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Boggle & Sneak
Her clothes stay damp, but her
muscles begin to warm up.
Jump. If I had some tools& Jump.
& you stupid eagle& Jump. & I could catch
your fish thief. Jump. But what am I
supposed to do? Jump. Beat him to death
with sticks? Jump. Stupid eagle! Jump.
Clang!
Clang?
She stops jumping and looks down.
Underfoot is a flat scrap of rusted metal
about the size of her torso.
She picks it up and shakes some of
the mud off it.
This is what I have to work with?
But at least it s something.
She kicks around a bit and finds a
cracked piece of driftwood to use as a
handle for the metal scrap. There a
makeshift shovel. She surveys the area
once again.
If you assume that the thief is
fishing smelt out of this inlet, and if you
assume that the thief is coming and going
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Boggle & Sneak
by land, then you can imagine a line and
not a very long one that the thief has to
cross.
She walks to one end of the
imaginary line and starts to etch this
imaginary line into the ground with the
shovel. As she paces and etches, she tries
to make a plan: I could dig a pit to trap the
thief, but that would take forever. I could
use the shovel to dig a bare patch on the
ground, and use the bare patch to trap a
footprint. But what if the thief runs off and
all I have left is a footprint? I could
The dragging scrap metal hisses
along the ground, and then suddenly
clunks into rock.
She looks down and sees that the
whole remaining third of her imaginary
line is covered with rock. Digging or
scraping isn t going to help her there. She
shoves her ugly shovel violently into the
ground in frustration. There is a buzz,
and the dust around the shovel bursts
into flame.
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Boggle & Sneak
What s this?
She digs again, cautiously, with the
tip of her shovel, and brings up a severed,
rubber-coated wire. Electricity? Out here?
But first things first: she digs around the
smoldering weeds and carries them in the
shovel, gently, over to a patch of exposed
rock. Then she sets the weeds down and
sets about gathering the driest twigs and
branches she can find.
After a few minutes, she has a
satisfactory campfire going, and she sits
down beside it to soak up the heat and the
smoke.
* * *
When she wakes up, the fire has
dwindled down to embers and has to be
resuscitated. Once that s done, she
returns to inspect the wire she has
uncovered. Perhaps it leads somewhere?
She scratches the shovel against the
exposed wires, looking for more sparks.
When there are none, she begins to dig
along the wire, uncovering it and pulling it
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Boggle & Sneak
to the surface. For the first time since her
arrival, it feels like progress.
Little by little, she uncovers the
wire, skirting the rocks and looping
around trees. It seems to be working its
way toward the shore, but via a
roundabout path determined by the
presence of dirt and absence of rocks. She
works faster as she goes along, drawn on
by the hope of finding something, anything
that might help to justify all this work and
this whole stupid situation.
When she is within ten feet of the
shore hot, tired, but mercifully drier the
wire suddenly dives straight down into the
soil and disappears.
Several minutes of excavation make
a big hole and expose more wire but don t
make anything clear and don t provide any
way to continue. A wild-goose chase.
Alvy sits down, leans back on her
hands, and shuts her eyes. She can t
recall a time when she felt such a loss of
confidence. Does she really have it? Or is
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Boggle & Sneak
all her success bound up in her home, her
tools and her brother?
She opens her eyes and looks at the
long, useless wire lying in the dirt, looping
out of sight. She wishes she had not
wasted the effort. But then she had
started out trying to establish a perimeter,
to draw a line around the inlet that the
thief would have to cross; to find some
way of rigging a trap or an alarm to give
her a moment s advantage; to give her
some chance of catching or at least
identifying the thief.
She takes her shovel and severs the
near end of the wire, then starts coiling it
around her arm, and humming.
She retraces all her steps, all the
way back to the beginning of her
imaginary line.
Now then, where was I? This time, I
have an additional tool; something that
may actually get the job done right.
She climbs up into the low branches
of a bush and ties off one end of the wire,
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Boggle & Sneak
tugging at it to make sure it is reasonably
secure. Then she climbs down and runs
from bush to bush, stringing the wire out
at about the height of her raised arms,
and twisting it around tree trunks. Not
invisible, of course, but if the thief isn t
expecting it& And especially at night&
The work goes quickly, and even the
rocky section has just enough exposed
plants growing out of cracks to provide
hooks and hangers and tie-points for the
wire.
She reaches the end of the
imaginary line and drops the remaining
loops of wire onto the rocks. The wire is
long enough! It s about time her luck took
a turn for the better. She surveys her
handiwork. Not elegant, certainly. Ugly.
But all she needs for starters is a trip and
a shout&
At that moment, the wire pulls taut
and shakes violently. Something is
pulling on it, and hard.
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Boggle & Sneak
Right now? How could her trap
have worked so quickly?
She begins to follow the wire back,
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