Some one had sneaked up on Feller. Crouched in the ditch, bent over the mouth of the culvert, his hands in its cold gurgle of water, Feller felt eyes.
He whirled and saw shoes. On the roadbed above him were shoes with turned-up toes and zigzag tread. (That track, he had seen that running track this summer on the road past his cabin.) From the shoes rose short, muscular legs thick-furred with brown hair. The legs ended in red shorts. Above the shorts was a blue T-shirt with a broad tongue of sweat up its center. The bound ends of the two brown braids of hair jerked Feller's eyes up to a woman's face.
She was the ugliest woman Feller had ever seen. Her face was wide and flat, punctured in its middle by small, pinched-together blue eyes - a shovel held up to the sky with two .22 slugs shot through its center. Though he had never seen this woman, it was clear to Feller that she was the reason he had never married.
"What is it you're doing?" the woman asked.
Feller's eyes flickered to his basket of traps on the bank. Her eyes followed his.
"Setting a trap," Feller said. From disuse his voice croaked like a magpie. Living alone in the woods, Feller did not have to talk to many people. He liked it that way.
- Will Weaver
From The Trapper