HOW TO BE AN ALPHA: STEP 3 BE CREATIVE

"It should be somewhere here." Harvey said.

He put one hand on the small of my back and started nudging me back towards the path. If he was trying Killion's magic steering trick, it didn't work. I guess betas had different magic tricks.

Nix prodded behind some bushes, "It's here."

I ignored Harvey's prompting and flapped over. The oversized sleeves and the high snow made it hard to walk.

"It's snowed in!" Nix frowned at the contraption.

Harvey and Flynn came over.

"Sam, go wait by the path." Flynn told me. What? Did he think I would walk into it?

He frowned a little at the trap, "We need to move the snow but not let the trap stand out."

That was hard. There were snow piles everywhere, a suddenly flattened square area would look really obvious.

"I wonder what the morning patrols were doing." Flynn frowned at the unchecked trap.

I flapped around making messy tracks all over the other side, "This way, they'd think the trap is over here and when they move over to avoid it, BAM! We catch them!"

The guys looked amused, but I doubt they were taking me seriously.

"Let's just clear off the excess snow and reset the trap. Then we'll see what we can do about concealing it." Nix decided.

Nix was surprisingly competent with traps. Flynn remarked just as much.

"My dad taught me since I was a boy." Nix said, "Used to get myself caught in them. My dad will leave me there till I figure a way to get myself out. Once I was stuck overnight. My dad's a ***********."

And they said my dad was a radical father, sending me to school outside our packlands.

I wonder what they would say about Gamma Endo. I wouldn't go as far as to use the word Nix did though, but I wasn't the one left overnight outdoors in a trap.

The guys were done resetting the trap. They tried to smooth on some snow, just enough to cover it. Okay... That left the trap looking very obvious with a sudden thin layer to carefully hand smoothed snow. It's a good thing I was going with my plan. I made more snowy messes around the trap and then I flattened out a square patch, being very careful to make the corners unnaturally sharp.

Nice! Counterfeit trap was ready!

"It'll probably be snowed over by evening." Nix told me as he surveyed my handiwork.

"We need to keep moving." Harvey informed us. "It's already been 30 minutes."

Opps. I guess I got carried away.

We hurried on to the next trap. There were five in our route. Luckily three out of two had been properly check and reset by the earlier teams, so it was quick work.

At our last stop, it was another abandoned trap. I am beginning to think the reason why our traps didn't catch anything was because it couldn't. This last trap had been unchecked for so long, there was a small brambly bush growing through it. I tried to pull them out but the roots were deep, plus the thorns scratched my hands.

Flynn frowned, "Why wasn't this reported? It's been too long since I've patrolled this route myself."

Because this was a "safe" route, it was often taken by patrol teams without a delta or elite warrior leading it. Apparently, the warriors had decided the thorny brambles were not worth the trouble pulling out. So the trap had been trapped by it for what looks like months.

I knew these brambles. How many times as a child I had played among brambles like these.

Thorny angry things... I used to imagine they were the same ones as in the cartoon, Sleeping Beauty. I imagined them growing huge so I could scale them (even as a child, I was seriously sure I would have done a better job than the prince.)

I even tried to plant some around the house as a kid. I thought it would make a good natural defense. Unfortunately my mum didn't like them.

Dad swapped them for rose bushes. The workers who had to plant them made a big fuss over having to remove the brambles which had in those few weeks since I've planted them, rooted themselves quite firmly down. Dad had to play them extra to deal with it.

Anyway, my point was that I had experience with these things.

"Just let me do it." I showed off my palms, "See I heal fast."

Harvey made a face like he'd rather die. It was quite funny because we were just talking about dealing with a small shrub.

"Leave it." Flynn decided, "Let's report it when we get back. Let someone come with the tools to deal with it."

"Just give me 3 minutes." I said.

Flynn looked at the other guys and shrugged. What harm would that do?

I took off my warrior jacket and slipped it around the base of the bramble. Then I tied it into a tight knit and pulled. The ground was frozen, making the job much harder than in my memory as a child in summer.

Grrr... But I didn't have my wolf strength when I was a pup, and now I do. I used the heel of my boot to kick the ground and jerked the tree hard, shaking it to break up the icy ground. Then I pulled up in one quick movement. The plant came out.

I heard the spring of the trap give out.

"Nix! The trap!" Harvey yelled.

Nix ran for the catches on the side but he was obviously not going to make it. I took the couple of steps needed out of the trap range, but Harvey had rushed in to push me out.

The trapped creaked and slammed shut together with my Beta inside.

I laughed.

I laughed so hard, I tripped over the uprooted bramble and fell on it. My lucky vest blocked the thorns. I knew it was lucky!

I rolled into the snow. Hahahaha. Harvey's face was priceless.

"Are you hurt?" Flynn asked.

"No. Just feeling stupid." Harvey answered with a wry smile.

Hahahahaha...

"Hang on, Beta, I've got it." Nix proved himself once again, releasing Harvey from the trap and resetting it.

"Or we could leave him inside overnight till he figures how to free himself." I joked.

Nix snickered.

Harvey raised a brow to me, but he laughed a little too.

I undid my warrior jacket and got it back on. Then kicked the bramble to the side.

Flynn and Nix covered concealed the trap with some snow and branches. Harvey dusted the snow off himself.

Then we finished the rest of the route uneventfully.

"Mission accomplished!" I announced to Beta Lucas the moment we saw him back at the shed.

We took off our jackets and dumped them into the hamper. Another reminder that we got a cool duty. I mean, they could have put us on laundry duty. Yeah, you can tell I had very little expectations of what the adults would have come up with for "Alpha Duties".

Beta Lucas opened his mouth to greet us, but closed it again and frowned when a mindlink came through.

"Seems like the next patrol team needs help." Beta Lucas said.

Apparently we took so long to finish our patrol that the next team had already started off.

We followed Beta Lucas down the same route. It was cold without the warrior jacket out in the open.

At the first trap, we found the patrol team that was scheduled after us...caught in the trap.

I tried not to laugh. Our decoy trap worked exactly as I had planned! (Just as long as you overlook the fact that instead of rogues, it caught our own warriors.)

The warriors had noticed the fake trap at once, and stepped away so as not to be caught by it. Together, they stepped directly onto the real and relatively less obvious trap and got caught. All three of them.

Beta Lucas looked at the otherwise untouched set up, the decoy trap, and the three warriors caught haplessly in the real one. And then at us.

"Well, at least we know it works." I told him.

Nix made a snorting sound.

Harvey shot him a look and nodded at the trap indicating for Nix to go disarm it. The gamma climbed up and started work on the catches and soon the warriors were released.

They dusted the snow off while the guys re-setted it for the next patrol team... I mean the chance of rogues.

Rogues won't come here. After walking this route myself, I knew this from deep in my wolf core.

We were too near the pack's town, if they even came close, Wolfie would have been on alert and I doubt Dad's wolf wouldn't have noticed either.

Remember that black wolves were aggressively territorial. Usually, due to historical events, this was said like it was a bad thing. But it was a useful trait if you wanted to protect your pack. Two sides of the same coin.