Falmon Entries

Many of my readers won't know a figure four snare. Though I expect most to recognize the written numeral 4. In this case, as above, we're considering the closed version of the cipher, where the diagonal line touches the vertical. In the trap, the diagonal stick actually passes the vertical one, which notches into it. The bottom end of the diagonal notches into the horizontal stick, the trigger. Another notch, where the trigger crosses the vertical, isn't sturdy or secure but balanced by a hair's pull. The deadfall rests on the diagonal's top end, at the apex of the figure four. For squirrel-sized beasts it ought to be about twenty-five pounds, a flatish rock-rectangle would be first-rate. This falls to crush the prey or maybe only snag it by the hind legs. Or neck. A twig spring-work supports the raised end, leaving about a hand's width open in the middle trapping area, between the deadfall and a hard surface. The extended free end of the trigger runs back into the killing zone, a baited lever which provides the victim with the requisite mechanical advantage to engineer his own doom.

The trap into which Dathan's chair-backing tree cast itself very much resembled a figure four snare, in philosophy at least. Probably not so much in engineering. And in his case it wasn't the overarching, balanced firmament which threatened but the lower chainsaw-cut face of the prematurely split tree. This fir trunk played the role of the four's slanting stroke. The diagonal in these traps is really neither the lynchpin nor the trigger. It's the precisely but perfidiously balanced epitome of the treacherous support, of the villainous prop, of the double-crossing crutch. Assumed to be dependable but perfectly poised to detect and ruinously punish the slightest transgression. In this sort of trap the killing stroke would be generally accomplished at second hand, the perfidious prop being only the agent of dropping the weight of doom, but Dathan found himself staring directly into the face of a fatal treachery. And in an instant the low end of the diagonal tree, weighted from above with uselessness and purposelessness and capricious contingency, would swoop down and into him like the finally triumphant bull into the arrogant matador. The unalterably sprung trap hesitated. A necessary pause intervened, while the transcendent and the material accommodated to the new configuration. A necessary pause wherein Dathan could no more move to escape than the through-gored bull-fighter could avoid being ripped skyward. But a necessary pause which the green wood's shear strength measured, balancing time a moment, before slipping loose its final battering.

The tree butt lifted Dathan by his chin and flew him thirty five feet back and considerably uphill, to cancel his head ten feet up, against the trunk of a tree which he would never fall. Not a usual result, given the situation, even though one sometimes sees staggering improbabilities when even modest, second-growth trees are felled. The snare which caught Grandpa Falmon was only philosophically reminiscent of the figure four. It seems impossible that that exact combination of human ingenuity could be replicated, in a saw-cut tree, without contravening both routine falling practices and the constants of physics. Which is probably exactly how the spirit of fate intended things, in the case of its unfortunate son Dathan. That he should understand the aspects of being singled out.