Traps: a Novel

Backpacker Baz Billings sets out for a camping trip in the Adirondacks but encounters en route a group of armed men, who detain him for trespassing. In an attempt to escape, he accidentally discovers that his abductors are a professional hit mob. He is recaptured but later succeeds in escaping, subsequently killing one of his pursuers. He reports his experience to the FBI.

The mob retaliates by kidnapping Baz and his girlfriend and sending them, bound and blindfolded, over a cliff in a stolen van. But by chance, the two elude harm and make a getaway.

Determined to exact justice, Baz tracks down the group's new lair and breaks in to steal their files. In the high-speed chase that follows, he lures some of them to their deaths. Afterward, a surviving sniper attempts to kill him, but Baz engineers a successful reprisal.

He then wins back the affection of his traumatized girlfriend.

The end.

E. L. Tabler’s love affair with nature began at age four, catching and releasing crawdads in a creek just behind his Missouri home. Later, after visiting sequoias in California, he hitched across the country, hiked along a river ravine in the Rockies, beheld Galveston smothered in wildflowers, and was seduced by Vermont’s fall colors. During eleven years in the printing trade, he snatched hours to explore Midwestern forests, where he observed deer grazing, snapping turtles mating, and a school of carp playing a game of “Chicken.” He has resided in Massachusetts for most of his life, where he worked in the human services field for twenty-five years. For ten of those years, he lived in a remote loft with a wood-burning stove for heat and kerosene lamps for light. Callers included deer, moose, woodchucks, wild turkey, porcupine, and bullfrogs. He considers himself an epicure of edible wild foods, particularly mushrooms. Writing about nature has enabled him to more fully immerse himself in her.