the Poacher's Son (2010) (29 page)

The cottage was built partly of peeled fir and spruce logs and partly of beams and cedar shakes, and it had a red-shingled asphalt roof and a squat fieldstone chimney from which a wisp of smoke was rising. Yellow light streamed out through the windows onto the forest floor. I heard classical music playing softly from a stereo inside.

"Ora?" said Charley, pulling open the screen door. "We've got company."

The inside of the house smelled of a log fire and of meat cooking in an oven. There were vases with wildflowers in all the windows and books piled everywhere on tables and on the floor. On the walls hung innumerable deer and moose antlers and mounted trout and salmon trophies the length of my leg. The furniture all seemed too short somehow.

"Ora?"

"Hi, Charley. I'll be right out."

He frowned at the crackling fireplace. "Isn't it a little warm to have a fire going?"

"My bones were cold."

Charley removed his green cap and hung it from a deer-foot
coat peg beside the door. His thick gray-and-white hair stood up with the electricity even after he tried to smooth it. "She'll be right out."

I gestured at the taxidermy on the wall. "Those are some impressive fish."

"Ora caught that salmon there. She's a better fisher than me. Always has been. Of course, it's harder now for her to get out than it once was."

I was about to ask why it was harder when the answer arrived in the person of Ora Stevens herself. She rolled into the room in a wheelchair, a handsome woman with deeply set green eyes, high Scandinavian cheekbones, and shoulder-length, snow-white hair swept back behind her ears. She wore a spearmint-colored sweater over a white T-shirt, khakis, and tennis shoes.

Charley knelt down to kiss her pale cheek. "How you doing, Boss?"

"Boss! I wish he wouldn't call me that." She held out a hand to me. "Hello, Mike."

The grip was firmer than I expected. "It's nice to meet you, Mrs. Stevens."

"Ora," she corrected me.

"Mike has agreed to spend the night with us," he said, not mentioning anything about what had just happened back at the boat launch.

"That's wonderful. I have a room already made up."

"I hate to put you out this way."

She waved a hand. "It's no bother. We don't get enough company these days, as it is. Can I offer you something to drink, dear? We have lemonade, iced tea, beer."

"A beer would be great."

"I'll have iced tea," said Charley. "I guess I'll show Mike around in case he needs to use the facilities."

With Nimrod trailing us at every step, Charley escorted me
through the cottage. I realized now the reason for the paved walkway and the low furniture. Everything in the house had been arranged to be accessible to Ora Stevens in her wheelchair. The cottage was larger than it looked from outside and was cluttered with all sorts of woodsy knickknacks: animal skulls and hand-carved duck decoys, eye-catching rock specimens, and lots and lots of books. There were several framed photographs lined up along the top of a bureau. I noticed that two young women appeared in multiple pictures. "Are those your daughters?"

Charley nodded. "Anne and Stacey."

The photo that looked to be the most recent showed Ora standing--no wheelchair in sight--with her arms around both young women. Her hair was darker, as was Charley's.

"Do they live in Maine?" The question was all I could do to maintain the semblance of good manners.

"Anne does, down to Augusta. I'm not sure where Stacey is these days. She moves around a lot." He guided me back out into the cottage's great room.

"I'd love to have a place like this someday," I said honestly. It was the kind of cabin in the woods I'd always dreamed about.

"We only live here April through November. But sometimes I come up on my own to do some ice-fishing in the winter. It gets damned cold, but if I sleep out in front of the fireplace with Nimrod and a few blankets, I'm all right."

"How much land do you have here?"

"Twenty acres. Of course it belongs to Wendigo since we're on a lease."

"And they're really going to evict you?"

Charley made a face. "Oh, I expect they'll give us a chance to buy the land at a price five times what we can afford to pay. After we refuse, they'll make an offer on the buildings here, knowing we don't have the money to move them anywhere else. That's the way it happened when they went into Montana, from what I understand.
Wendigo never evicts anybody. They just force you to sell out at their asking price."

"How long have you been here?"

"Thirty-three years."

Ora came rolling out with our drinks and a bowl of roasted pumpkin seeds on a tray on her lap. "Dinner will be ready in half an hour," she said. "Why don't we go out onto the porch?"

Charley's mouth tightened. "I thought you felt cold."

"I'm warmer now," she said with an unconvincing smile.

Charley and I sat down in wicker rocking chairs, facing the lake, while Ora positioned her wheelchair to one side.

"Supper smells great."

She smiled. "I hope you don't mind moose. Charley got about three hundred pounds of meat from a man in town who hit one with his car."

"Totaled his Subaru," he said. "Lucky he wasn't killed."

"The irony is the poor man is a vegetarian." Ora gave a sad laugh.

"We'll be eating moose until it's coming out our ears," said Charley. "How many moose have you shot?"

"None, yet." It was an embarrassing admission for a Maine game warden.

"You'll get one with brainworm or struck by a car before too long, and you'll have to put it down." He was speaking as if I hadn't just resigned from the Warden Service. "So I understand you shot a bear last week."

"It was killing pigs. I was hoping to relocate it somewhere up this way, but a farmer wounded it, and I had to put it down."

"How big a guy was he?" asked Charley.

"Two hundred pounds. But he looked twice that size."

"Bears always look bigger than they are," he said. "That's the problem I have with baiting them during bear season. These dimwit hunters shoot the first bear that comes close to their tree stand. Half the time it's a yearling cub, thirty-five pounds or so. Then
they're too embarrassed to haul the little thing back to camp, so they stash it behind a brush pile and try for a bigger one."

"Charley." Ora gave him a hard look.

"I'll shut up," he said. "Baiting just gets me steamed. I know the state's got to manage the bear population, but still--"

"Charley."

"I'm finished." He took a sip of iced tea.

We gazed out through the porch screen at the lake's dark chop, the lights of Flagstaff burning like yellow and red stars in the far distance. The purr of a motorboat carried across the water, a fisherman returning late to shore.

Then Ora said, "Mike, I'm sorry about your father. This must be very difficult for you."

"Thank you," I said.

"Have you talked to anyone about this? A minister or counselor?"

"Ora," said Charley.

She leaned forward and touched the arm of my rocking chair with two fingers. "You can't save him, dear. Whatever happens is up to him. I hope you'll remember that."

"Ora, that's enough." Charley rose to his feet. "My God, what a busybody you are. She loves to ask questions she has no business asking."

She looked up at her husband, leaning back in her chair. "Charley's right," she said.

"You don't need to apologize."

"Oh, yes she does." He took hold of the rubber handles on the back of her wheelchair and pivoted her toward the door. "We'll check on supper and let you finish your beer in peace."

They left me alone on the porch.

Dinner was the best I'd had in ages. The roast was lean and tender with a stronger flavor than beef. There were new potatoes and
onions from the Stevenses' big garden, and Ora steamed some sort of greens Charley plucked from the yard. On the table was a Mason jar of wild mushrooms pickled in cider vinegar and a crusty loaf of home-baked bread wrapped in a warm napkin.

It was the kind of meal my mother never made. I remembered all the nights I'd spent as a kid staring down at an orange lump of boxed macaroni and cheese. Even when my dad brought home deer meat she managed to burn all the taste out of it. She just never put any effort into cooking. And, of course, the TV was always going, background chatter to their arguments.

Charley and Ora drank glasses of cold milk they poured from a pitcher. But I stuck with beer. There were four empty bottles in front of me, and I was feeling woozy by the time Ora brought out the blackberry pie.

"Charley gathered these berries along the dirt road that leads out here from town," she said. "We grow or gather most of what we eat. Always have."

"On a warden's pitiful salary, what else could we do?" he said. "We're like that Ewell Gibbons feller from those old TV commercials? 'Did you ever eat a pine tree?' There's just so much to eat out there if you know what to look for--fiddleheads and frog's legs and mushrooms. Then there's the usual game: moose, deer, rabbits, squirrels."

Ora patted his hand. "Charley has a stronger stomach than I do. I can do without rodents," she said. "I do love fish, though. Trout and salmon. Pan-fried perch and bullheads."

"Of course, these days you can't eat fish like you used to," said Charley. "On account of the mercury. All that damned acid rain from the Midwest dropping down into our lakes and rivers, poisoning our fish and birds. That's another sad development from when I was a lad. But I guess every old fart says the world has gone to hell in his lifetime."

"I think it really has," I said.

Ora looked at me with concern. "Why do you say that?"

"There's no wilderness left. There are roads everywhere now, and GPS receivers if you do get lost. You can make a cell-phone call from the top of a mountain or the bottom of a cave. You can go to the ends of the earth and if you look up, you'll still see a plane flying overhead."

I hadn't realized how crocked I was until I'd opened my mouth. But the more time I spent with Ora and Charley, the angrier I became at Wendigo for threatening to take away this beautiful house and this life of theirs. I thought of that heated meeting at the Dead River Inn, and part of me felt a little murderous.

"It's just change," said Charley with a big grin.

"Change for the worse."

"Son," he said, shaking his head with mock sadness, "you are the youngest old fart I've ever made the acquaintance of."

After Charley had washed the dishes, he said, "Let's call some owls."

Outside it was dark. When we looked out through the windows all we could see were our reflections floating like ghosts on the glass. Charley lifted his green cap from its peg and put it on his head, and then Ora turned off the lights in the house, and we all went outside. In the darkness I could smell the lake and hear a rustle of breeze in the treetops. Crickets were chirping under the cabin.

"Do you speak Owl?" Charley asked me.

"Not fluently." I could taste the beer on my breath.

"I'll teach you, then."

He cupped his hands around his mouth and made a shrieking noise that sounded like "
Who-cooks-for-you
." He repeated the noise a few times, modulating it so that it was always a little different.

"Barred owl," I said.

"It's good to know they're teaching you something in warden school." He repeated the noise again and then we waited.

Through the branches overhead stars were salted across the night sky.

Far away I heard a noise:
Who-cooks-for-you
.

"There he is," said Charley. "Let's see if I can draw him in."

Back and forth Charley and the owl called to each other, the bird moving closer and closer until finally the answering hoots were coming from a tall evergreen directly overhead.

"Do you feel him watching us?" Charley whispered.

"Yes."

"He's up there in that big spruce looking down at us wondering, 'Where's that son-of-a-gun owl who's poaching on my territory?'
Who-cooks-for-you!
"

"Charley, don't torture the poor bird," said Ora.

"We're just having a conversation. Why don't you give it a try?"

I cupped my hands around my mouth and made a loud attempt.

No response.

"You get an A for effort," said Charley softly, "but an F for pronunciation. Try it again but garble the sounds together more. You're talking to an owl, not a person."

"Charley's a regular Dr. Dolittle of the Maine woods," said Ora.

I gave the call another attempt, focusing on the actual sounds the bird was making, not the human words they reminded me of.

This time the owl answered.

Charley clapped me on the back. "There you go. You want to try some coyotes?" He pronounced the word
ki-otes
. "We've got to drive a little ways, but it's not far. How about you, Boss? You up for a moonlight drive to Pokum Bog?"