Hard Ground (3 page)

Symbiosis

It was opening day of firearms deer season. CO Steven Burdoni made his way cautiously along an old tote road that split off the Norway Truck Trail and encircled a knob locals had dubbed “Mount Pile of Rocks.” Every year on opening morning of deer season in Dickinson County, Burdoni walked into a deer blind here, and the hunter was always over-baited.

The ground blind sat at the bottom of an opening with a clear shooting lane up the hill. But this year Cotton Nebel wasn't in his blind. His pickup was parked where it always was, and Burdoni immediately felt anxious.

Nebel had always been there. A slight, cadaverous man, Nebel wouldn't tip scales at 120 with his old red wool hunting plaids and boots on. The man looked sickly, was a chain smoker with an owl's bark of a cough you could hear 200 yards away.

The man lived in Kentucky but owned a ramshackle deer camp in Dickinson County, used the same blind every season, and Burdoni wrote the same ticket every year. The man always bought an out-of-state license and never shot more than one deer. In all things but baiting, Nebel seemed a law-abiding citizen.

Burdoni got to the blind, saw a fresh Camel butt in the Sanka can the Kentuckian used for an ashtray. There was a single spent .30-30 cartridge gleaming on the ground and a Winchester model 90 lying on top of an old canvas gun case, the lever action wide open for safety.

The conservation officer scanned the hill above him and saw a large buck walking nonchalantly across the open area, easily in shooting range. Beyond the deer, a man popped to his feet and waved. Nebel. The man began coughing, which sent the passing buck into flight.

The game warden worked his way up the hill to find Cotton Nebel's arms red with blood and a fresh gutpile in a dip below a dead six-point. “You see that dandy buck, Steve?” Nebel asked, wiping a hand on his pants and reaching out a bony hand for a handshake.

“You shoulda waited for the big one,” Burdoni said.

“Hell, you know I don't care none about no such things. Can't eat them damn horns. Wondered when you'd mosey by.”

“How much bait this year?” the officer asked.

“The usual. Hair over two gallons.”

Burdoni looked at some apples, corn, two sugar beets. “Looks pretty close to two gallons,” the officer said. “And it's spread out real nice.”

“Nope, I'm over, Steve,
way
the heck over for sure. Got at least two wheelbarrys full.”

Burdoni looked around. “What wheelbarrow?”

“Was a finger of speech,” Nebel said. “I used my bucket.”

“You want help getting your buck down to the blind?” Burdoni asked.

“Be good,” the old man said. “Thanks, Steve.”

They dragged the dead animal down the hill, and Nebel lit a new cigarette and held out the pack, which Burdoni refused.

“You gonna write me my ticket now?” Nebel asked.

“Well, you're not that much over, if at all, and the bait's spread out pretty good,” the game warden said.

Nebel looked crushed. “I'm over, I
know
I'm over. You
got
to write me, Steve. The law's the law.”

Burdoni said, “I don't know. I've seen a lot worse, far more egregious violations.”

“Steve,” the hunter said, “sir, I've already done marked my rifle.” The man picked up the .30-30, closed the lever, and showed the stock to the game warden. It had today's date at the end of a string of nine other dates.

“But you've already got your buck, Cotton.”

“That don't matter none. This here's a matter of tradition,” the hunter said. “For the both of us. You write a ticket, I get a deer. You get a ticket to start off your law season, and it's good for the both of us. You and me, we do this every year, like partners. I drove all the way from Kansas City. Left my rig there just so I could make the opener.”

“I don't know, Cotton.”

“How about I make us some fresh coffee?”

“Don't bother.”

“Ain't no bother, and your daft talk's a-gettin' me twisterpasted. I'll make coffee, and you write my ticket. We got a deal?”

“I have to tell you I've seen a lot worse baiting than this, even from you, Cotton.”

“I know, I know, I didn't have time to do 'er right this year. Grabbed bait, drove over here, hauled it up the hill, walked back down, looked, and there stood that fool six-point. Had no choice. I picked up the rifle and let fly. Dropped right there at the bait. Didn't even have to track the dang fool.”

“Well, the bait's just not enough to bother me, especially being spread out the way it is. Got your license?”

“Yut, picked her up in Iron Mountain. Old boy down there stays open all night before the season opener.”

“Let me take a look.”

Nebel handed his license to the conservation officer.

“Says you bought this at oh four-forty.”

“'Bout right,” Nebel said. “Thirty minutes to camp from IM.”

“You drove to camp, grabbed bait, and came over here. How long from your camp to here?”

“Half hour.”

“How long to walk in, put the bait on the hill?”

“Dunno, mebbe 'nother half hour, I speck.”

Burdoni scratched his chin, took out his notebook and pencil. “Oh four forty-five leaves store. That's oh five fifteen at your camp. Five minutes there, half hour to here, makes oh five forty-five, half hour to walk in, dump bait, and get down to your blind. That gets us to oh six fifteen, I'd say. You have a smoke before you shot?”

“No time. Looked up, and there he were a-standin'. I put Old Annie's sights on him an' squeezed one off.”

“Shooting light?”

“Got 'im, didn't I?”

“How come you're just gettin' to gutting the animal now?”

“Truth is, I'm gettin' old, Steve. Going on eighty. Took a while to get the energy to walk up that dang hill again and do what had to be done. Deer was down. No hurry, was there?”

“I guess I could cite you for shooting early, before legal shooting hours,” Burdoni said.

“Fine by me, Steve. Whatever you think is right.”

“But I think we'll just call it over-bait and be done with it. The fine's lower.”

“That's real good, Steve, just so long as there's a ticket.”

Burdoni made out the citation and gave it to Nebel. He explained for the tenth time that the man could pay it by mail, did not have to appear. That it was a civil fine, not criminal.

They drank fresh hot coffee, and the game warden walked away listening to the old man cough. One of these year's Cotton Nebel wouldn't be around anymore, but until then, he'd humor the old man. What exactly a ticket did for Cotton Nebel was beyond Burdoni's ken, but this was the Upper Peninsula, it was the opening day of deer season, and it was what it was . . . whatever
this
was.

Going Viral

During seventeen years as a game warden in Chippewa and Luce Counties, Marlin Rodgers had earned the name “Hemlock” from local violators who insisted he was like poison to their work. Out in the county's cedar swamps and boreal forests, outlaws of all shapes and hues developed sudden palsies when he materialized.

There were some who maintained Rodgers was the most feared man in Luce County.

His fourteen-year-old daughter, Deven, saw it differently. She rolled her eyes, sighed, even walked away whenever he tried to speak to her. Or she told him, “Like, you need to get a life!” Until she was ten, she would hardly let him go off to work alone. Now she had banned him from her school in his CO uniform, even to pick her up after basketball or softball practice. When he did manage to talk to her now, it seemed almost always at her back. The legend in the woods was persona non grata in his own home. Wife Patsy, a guidance counselor at Newberry High School, constantly reassured him that this was a stage, and it would pass. He was dubious.

Deven was a first-rate student and, like her friends, addicted to computers, phones, and various electronic contraptions. She talked about Facebook like it was an alternative world—and a much better one at that. Above all, Deven seemed to measure the importance of everything by whether or not it appeared on YouTube.

Rodgers had looked at all the computer crapazola and rejected it as escapist at best, toys for kids with a little money. It was bad enough how electronically tricked out his own patrol truck was these days, like Big Brother rode on his shoulder, monitoring every move he made.

Having checked his snailmailbox slowmailbox at the district office, Rodgers picked up a new elastic ammo sleeve for his shotgun and slid it over the stock of his .12 gauge. He put eight shells into the sleeve, with the lips pointed down so he could pull them downward into the palm of his hand during a firefight, a maneuver officers called a combat release, something they all practiced.

Rodgers had just slid the shotgun into its case when Central called. “Current location, Two One Nineteen?”

“Just leaving the district office.”

“Just got a report of a man covered with blood in the woods, two miles south of your location on a two-track that veers west by a red barn. Troops and our people are tied up.”

“I know the place, Central,” he said, getting into his truck. “Two One Nineteen is rolling that way.”

Man covered in blood. This could be nasty or nothing. You never knew until you were on the scene to assess for yourself. Eyewitness reports, so called, were generally useless and often totally inaccurate.

He found a young woman waiting out by County Road 403, and when he pulled up, she was shrieking, “Help him! Please God, somebody help him, he's bleeding bad!”

“Calm down, ma'am,” Rodgers said in a firm but quiet voice. “Who is bleeding?” he asked as he snapped on blue latex gloves.

“I don't know, I don't know! I was, like, walking in, like, you know, like, the woods, and I saw him. Oh my God, there's so much blood!”

“Where is this man?” Rodgers asked. The woman was jacked up on adrenaline and fear.

“Follow me, follow me!” the woman said and started running down the two-track with a grassy hump in the middle.

Rodgers picked up his emergency first aid kit and walking briskly, followed her until she neared a shed, began stabbing with her finger, and screaming, “There, there, there!”

Rodgers got close and saw nothing except a caved-in building with tarpaper walls. “Where exactly, ma'am?”

The woman ran to the ruin and pointed, “There, there, oh my
God
!”

Rodgers felt his heart jump. Bad news: bloody
and
behind cover. He moved in at an angle, got to the corner of the derelict shed, looked around, and saw the man up on his feet: fifties, sixties, wife beater shirt, balding with what remained of a mullet cut, both arms dripping blood, flies buzzing around in hungry armadas.

Secure the scene, the cop voice in his head preached. The man had what looked to be a Bowie knife in his left hand, same arm that seemed to be cut. Big-ass knife, blade bloody.
Oh boy
.

“Sir, I'm Conservation Officer Rodgers, and I want to help you, but first please put the knife on the ground.”

“Wha . . .?” the bloody man mumbled, staring blankly.

He was weaving, unsteady, high, drunk, shocky maybe.
No way to assess injuries yet. Secure the scene.
“Sir,
please
put the knife
down
,” Rodgers repeated, standing back.

“So confused,” the man said, taking a step forward. “Dizzy…”

“Stop. Look at me!” Rodgers ordered. “Sir, look at me
now
! What's your name?”

“Dunno,” the man said, looking up slightly. “What's going on? Huh?”

“Put the knife
down
!”

“
I don't know
,” the man said, stepping forward again. “Where am I, what's going on?” Not just holding the knife, he was now brandishing it clumsily. Dandy, Rodgers thought.

“Sir, put the knife on the ground and step away from it.”

“Knife?”

“In your left hand. Put it
down!
”

The man gathered himself and looked like he was going to charge forward. Rodgers unsnapped the strap of his .40 cal and held his hand on the grip, ready. “Sir, I can't help you until you put the knife
down!
”

Still no compliance. Rodgers drew his weapon and held it behind his leg. “Put the knife down and step away from it, sir. Do it
now!
”

“You can't shoot him!” the female shrieked. “Why aren't you helping this poor man, ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod!” The woman was holding something in her hand, jumping up and down erratically. He snuck a look with his peripheral vision. She had a cell phone.
Just great
.

The man let the knife drop, stepped heavily against the camp wall, and slid to the ground. Rodgers got the knife, threw it behind him, and keyed his radio. “Central, Two One Nineteen needs paramedics. I'm about one hundred yards west of my vehicle on the two-track you sent me to. The road's good. They can drive all the way in.”

“EMS rolling, ETA five,” dispatch reported.

Rodgers knelt by the man and patted him down for other weapons.

“Ohmygod, are you going to help that poor man or just watch him die, pig?!?” the woman shouted in a shrill tone that hurt his ears. She pointed her phone at him. “I'm getting all of this, and it's going up on YouTube! Everybody's gonna see what you did! If he dies, it's on your head, pig!”

“Ma'am,” Rodgers said, trying to remain calm. “Please help us. Go back out to the road and show the EMS where we are.”

“While you fucking kill that poor man?!? Ohmygod, when are you gonna help him! I saw you pull your gun. I called for a cop, not some frickin' park ranger. This man needs
real
help.” The woman swooped close, held the phone to the CO's face, and flounced away. “What's your name?” she demanded.

“I don't know my name,” the bleeding man said with a whine to the woman in a weak and pathetic voice. “Do
you
know?”

The wound was in one arm and ugly but not immediately life-­threatening. “Sir, I'm going to help you” Rodgers said, as he leaned down for a closer look at the bloody area. “Can you hold up your arm for me?”

“Okeydokes,” the man said in a singsong voice.

The cut was long, down the middle of the left forearm. The blood on his face seemed to be from the arm wound. Rodgers broke open his kit, got a sterile bandage, wrapped the arm, and tied off the bandage to keep it in place. To maintain pressure on the bleeding, he took the man's right hand and held three fingers on the site. “Keep your fingers there. Can you help me do that, partner?”

“How'd I get here?” the man asked. “Who're you?”

“Help him!” the woman shouted as she made another running pass with the phone held out like a weapon. “For the love of our personal savior Jesus Christ!” the woman shouted. “Hey, jerkwad, help the man! He's bleeding to death!”

The woman jarred Rodgers's shoulder on the way past. “Ma'am, you need to back off. If you come close again, you're going to jail.”

“A man lies bleeding to death, and this pretend pig is harassing me!” she shrieked at her tiny phone and charged again, this time thrusting the cell phone close to his chest and his metal name tag.

Rodgers told the man, “You're not in any immediate danger, sir. It's going to be okay.”

“Where are my teeth?” the man asked, his eyes bulging like ping-pong balls.

Teeth?
Ms. Cell Phone swooped in again, and Rodgers caught her arm, stood her up rudely, spun her like a top, and frog-hopped her back to his truck as the EMS came roaring along. He pointed them forward and cuffed the woman to a metal ring on his bumper. “Do
not
move!” he shouted and went back to his patient.

“I holded it,” the man said with a nail-in-the-head grin.

“Good job,” Rodgers said, looking him over for other wounds as two EMS techs moved in to take over.

“Lots of blood,” he reported, “only one wound I can find, knife's over there behind us.” He pointed.

“He say what happened?” an EMS man asked.

“Confused, probably shocky.”

“Okay, we've got him from here,” the EMS woman said. “What's with the chick cuffed to your truck?”

“She reported it.”

“Why the histrionics?”

“Don't have the foggiest,” Rodgers said.

A Luce County deputy sheriff named Shewbart pulled in and crawled out of his patrol unit, looked at the man on the ground, then nodded toward Rodgers's truck. “The cuffed one do this?”

Rodgers said, “No, she reported a bloody man in the woods. When I got here, she got too rambunctious, and I had to restrain her.”

“You want to file charges?”

“No, just take her to the county, chew her ass, and let her go. And let her arrange her own transport home.”

“You know her, eh?” Deputy Shewbart asked.

“No.”

“Bonnie Lahti, known nutso. Got kicked out of a Colorado police academy her first week, lack of emotional stability. She lives near Engadine. Pain in the patoot, and she hates cops.”

“Thanks,” Rodgers said, stripped off his gloves, put them in a trash bag, and closed it with a tie-off. He put the knife in a clear evidence bag, labeled it, and headed for his truck. “Meet you guys at emergency at Joy,” he told the EMS team. Joy was the name of the local hospital, named after some woman whose history had never interested him enough to learn. Shit got named for rich people's money, and such history bored him.

“You get a name on our patient?” the EMS tech asked.

“It's just like you see. He's too confused. See you there.”

It turned out that the attempted suicide had a record of attempts, known bipolar disease, drug abuse, and a heavy booze problem, a loser's trifecta.

Rodgers completed his paperwork and met Deputy Shewbart in the hospital parking lot. “Lahti called somebody to pick her up.”

“Thanks.”

“She can go mega-whackadoodle in a heartbeat,” the deputy said. “Click, and she's off and running!”

“I saw,” Rodgers said. He spent the rest of the day in the north county checking trout fishermen, wrote no tickets, gave one man a verbal warning for a short fish, and explained how to safely release a fish: “Always wet your hands before handling a trout. Their slime is their autoimmune system. A dry hand will break the seal, could kill the fish.”

It was nearing midnight when he got home, parked in the trees behind the house, removed his equipment belt, took a shower, ate two leftover pork chops in the microwave, and slid into bed beside Patsy. “Dinner in the fridge,” she mumbled.

“Found the chops,” he said. “Thanks.”

“How was your day?” she asked sleepily.

“Uneventful,” he answered. “Yours?”

“The usual high school hijinks,” she said with a drowsy chuckle.

The next night Deven met him at the front door with an almost violent hug. “You are sooo
cool
, Daddio!” she said and rushed outside.

Patsy was grinning.

“What the hell was that all about?” Rodgers asked her.

“You went viral. You're somebody now.”

“I don't feel sick,” he said.

“Viral, not virus,” Patsy said. “On YouTube. You don't know?”

“Obviously not.”

“There's a video of you on YouTube. Posted last night, and there's already forty thousand hits in less than twelve hours. You're the talk of the high school and town.”

He stared at his wife, who led him to her laptop, hit some keys, and pointed.

The crazy Lahti woman was calling him every name in the book. “Nice,” he said. “CO as storm trooper.”