by Paul Doiron
“No!” I said, frightening off the siskin.
“So what did you want to discuss with me if not your neighbors?”
“I don’t know what to do about Christmas.”
“You’re having Christmas Eve supper at our house.”
“I mean the day itself. I’ve got two invitations. Usually I go up to Sixth Machias Lake and spend the evening with Charley and Ora. Their daughter Ann comes from Bath with her husband and kids. I think Charley likes having me there as a buffer against his son-in-law. The problem, this year, is Stacey will be there, too.”
“Oh.”
“Meanwhile Dani wants me to break from tradition and go to her mom’s house in Pennacook.”
“Oh.”
“Exactly.”
Stacey Stevens was Ora and Charley’s younger daughter. She was a wildlife biologist, a bush pilot, a wilderness EMT, and my old flame. We had lived together for three years—almost gotten engaged—before things fell apart. She had recently returned to Maine after self-imposed exile in Florida.
As for Danielle “Dani” Tate, I was no longer sure what to call her. She was a former game warden, now a state trooper, and six months earlier I would have referred to her as my girlfriend. And yet since the summer, we spoke less and less and saw each other rarely.
I should’ve realized that Billy was the wrong person to ask for relationship advice. He and Aimee had been sweethearts at Machias Memorial High School. As a couple, they were an advertisement for wedded bliss.
“You’re kind of running out of time to make a decision,” he said.
“Tell me about it.”
He scratched his bearded chin. “Isn’t Pennacook where you’re going today?”
“Shadow’s vet, Dr. Holman, has her practice there.”
“Two hours is a long drive for a check-up.”
Elizabeth Holman had removed a crossbow bolt from the wolf’s side—acquired in his last hours as an escapee in the wild—and nursed him to health. He had suffered ligament damage from the arrow, however. The injury prevented him from running at full speed, which meant he would never chase down prey again, if I had considered re-releasing him into the Maine woods, which I hadn’t.
Now he lived behind my house in a compound roughly an acre and a half in size, with chain-link fences ten feet high, impossible to scale. The fence extended below ground into a concrete foundation so he couldn’t escape by digging his way out, either. I had made sure he had bushes and trees where he could hide and an exposed ledge where he could sun himself, but there was no denying the fact that his pen was still a jail yard.
Dr. Holman had made house calls for her first exams. She’d brought along a dart gun with ketamine-filled projectiles to tranquilize the wolf, but Shadow had learned to find redoubts in the trees that made it impossible for Lizzie to get a shot at him.
“I still don’t understand how you think you’re getting Shadow into a crate,” Billy said. “That animal is smarter than 80 percent of the guys in my prison quad and 90 percent of the guards.”
Now it was my turn to smile. “You know me. I’ve always got a plan.”
I pointed at the frozen ground where a snaking length of orange extension cord twisted and turned from the house all the way to Shadow’s enclosure. I had positioned the kennel just inside the fence. The electrical cord led to the box and disappeared though one of the air holes on the side.
“Try not to make any noise,” I whispered as we descended the stairs.
Billy could move through the underbrush as silently as a deer.
Of course, I was the one who stepped on a twig.
The sound didn’t cause Shadow to bolt. His snoring continued from inside the crate.
I had tied a length of Kevlar cord to the open door of the kennel. Now I gave it a hard yank and the gate swung shut, and there was a click of the latch fastening. Shadow arose inside the box and growled, but he didn’t fight against his sudden confinement. That had been my biggest worry—that he would injure himself trying to escape.
“I put an electric blanket in there last week. He started sleeping inside a couple of nights ago when that polar vortex came through.”
Billy let out a laugh that frightened the remaining siskins from the trees. “Did Charley suggest this?”
“I’m capable of coming up with my own harebrained schemes without Charley Stevens’s input,” I said with false affront. “Besides, a scheme is only harebrained if it fails.”
“This one worked.”
“I can’t take full credit for it, though. Shadow is smart. I think he remembers what this crate means—that he’s going for a ride. Maybe he senses there’ll be a chance to make a break for it.”
“This place isn’t a jail, Mike. I can say that from personal experience. You’ve given him a good life here.”
I could easily have refuted Billy’s assertion. How many tunnels had Shadow started over the past sixteen months? All those holes dug in vain.
“I need your help getting the kennel into the Jeep.”
Nearly all wardens drove trucks, investigators included, but my superiors had leased the Compass Trailhawk for me so I could sneak down Maine’s scofflaw peninsulas without word getting out that a game warden had been spotted.
Billy gestured toward my personal vehicle. “Why aren’t you taking your Scout?”
“Because I have warden business, too. A woman in Stratford wants to meet with me. Her father-in-law drowned while duck hunting in the Androscoggin River four years ago. She doesn’t think the case should have been closed so quickly and has issues with how the wardens treated her.”
“And you’re going to go listen to her whine?”
“What can I say? I’m a masochist.”
Shadow growled a few times, but he didn’t make the job of moving him impossible by shifting his weight. The vet had prescribed some medicine to put in his food—Gabapentin and Trazadone—to mellow him out.
I left Billy in the yard while I went inside to fetch my briefcase. Emma was still scrawling away in her little grimoire. She blinked foggily, as if returning from someplace deep.
“Wait!” she said. “Did I miss Shadow?”
“He’s still here. Your dad and I put his crate in the back of my Jeep. You can go talk with him now.”
The junior wizard snatched up her journal and her wand and was out the door with a whoosh of her handmade robe.
On my desk I found the note from the woman I’d told Billy about, three sheets of beautiful blue script, signed by a “Mariëtte Chamberlain (née Van Rooyen).”
Dear Warden Bowditch,
I have read about you in the Sun Journal and the successes you have enjoyed investigating cold cases, and for this reason, I wish to speak with you, in person, about my father-in-law, Professor Eben Chamberlain, whose name you must recognize, but if not, he is the eminent man who died under suspicious circumstances while duck hunting along the Androscoggin River in Stratford four years ago this month. Despite an “exhaustive” investigation, his demise was insufficiently explained by the members of your service about whose commitment, competence, and professionalism I continue to have doubts. I have written to the governor and the attorney general and your own colonel with no result. Because you did not participate in the failed examination of my father-in-law’s death, your reputation remains unsullied in my estimation, and therefore you are my last remaining hope.
The rest of the document was written in the same florid style and provided details of her father-in-law’s initial disappearance and the rescue mission that became a recovery mission, as happens in many such cases. I knew the story better than she thought—I’d followed the search from afar—and saw no way to help her. But she had reached out to me with such desperation, I felt I owed the grieving woman the courtesy of a meeting.
Billy Cronk, it seemed, wasn’t the only softy in Ducktrap.
I dropped the letter along with the Warden Service’s official report into my leather attaché.
Out
side, I found Billy crouched with his arm around Emma, looking from a safe distance at the wolf in his crate. Shadow stared at them through the cage with his inscrutable sulfur eyes. The sight of father and daughter prompted an odd sensation: longing.
I was closing in on thirty-two. Children were not a near-term prospect in my life. Nor even a medium-term prospect. This vision of the Cronks filled me with a feeling of my life slipping away.
As I was reaching to close the lift gate, Emma said, “Stop!”
“What is it, Em?”
She produced her wand, directed it at the cage, and moved her lips soundlessly, while twirling the tip.
Billy had told me that she was insistent he find a rowan, or mountain ash, from which to carve her magic stick. The finished result resembled a unicorn’s twisted horn.
“What spell did you cast?” Billy asked.
“Protection. So Shadow will be safe on his journey.”
“What about Uncle Mike,” said Billy with gruff affection. “Doesn’t he deserve a spell, too?”
She nodded her blond, braided head. “Don’t move!”
I stood in place as the little girl waved her rowan wand and mouthed the silent words to keep me safe against whatever dark forces I might encounter that day.
3
I float in the current until I am jostled by a miniature iceberg. The jolt reminds me to move my legs, heavy from the weight of my waterlogged boots. Amazingly, I am still gripping the knife in my stiff hand, a case of premature rigor mortis.
I give a few hard kicks trying to propel myself, dolphin like, above the surface. The thicker ice ahead is visible as a pale smudge, more gray than white. If I don’t get on top of it fast, I’ll be trapped underwater again.
The cliff is somewhere behind me to the right. Through the blowing snowflakes, I can’t see land. No rocks, no trees, and no houses pouring light from their windows. Shouting for help would be a waste of breath and energy.
I reach up at the ice plate beside me, but as I feel for a grip, it rolls like something heavy falling off a shelf.
Something hard strikes me from behind. A dead tree fallen into the stream. I grasp for a branch with my left hand. The tree, which had been floating lengthwise in the current, begins to pinwheel. I have upset its course, and now I am turning with it, watching the trunk and roots swing past. Just as I am about to let go, it crashes against the nearest sheet, cracking through the crust along the edge and catches on the thicker stuff.
I have only seconds before the current pushes the tree loose again. I “climb” shoreward along the weathered trunk, but already I can feel it shifting, sliding, its roots being pulled by the hydraulic force of the Androscoggin.
Once again it is the knife that saves me. I plunge the blade into the ice while the tree drifts away. The point scrapes, then sticks.
My legs swing downstream, the toes of my boots appear before me. For an instant, I am like a sea otter reclining on his back. I am terrified I will lose my grip. So I reach up and get two hands on the knife handle and begin kicking furiously. When my chest touches the edge of the ice, I do my best to pull myself up, hoping the blade sticks.
I manage to get my elbows onto the flat surface. I bring up one knee to get a purchase only to hear a sharp crack. The ice, which can’t be more than three inches thick, is breaking like china under my weight.
I lift my other leg clear of the water and roll onto my back. My teeth chatter uncontrollably.
It seems I’m on another ice floe. This one is larger, the size of a barn door, but not buoyant enough to keep me afloat. Water streams over its opaque surface as it begins to sink beneath me. I lunge onto the adjoining sheet and, this time, keep moving. I crawl on hands and knees, listening for the cracks that foretell a collapse.
I am nearer to the eastern bank than the western bank where I plunged off the road. Forty-degree water moving at two thousand cubic feet per second separates me from safety. I have no choice but to continue on, to the unknown shore.
The snow, light and dry from the crispness of the night, flutters more than falls.
Movement downstream catches my eye. Amazingly, it is Shadow. The black wolf is bounding across the ice and in three leaps gains the eastern shore.
My wet face hardens into a mask as I climb to my feet. Now I hear the cracking sound familiar to any skater who’s tested a frozen pond for the first time.
I leap forward, then leap again, somehow keeping my balance. My flash-frozen clothes make rubbing noises as I move. Suddenly the world lurches beneath me. I have stepped onto yet another floating plate.
I have no time to think. My foot goes through a soft, slushy spot and I nearly lose my boot in the hole, but I am inspired by the sight of the wolf and full of fresh resolve, and I keep going, until I find myself standing on something that feels like land. It is the laminated ice that has built up, over the course of subzero nights, along the river’s edge.
A steep bank, lined with gnarled oaks, rises above me. It is undercut from frequent floods, but if I can get a grip on one of the exposed roots, I can pull myself to safety. Carefully, I put away my knife. My hands are quickly becoming bear paws, but I clench them to force blood into my fingers. The hard, smooth lattice of tree roots provides the handholds I need.
When I reach the top, I press my body face-first onto the powdery ground, like a child attempting a snow angel.
Then the joy of having escaped the river gives way to brutal reason.
Ten minutes. That is all the time I have before hypothermia sets in. From my training, I know the process is inexorable; if I can’t rewarm my core, my heartbeat will slow, my brain will cloud, and I will die.
Ten minutes to get warm.
With no means of making a fire, nothing to use for a shelter, no way to signal for help.
All I have is a knife.
4
The road west of Ducktrap took me through a landscape of leafless forests and hayfields that had been mowed to a hard stubble after the harvest. The last time I’d come through, this countryside had been white with snow. Now it was tundra again, hoary brown in color and patched with ice, with ridges of rotting snowbanks along the roadsides.
I glanced at the thermometer in the dash. Nineteen degrees, cold enough for snow, but the barometer was rising. The online forecast had said there was only a sliver of a possibility the Midcoast would receive any precipitation before Christmas. It would take some powerful magic to change the weather.
Emma Cronk was a sweet, strange child. No wonder Billy doted on her. And with four older brothers and the most dangerous man in Maine for a father, I feared for the first boy who asked her on a date.
I felt again the longing I’d experienced watching Billy wrap his arm around his beloved child.
Then in my head I heard Dani say: “I don’t know how anyone can decide to bring children into this world, as fucked up as it is.”
To drive out the thought I turned my attention to the bleak land whipping past. The snow that hadn’t melted before the latest cold snap had a dingy, aged appearance. But I knew there would be fresh, clean snow the farther I got from the coast. Up north, the ski mountains were doing a booming business, and it was to the mountain foothills that I was now headed. To Dani Tate’s hometown of Pennacook.
It had been two days since she’d called to say she was applying for yet another new job. Having been a state trooper for less than four years, she was already thinking of jumping ship. The Portland Police had a flashy new chief who had been recruited from Gary, Indiana. At his first press conference, he had announced his intention to restructure the department from top to bottom and increase the diversity of his force.
“He’s creating two new sergeant positions, one focused on domestic violence,” Dani had said excitedly. “There’s no way he’s not hiring a woman for that position.”
“I thought you were committed to the state police.”
“It’s the same boys’ club as the Warden Service. Jemison is promising to ma
ke real changes. And the job would be a stepping-stone to something even bigger.”
Dani had had a health scare six months earlier—she’d contracted encephalitis that was at first diagnosed as the often-fatal Powassan virus—and had come through with no lingering damage to her brain. But she had emerged from illness with a new ambition.
“I am not going to wait for the things I want to fall in my lap,” she’d said. “Life’s too short.”
“Not if you learn to live in the moment.”
Even now I remembered the silence with which she received this principle, so central to the way I lived my life.
Had she given up waiting for me, too?
I hadn’t thought of myself being in a hurry to settle down. But recently, a detective friend had announced that his new wife was pregnant, and I’d been surprised by the stab of envy I’d felt.
As far as I knew, however, Dani and I hadn’t officially broken up. In four days we were still scheduled to drive to her mother’s house in the same derelict mill town where I was taking Shadow. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt that she’d been too preoccupied with the possibility of a new job to confirm with me.
It would be the first time in six years that I missed celebrating Christmas with the Stevenses. But this year, Stacey would be there again.
In the town of Liberty I passed a farmhouse with an all-terrain vehicle in the dooryard and a life-sized dummy, sewn together from grain sacks and dressed like Santa, propped behind the handlebars. A nearby spruce had been decorated with strings of Budweiser cans. It must have required some truly heroic drinking to provide the raw materials. Instead of a star at the top, the merrymakers had secured a naked, spread-eagled Barbie doll.
Shadow broke wind inside his kennel forcing me to roll down the windows. The air that came whipping in felt like it had blown all the way from Siberia. My eyes began to water from the intense coldness. I rolled the windows up.
The wolf didn’t want me to forget about him, it seemed. The veterinarian would need to anesthetize Shadow before she began her exam; it was simply too dangerous to try using a muzzle and other restraints. My hope was that he’d sleep the whole way home, provided I didn’t linger long in Stratford.
