the Poacher's Son (2010) (4 page)

"Mike? You still there?"

"I got this weird message on my answering machine last night. It was from my dad. He lives up near Dead River."

There was a pause on the other end. "Weird in what way?"

"Well, we haven't spoken in a couple years."

"Maybe he heard what happened and was concerned about you, being a law officer and all."

I laughed, a single sharp laugh.

"Or maybe not," she said. "You said he owns a camp up there?"

"Not exactly. Last I heard he was working for Russell Pelletier over at Rum Pond Sporting Camps. Wendigo owns all that land now. If they sell it, Pelletier will lose his business."

"You think that's why he called you?"

The suspicion in her voice made me uneasy, as if I'd somehow given her the wrong idea. "It's probably nothing. He gets drinking late at night."

"My brother's like that." She paused long enough for me to hear a dog barking in the background. "So did you talk to him?"

"I was out on a call." I told her about my evening with Bud Thompson. "I think I know the bear that got his pig. The one I'm thinking of has a thing for greasy barbecue grills. Last month it was up on a patio licking some guy's hibachi."

"Sounds kinky. You want me to bring over a culvert trap?"

"What about Dick Roberge?" I said, referring to the local animal damage-control agent who assisted us trapping nuisance wildlife.

"Dick's getting his knee replaced."

"You don't mind bringing over a trap?"

"I'm headed to Division B, anyway. Where do you want to meet?"

"How about that place where we caught that night hunter last month?"

"Give me a couple hours." We were both about to hang up when she came back on the line.

"Maybe in the meantime you should give your old man a ring. Just a suggestion, but if it were my dad and I hadn't heard from him in years, I'd be a little curious about the timing."

In the few months we'd been working together I'd learned to follow Kathy's advice. Better to make the call than spend the day wondering what my dad was mixed up in.

My father didn't have a phone himself at his cabin but relied on the owner at Rum Pond Sporting Camps to take messages for him. The lodge itself was so remote no phone lines connected it with the outside world, and the surrounding mountains made cell-phone reception iffy at best. Instead, the owner, Russell Pelletier, used an old radio phone to make and receive calls. When no one picked up, I tried the in-town answering service and got an earful of static until the machine came on.

"Hey, you've reached Rum Pond Sporting Camps, and if we ain't here, we're probably out fishing." When I was sixteen, I'd spent half a summer washing dishes at the camps. The only woman there had been Pelletier's chain-smoking wife, but this pretty voice definitely didn't belong to Doreen.

The machine started to record. "This is Mike Bowditch," I said. "Jack's son. I don't know if he's still working there--Charley Stevens told me he was, but we haven't talked in a while--I mean, my dad and I haven't talked. Anyway, I got a call from him last night. I'm not sure what it's about. Can you tell him I called?" I rattled off my cell-phone and pager numbers and hung up, embarrassed at my stammering incoherence.

How come everything to do with my father left me feeling like I was nine years old?

The sun had risen over the pines and the day was shaping up to be another steam bath. I had two hours to kill before Kathy showed up with the culvert trap, so I decided to stop in town for breakfast. I desperately wanted to see a newspaper.

The Square Deal Diner, in Sennebec Center, was owned by a plump and hyperactive widow named Dot Libby who also ran a motel and gift shop out on the highway, served as chair of the school board, organized the municipal Fourth of July picnic, and played the organ every Sunday morning at the Congregational Church. She was the mother of six (four living) and grandmother of twenty-two. I knew all this within five minutes of meeting her. Dot liked to talk. Her late husband had passed away several years earlier from prostate cancer, but the joke around town--probably started by Dot herself--was that he died of exhaustion from trying to keep up with her all those years. She kept a photo of him on the wall of the diner, where he continued to stare down at her with sad, hound-dog eyes.

" 'Morning, Mike!" she shouted as I came through the door.

Every head in the room turned to look at me. I felt blood rush to my cheeks. I've always blushed easily. "Hey, Dot."

"So what are you gonna do about that bear?"

"News travels fast."

"Heard it over the scanner." She poured me a cup of coffee. "You gonna shoot it?"

"Hope I don't have to."

This early, the crowd consisted mostly of locals: carpenters, fishermen, auto-body mechanics, road crew workers. All males. Dot and her youngest daughter Ruth, who waited on the booths, were the only females in the place.

"Can I have the bear meat if you get it?" Dot had red blossoms
on her cheeks and laugh-wrinkles around her eyes. Her face sometimes reminded me of a talking apple.

"You ain't adding bear to the menu, are you, Dot?" said a prematurely bald young man I didn't know at the end of the counter.

"It's for the shelter, Stanley."

From a booth behind me another voice said, "You're not going to waste good bear meat on those dogs."

I swiveled around to see who was speaking and saw Hank Varnum, the lanky proprietor of the town grocery. He was sitting with a clamdigger I recognized but whose name escaped me. As a newcomer to the area, I was still having trouble connecting names and faces, and since my position as district warden ensured everyone knew who I was, I often found myself pretending to recognize people who recognized me.

Dot made a face. "Bear's too stringy for my taste."

"You can make a decent chili with it," said bald Stanley at the end of the counter. I noticed he had a newspaper spread out under his plate of pancakes.

"Or a good hash," offered someone else.

"How big did Bud say it was?" asked Varnum's clamdigger friend.

"He didn't get a great look at it," I said.

"And knowing Bud, I bet he was drunk off his ass. I bet he shit himself when he seen that bear eat his pig."

"I'd thank you not to use profanity in my restaurant," said Dot.

The clamdigger looked down at his ketchup-smeared plate and began scraping up the last shreds of scrambled eggs.

"I'll let you know about the bear, Dot," I said. "I'm hoping we won't have to shoot it at all."

"Oh, you'll shoot it," she said confidently. "You won't have any choice in the matter."

"I hope you're wrong." I gestured at Stanley Whatever-his-name was at the other end of the counter. "You mind if I take a look at that newspaper?"

"You gonna arrest me if I say no?" He gave a grimace that passed for a smile and shoved the paper down my way. Half of the pages slid off the counter. What was the deal with this asshole?

"You hear about that shooting last night, Mike?" asked Hank Varnum.

"Yeah, I heard about it." I retrieved the sheets of newsprint from the floor. I found the front page and spread it out in front of me. The headline read:

There was an old file photograph of the Dead River Inn, where the public meeting had taken place that led up to the shooting. It looked the same as I remembered it from the bar fight two years earlier.

The article didn't say much beyond what Kathy had already told me over the phone: Somerset County Sheriff's Deputy William Brodeur, and Wendigo Timberlands, LLC, spokesman, Jonathan Shipman, had been leaving the inn by a back road, driving to the Sugarloaf resort from Dead River, when a person or persons opened fire on the police cruiser.

"It was only a matter of time," said Dot.

I glanced up.

She gestured at the paper. "Until something like that happened."

I hadn't followed the Wendigo land purchase all that closely, being so preoccupied, first with my new job and then with Sarah's growing unhappiness. I knew the company had recently bought something like half a million acres of forestland in the northern part of the state, including scores of privately owned camps and sporting lodges. These were largely lake-and stream-front cabins built on sites leased from Atlantic Pulp & Paper, the local company that had previously owned all that timberland. It was the way Maine paper mills used to reward their longtime employees, by granting them leases to build rustic vacation camps on company property. Many of these leases had been in the same families for generations.

"People up there are madder than hell," said Dot, "and I don't blame them. They were promised that land, and now this
Canadian
company comes in and says, 'Sorry, we're ripping up your contract, get out.' I'm not excusing what happened, understand. I'm just saying you could have predicted things might turn ugly."

I thought of my father and Russell Pelletier and all the other people I had met up that way whose future was now in the hands of Wendigo Timber. "I hadn't heard they were going to evict all those leaseholders."

Hank Varnum, six foot six with a mug like Abe Lincoln, came over to the counter to pay his bill at the cash register. "They're not really evicting them," he said. "Not outright, anyway. What they're doing is offering to sell them the land their camps are on."

"For hundreds of thousands of dollars," said Dot. "Who can afford to pay that kind of money?"

"They have the choice of moving the buildings somewhere else," said Varnum.

"You ever try to move a fifty-year-old log cabin?"

"I thought you were a believer in free enterprise, Dot."

"I am."

"Wendigo bought that land legally. It belongs to them, and by law they can do whatever they want with it."

Dot's face glowed red. "You know what they're going to do, don't you? They're going to sell that forestland to rich out-of-staters, and it's all going to get developed. They've already put up a bunch of gates. It used to be you could hunt or fish or snowmobile wherever you wanted up there. Now it's all going to be off-limits. Is that what you want to see happen?"

Varnum said, "You can't fight progress, Dot."

"It's not progress," I said.

The sound of my voice seemed to surprise everyone, myself included. I almost never weighed in with a personal opinion at the Square Deal, just answered questions and made polite conversation.
It had something to do with wearing the uniform, holding myself in check. But it pissed me off to think of the North Woods gated and turned into a private playland for the rich.

"Mike's right," said Dot. "And if I was one of them leaseholders, you can bet I would have been at that meeting last night, screaming my lungs out."

"I'm sure you would," said Varnum.

After he had left, Dot said, "I'm sorry, Mike. What can I get you? You want a molasses doughnut?"

"That would be great." Truth was, I didn't have much of an appetite.

"The one I feel sorry for is that deputy," she said. "I wonder if he had a family."

Of course, he did. We all do.

A
number of years ago, some Hollywood producers made a movie about a man-eating crocodile that had somehow taken up residence in the frigid waters of a northern Maine lake. The hero of this motion picture was supposed to be a Maine game warden. Prior to filming, the actor who had been chosen to play the part of the warden took a look at the summer uniform we wear--dark green, short-sleeved shirt and pants tucked into combat boots, white undershirt, black baseball cap with a green pine tree and the words
Maine Game Warden
stitched around it in red--and refused to put it on. He said we looked like the Brazilian militia. Instead, the actor opted for a more casual outfit of khaki shirt and blue jeans, the better to combat the killer croc and romance Bridget Fonda.

So much for realism.

In my experience, the profession of game warden was misunderstood enough by the public without Hollywood drawing another caricature. Many people--urban and suburban people, especially--didn't recognize the uniform or understand what it signified. Hikers would come up to me in the woods and say, "Oh, are you a forest ranger? How's the fire danger today?" Others would say, "I'd really love to work with animals," not realizing that most of the animals I saw were dead or seriously wounded or sick with rabies or brain worm.

What I tried to explain to these nice people was that I was a cop, and the forest was my beat. The statute that created the Maine Warden Service in 1880 gave the governor the authority to appoint wardens "whose duty it shall be to enforce the provisions of all laws relating to game and the fisheries, arrest any person violating such laws, and prosecute for all offenses against the same that may come to their knowledge." That legal description was accurate, but it didn't remotely describe my job.

For one thing, the duties change from season to season. Winter means game wardens must deal with ice fishing and rabbit hunting and hunting bobcats with hounds. It also means snowmobiling accidents, one of the fastest-growing law enforcement issues in the Northeast. In mud season--which is what Mainers have instead of spring--open-water fishing gets underway and dipping for smelts by night. Dogs chasing deer become a problem. And wardens begin enforcing boating laws on Maine's 5,782 lakes and ponds, as well as all navigable rivers and streams. Canoes overturn; swimmers drown. Summertime brings ATV accidents in the woods. Wardens stumble upon secret marijuana gardens. And poaching--a year-round problem--gets worse as hunting season nears. Autumn is just plain crazy. Hunting and trapping of all sorts--bird, bear, raccoon, duck, moose, deer--keep wardens busy day and night. Investigating hunting accidents in Maine is the special responsibility of the Warden Service. Then there are the four-season emergencies: deer-car and moose-car collisions, tracking escaped convicts, rescuing injured mountain climbers, searching for people lost in the woods.