Mountain Chapter 8

Read Table of Content | +Kyla Scurchio
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      The first day in the Mountain was the hardest. I was plundered every other hunt.
"What are we doing WRONG?!?" I yelled kicking my trap a few feet. My fresh Brie had been stolen by a mouse I was unfamiliar with. I'd seen different mice run under rocks here and there but never got a good enough look.  I managed to catch many more gold mice than I had any where else but they were old news.

     Zugzwang didn’t fare much better. "This would be so much easier if we didn’t
have to wait so long for trap checks." He grumbled.
I replaced my trap in its spot and snatched the stone base from underneath it. "I'm using the explosive base.” I said yanking it out of my bag.
"Careful with that mate." said Zugzwang removing his own from his pocket. How it fit in there was a
mystery to me.

     Whatever the reason, the base swap seemed to do the trick; though we still missed here and there, no doubt because our trap was too weak, we managed to catch more often.
On the third day I'd done it, I snagged the mouse that had been looting me.
"Mountain- I checked my trap and found I had caught a 5 oz ninja mouse!”
I quickly sketched in the body of the mouse for future reference. With notes on what I used to get him. Swiss worked OK, but I favored brie since it seemed to attract the rarer mice.
"Dear King, Zugzwang caught a Zombie mouse today, what hope do we have if the mice are undead.     -P"

     Zugzwang on the other hand was ecstatic; he examined the little creature left and right. "I've never seen such a thing! Have you?" He asked me. I stared at him like he was an idiot. "Oh, right, forgot." I shook my head.

     I'd never gone so long with such little sleep. Hunting with Zugzwang did help though; we hunted in shifts, every few hours he would be on trap checks. He took over jotting down the catches in the Journal as I slept. After a while I'd take over, but it wasn’t enough sleep, the mountain was rough. The terrain was killer, moving up and down hill sides freezing in the dead of night, snow falling five days in. I couldn’t wait to be done with the place but I knew there were more mice lurking in the shadows.
When the snow settled, finally, we had about a foot beneath us. I brushed snow out of the tent and headed to check the traps as Zugzwang slept. To my astonishment I found a little mouse frozen solid reaching for a piece of my cheese.  And in Zugzwang's trap I was shocked as I found a huge 1lb snow mouse; An Abominable snow mouse, I thought to myself. I brought them back for sketching and recording. Zugzwang was awake by the time I returned.

     We both gawked at the large snow mouse. Our little traps were out of their depths.
"What do you say, time for an upgrade?" I asked Zugzwang
He grinned, "You know I'm up for that."