The Snare and the Stag

The air in the Siuslaw National Forest carried the smell of damp earth and pine, but underneath it, something acrid—like burnt sugar and old copper—clung to the back of my throat. My girlfriend, Lena, and I had been hired by a nonprofit to survey invasive plant species, and our coordinator, a man named Bartholomew, had insisted on a ‘team retreat’ at his private parcel of woodland. Bartholomew was a former logger turned environmentalist, with a beard that looked like a matted bird’s nest and a habit of speaking in aphorisms that made no sense. He walked with a gnarled walking stick, its head carved into a snarling badger, and he claimed it had been a gift from ‘the little people’ who lived in his trees.

The retreat was held in a clearing where a dozen young men, all in their early twenties and wearing Carhartt jackets, sat on stumps, whittling. They were lean, with the feral energy of stray dogs, and they could do backflips from a standstill, landing silently on the moss. One of them, who introduced himself as Soot, had eyes that were too pale, almost white, and he smiled at me with teeth that were sharpened to points. I tried to laugh it off, but Lena squeezed my hand.

Bartholomew took a liking to us, especially after I mentioned I’d read a book on Pacific Northwest folklore. He insisted on showing us his ‘projects.’ He led us down a trail lined with small, crude cages made of twigs and wire, each about the size of a shoebox. Inside some, I saw tufts of red hair or what looked like tiny bones. Lena caught my eye and rolled her eyes, but I felt a cold knot in my gut. ‘The forest is infested with changelings,’ Bartholomew said, tapping his cane against a cage. ‘I’ve been trying to catch one for years.’ He laughed, and the sound was like gravel being shaken in a jar.

The party went on through the night. There was a bonfire, and the young men did their flips, and someone broke out a fiddle that seemed to play by itself. Lena and I drifted away, tired of the noise. We found a fallen hemlock, its roots ripped up like a giant claw, and sat there, watching the stars fade. It was the hour before dawn, and the forest grew eerily quiet, even the wind holding its breath.

Then I saw it. Between two ferns, no bigger than my index finger, a tiny figure stood perfectly still. It was pale, almost translucent, with enormous black eyes and thin, spindly limbs. It wore a scrap of cloth that might have been a leaf. As I stared, it raised one hand, and it was holding a tiny, glinting snare—like a miniature version of Bartholomew’s cages. It set the snare on the ground right in front of us, and then it vanished.

Lena hadn’t seen it. She was looking at the tree line. ‘Did you hear that?’ she whispered. ‘Like a bell.’ I didn’t hear anything, but I felt a sudden, terrible heaviness in my chest, as if something was pressing down on my sternum. The tiny snare glinted in the pale light, and despite all logic, I reached down to touch it.

The moment my finger brushed the wire, the forest erupted. The ferns lunged at us, wrapping around our ankles. The ground beneath us softened and began to pull. I tried to yell, but my voice came out as a dry rasp. Lena’s face contorted in terror, and then she was yanked backward into the undergrowth, shrieking my name.

I fought against the ferns, but they were like iron bands. As the light grew, I saw Bartholomew and his young men, no longer human. Their skins had turned to bark, their eyes to hollow knots, and they were moving through the trees with the terrible grace of walking branches. The one called Soot looked at me and said, ‘You shouldn’t have touched the snare. Now you’re ours.’ I wanted to argue, to say it was just a tiny cage, but then I felt a barbed root pierce my side, and I stopped thinking.

I woke up in a hollow log, bound in what felt like spider silk. Lena was there, her face pale and streaked with dirt, and she was holding a small wooden figure that looked exactly like me. ‘They carved us,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘Bartholomew said we’re trophies. He’s going to put us in his collection.’ I tried to move, but I was paralyzed. I could only stare at the tiny snare nestled in Lena’s palm, and I realized that we had been the ones caught, not the fairies.