaska kept Lilt circling low along the ridge crest to watch for syndicate skinners.
Before mid-morning they found and ruined two smaller baited snares set in narrow game chutes: each used a licked cake of gray quarry salt wired to a trigger pawl that dropped a weighted timber gate. Deyun knelt in the frozen dirt at both sites, showing Ashaun where to drive the cold chisel to shear the brass locking pins while Osha sketched the three-pine-cone syndicate stamp and recorded the exact locations in her notebook beside her father’s papers.
“One more,” Deyun panted, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve as they crested a terraced gully choked with dwarf willow and boulders. “The factor asked me where the glassback came down for water when the lower springs froze. There’s a warm mineral seep in the cleft just ahead. If they brought the big ratchet winch up here, that’s where they anchored…
