Bough Cutter

by Jeff Nania

  For a minute, I looked around to appreciate the trappings of the new life I had made. The people circulating around the cafeteria were members of the community to which I now belonged. I had met many of them. They were good folks. Solid.

  How I ended up here was a long story, and the young girl who played a central role in that story will never leave me. Leaving my life in law enforcement behind, I had hoped that maybe this place that had meant so much to me growing up would help me find peace. It didn’t turn out to be so peaceful after all, but I had survived.

  Jim Rawsom, the real sheriff of Namekagon County, survived too but had been severely wounded and faced a long recovery. The county board asked the governor to appoint an interim sheriff until Rawsom recovered or couldn’t return. Without my knowledge, Chief Bork, my old partner Lieutenant JJ Malone, and the sheriff himself recommended me for the job. I hadn’t intended to go back into law enforcement, but I found it appealing when I was offered the appointment. If I accepted the position, I would finish out the remaining three years of the term or until Jim was cleared to return to active duty.

  Jim was a hometown boy who had risen through the ranks. He ran in the election for the position and was elected by a landslide. He had proven himself to be worthy of the trust people had put in him. So, before I accepted the job, we called all the troops together for a meeting at the sheriff’s office. Almost all the deputies in the room had been with me when we executed a warrant to take down a violent killer at the Stone estate where the sheriff had been wounded. I hoped they would give me a fair chance to earn or lose their respect and loyalty.

  Jim Rawsom, using his cane for support, started off. “John Cabrelli has been offered the job as interim sheriff. He has not accepted nor declined the appointment. He would not decide until he talked to you people. So hear him out. John, you have got the floor.”

  I stood in front of the group, but before I could speak, a young deputy who had been wounded during the execution of the warrant raised his hand.

  “Mr. Cabrelli, I would like to speak on behalf of all of us here if that’s okay,” Deputy Holmes requested.

  “Is that okay with you folks?” I asked the group. All nodded in agreement. “Go ahead, Deputy,” I responded.

  “Mr. Cabrelli, you have proven yourself to us. You could have easily said that all these things we were facing were no longer any of your business and turned your back. After what you’ve been through, no one would have blamed you. But you didn’t. You stepped up and put it all on the line, just like we did. We are all ready to stand behind you. We would be honored to serve under your leadership.”

  With Julie beside me and surrounded by friends, I was sworn in on the courthouse steps a few days later.

  Like my predecessor, I was a patrol sheriff and worked side by side with my deputies on the day, evening, and night shifts to learn the county and meet the citizens. In my old department, I had seen many people rise in the ranks, where they found themselves in an office and distanced from the troops in the field. I had no intention of allowing that to happen. •

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  Namekagon County was thirteen hundred and fifty square miles of mostly forests, lakes, rivers, and streams—a stunning landscape with a population of sixteen thousand citizens. Musky Falls was the largest city and the county seat.

  Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, thousands of tourists came to Namekagon County to enjoy the lakes and rivers and hiking and biking trails. This time of year, however, had more of a local flavor. That didn’t mean there were no tourists; the contrary was true. The north country was truly a spectacular sight in fall. Plenty of people came to bask in the autumn colors of smoky gold tamaracks, sugar maples, and poplar leaves quaking in the breeze. Hiking boots, checkerboard flannels, and sweaters replaced shorts, t-shirts, and sandals. The hustle and bustle of summer was replaced by a slower, seemingly more observant pace. Days grew shorter, and an early fall snow could come at any time.

  Fall triggered the hunter-gatherer spirit of most everyone in the north country. It was time to make sure there was enough wood on the woodpile to get you through to spring. Canning jars of blueberries and other wild fruit were counted. Everyone prepared their hunting gear. While camouflage was worn year-round here, this time of year, it was more abundant. Hunters were responsible citizens, but come fall, an inordinate number of sick days were used, and the pews on Sundays had a little extra room. School absenteeism was more commonplace.

  Anglers anxiously took advantage of the mild fall weather and plied the waters of northern lakes for fall-fattened muskies and walleyes. Hunting seasons for ruffed grouse, bear, deer, and waterfowl had opened or soon would. Most conversations at the Moose Café and Crossroads Coffee centered on the upcoming or ongoing hunting seasons.

  There was an entire group of citizens who became more visible in the fall. It seemed that everyone in Namekagon County owned a dog or two, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the canine citizens outnumbered the human ones. Hound dogs stuck their heads out of the openings in dog boxes in the back of pickup trucks. They were anxious and ready to travel the backcountry with their handler, sorting out thousands of scents, looking for the one they lived for—the smell of a bear—announcing success with hound dog howls.

  The northern lakes and rivers were also a destination for waterfowl hunters. Wild rice flowages, big water, and shallow wetlands host thousands of ducks and geese during the fall migration. Water dogs, mostly Labs and Chesapeakes, were the choice of waterfowlers. These dogs were unfazed by the cold water, and they lived to retrieve ducks and geese knocked down by their hunter.

  Bird dogs rode in backseats or portable kennels. Pointers and close working flushers were ready to go in search of ruffed grouse and woodcock. Bird populations were high. Some said the best in over a decade. With thousands of acres of land open to the public, even the most determined hunter could not hunt it all in a lifetime.

  Hunting with dogs in the north country, as of late, faced some unusual challenges, and the situation had become more difficult and dangerous. Some of the best hunting was in the backcountry, the home territory of gray wolves, the largest wild canine on earth. These packs roamed freely across the landscape, covering large territories. Until recently, they were protected by the federal Endangered Species Act, and the number of gray wolves had grown significantly. As a result, there had been an increase in the number of wolf attacks on domestic animals. Bird dogs and bear hounds cover lots of ground, sometimes running head-on into a wolf pack. These encounters rarely end well for the dogs.

  Wolves also were suspects in the decline of the deer herd. Hunters harvested fewer deer, and in some areas available doe tags had been reduced to bolster the number of breeding females. Hunters were encouraged to take mostly bucks.

  For the past several years, it has been against federal law to kill a wolf unless, as locals put it, “your leg is in its mouth.” Whether they liked wolves or not, most people were law-abiding and adopted a live-and-let-live attitude. After all, wolves, known as ma’iinganag to the Ojibwe, had roamed this land for over ten thousand years. However, some folks had taken wolf management into their own hands and subscribed to the concept of the three S’s: shoot, shovel, and shut up. Even though wolves are a formidable animal, there had yet to be a case of a healthy wolf attacking a human in Wisconsin. But there have been some pretty close calls.

  Namekagon County sheriff’s deputies worked closely with local conservation wardens. There were only two wardens to cover the entire county, and by statute, the deputies were allowed to enforce game laws. Some of my staff even carried deputy warden credentials working part-time for the DNR when they were off duty. With backup sometimes miles away, patrolling so much country required all law enforcement officers to work together. A sheriff’s deputy on a call might be backed up by a Musky Falls city officer, a Wisconsin State Trooper, or a conservation warden and vice versa.

  It was the beginning of October, about one in the afternoon of a very quiet day, when I
got a call from dispatch to switch down to our secure radio channel.

  My call number came first, “301,” said the dispatcher.

  “301, go ahead,” I replied.

  “Sheriff, meet Conservation Warden Asmundsen and a grouse hunter in the parking lot at the Birchbark Bar. The grouse hunter and his hunting partner were hunting off Ghost Lake Road and came on an SUV that contains a body. One hunter stayed with the vehicle, and the other went over to the bar to call it in. They will be standing by in the parking lot.”

  “Have they determined that the individual in question is deceased?” I asked.

  “One of the hunters opened the driver’s door of the SUV. The one who called it in is a retired dentist from Eau Claire, so he has had a fair amount of medical training, but he didn’t need it. He said the body was very decomposed and had a solid population of maggots cleaning things up.”

  “Okay. Notify the ME’s office and put them on standby.”

  “Ten-four, Sheriff. What is your ETA to the Birchbark?”

  “About twenty minutes if I fly. I am en route.”

  “Ten-four,” dispatch replied.

  My Chevy Tahoe squad car was a police interceptor. It was equipped to be operated on the backroads. Four-wheel drive, all-weather tires, a steel welded crash bar, and a twelve-thousand-pound winch were standard equipment. Northern Wisconsin was known for its weather extremes, fifty below zero and eight feet of snow. The Tahoe was just the vehicle for that. It had plenty of horsepower but lacked the sports car handling I had come to know from driving a Crown Vic.

  I hit my flashing lights and took off toward the Birchbark. There wasn’t much traffic, and I cruised at eighty.

  As I pulled into the parking lot, I saw the conservation warden leaning on his pickup truck talking to a guy wearing a bird hunting vest. Hunters covered a lot of country and some pretty remote areas. It was inevitable that they would come upon something that required the attention of law enforcement.

  I stopped my squad next to them and got out.

  “Hey guys,” I said.

  “Hello, Sheriff,” they responded in unison.

  The warden was a veteran, closing in on his third decade in law enforcement. He was tough as boot leather and had no tolerance for people who violated our natural resource laws. My predecessor had provided background on the people I would be working with and had spoken highly of Warden Clark Asmundsen. Asmundsen was very adept at tracking and had run a fair number of miscreants to ground over the years. In one now legendary case, he had followed a wanted felon into the national forest. The person he was pursuing was a suspect in a homicide in the southern part of the state. A trooper had stopped a vehicle for having only one headlight. When he went back to his car to run a check on the guy, the suspect bailed out and took off into the woods. The trooper called in the foot pursuit, and Asmundsen, who was nearby, showed up a few minutes later.

  There was over a foot of snow on the ground, and he strapped on his snowshoes. The trooper stayed with the suspect’s car, and Asmundsen took off at a dead run, snowshoes and all. Following the bad guy’s tracks in the deep snow was easy. The warden kept the pressure on, and he could see that the felon’s strides were getting shorter and shorter, clearly a sign that he was running out of steam. The warden caught a glimpse of his quarry on two occasions and, knowing he would soon overtake him, pushed even harder. Asmundsen came to a small clearing, and there slumped on the ground was the suspect, breathing hard and exhausted, with no energy left to resist. The warden cuffed him without a problem. He radioed ahead to have a squad car meet him at a forest crossroad he was near. Then he hoisted the bad guy up and dragged him another mile through the woods to the waiting officers. The story goes that the officers who took the suspect offered Asmundsen a ride back to his truck, but he declined and headed back into the woods, claiming it was a good night for a hike.

  “Go ahead and tell the sheriff here your story,” the warden instructed the hunter.

  “We were bird hunting on a two-track that runs off of Ghost Lake Road. We’ve been hunting this same covert for years. I can’t recall ever running into any other hunters. Anyway, the birds weren’t cooperating, so we pushed on, looking for a stand of young poplar trees we knew about. We came over a rise in the trail, and Odie, my English setter, and my partner’s Llewellin setter, locked up on point. Two birds flushed. My partner got one, and I missed the other. The bird I missed didn’t fly far, and after the dogs retrieved his bird, we headed over to where we had seen the grouse land. That’s when we saw the truck. It was on the dead end of the two-track. A newer, fancy SUV, but it was pretty much covered with leaves and dust. There was also a sizable tree branch laying across the hood. The windows were tinted, but I could see someone was inside. I probably shouldn’t have, but I opened the driver’s side door to see if the guy needed help. When I did, a cloud of flies flew out of the truck, and others started buzzing around the body. The smell was overpowering. It was clear he was beyond any help I might offer. I could see maggots and the body was in an advanced state of decomposition. If I had to guess, I would say it had been there at least a month. It’s not a very educated opinion on my part, but taking into account the warm months of late summer and early fall, it seemed consistent with what you might expect,” the retired dentist relayed.

  “If you guys don’t mind, I would like it if you could take me to the scene.”

  “Sure thing, Sheriff,” the warden replied. “One thing though, I think there is another way into the area they are talking about that will be easier to get through. There is a long-abandoned guest lodge just a mile from here. I think the old driveway works its way back in the woods and hooks up to the trail he’s talking about.”

  “Works for me,” I replied.

  The old driveway took us right to the road where the SUV was parked. The hunter’s partner and the dogs greeted us. I approached the vehicle and called the plate number into dispatch. I opened the driver’s door and found the victim much as the dentist had described. Then I started photographing the entire area, including the vehicle, from every angle. It is surprising how many things are revealed by clear photographs that you may not have noticed even though you were at the scene.

  The vehicle plate came back on a three-year-old Cadillac Escalade registered to a Devin Martin from Milwaukee. The dispatcher immediately ran a criminal history on the name Devin Martin. Several individuals shared the name, but one in particular from Milwaukee had a lengthy criminal record.

  The warden recorded contact information for the two hunters while I began examining the scene in close detail. I could not make out the victim’s features. From what I could tell, it appeared to be a Caucasian male, thin build, with black hair. The insect world had all come to the buffet and had things covered. I knew the condition of the flesh would help the medical examiner determine how long the body had been there. I began photographing the corpse and immediately could make out the butt of a handgun down off the edge of the center console. Then I noticed a long stem of some sort of grass or woodland plant. The stem was inside the vehicle, pinched in place by the passenger door. I walked back around the vehicle and looked closely at the door. It was not completely closed. The door was about a quarter of an inch from completely latching. I photographed the door in its position and the weed as best I could.

  I walked back to the hunters and asked if they would mind going to the sheriff’s office to give a statement. Both readily agreed. I thanked both men for their cooperation and gave each a business card.

  “If either of you remembers or thinks of anything else, don’t hesitate to call me, no matter how insignificant you think it might be. Before you go, I have a couple of questions for you. Did either of you open the front passenger side door?” I asked.

  Both reiterated that they had only opened the driver’s door, which was the only physical contact they had with the vehicle.

  “Did you notice a pistol laying near the console?”

  Both again said they h
adn’t really looked around once they noted the condition of the body. I figured they were being straight with me. Perpetrators or co-conspirators in a crime rarely reported the victim and cooperated fully with law enforcement. The exception would be some sociopaths who had made cooperating with police all part of their sick game. I could be wrong, but these guys did not appear to be murderous criminals plying their trade in the Northwoods. The hunters headed to the sheriff’s office.

  The scene always told a story. Here was a late model, top-of-the-line Cadillac SUV, dressed out with huge chrome rims and thin profile tires. Where leaves and dirt hadn’t covered the truck, the finish appeared to have been buffed to a high gloss shine. This was not the typical truck that someone would choose for cruising the backwoods. There was a gun in close proximity to the dead man’s right hand. Most people are right-handed. Maybe this guy had powered his fancy SUV out through the bush until he had come to the right place, then had ended it all. At first glance, it was looking like a strong scenario. But there was something else. Someone had opened and partially closed the passenger’s front door, catching the plant. The victim may have done it himself. Got out for one last look at his fancy car before he did himself in. Or someone else may have come upon the Cadillac and opened the door. Once they saw what was inside, they decided they wanted no part of it, shut the door, and moved on. Or maybe someone who had been a participant or had critical information about what happened to the guy behind the wheel was in the car—all questions that needed answers. •

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