Blue Wolf In Green Fire

by Joseph Heywood

Service also headed south, but at Bruce Crossing he turned east on the M-28, facing a five-hour drive to the Soo and hoping neither weather nor circumstances interfered. He needed sleep.

  By the time he reached Seney he had nodded off a half dozen times and knew it was too dangerous to push it any farther. He drove a few miles south on M-77 to the entrance of the Seney National Wildlife Refuge, pulled up the driveway, parked on the grass shoulder, reported himself clear to Station 20, and immediately went to sleep sitting up.

  15

  Grady Service crawled out of his truck at 5 a.m. to stretch cramped muscles and take a leak. He was less than a hundred yards up the refuge’s driveway from M-77 and it was quiet, the air motionless. He lingered to light his first cigarette of the day, enjoying the palpable silence. As soon as he got the cigarette in his mouth he heard a muted thump followed by screeching brakes and the sound of collapsing metal. He instinctively grabbed his oh-shit kit and ran down the driveway with his light.

  To the south on his side of the road he saw the silhouette of something slumped on the shoulder; directly across the road from him a mini van was turtled on its roof in the cattails ten yards off the road. Shit-kicker music blared from the radio, something about friends in low places.

  He ran to the lump on the shoulder and found a man, the fletching of an arrow sticking out of his chest. The man was on his back, writhing, gasping for air and choking, trying to move. One of the man’s legs was bent ninety degrees to the side, and blood cascaded from his mouth. Service gently eased him onto his side, reached into his mouth with two fingers, and cleared the air passage. He wiped his hand on his jacket and saw the arrow protruding from the man’s back and blood pooling on the gravel.

  “Sir, it’s going to be okay. Can you hear me?”

  “Hurt,” the man said, his voice a wet rattle.

  Service felt for a pulse and fumbled to get on latex gloves, berating himself for having reached into the man’s bloody mouth without protection. The man’s pulse was racing and blood continued to pour out of his mouth, but the air passage was clear and he wasn’t choking as badly.

  “Fell, fell,” the man said, his chest continuing to heave.

  He didn’t want to leave the man, but he needed to check the vehicle. He couldn’t triage until he knew what he was dealing with. He got up and started to move toward the van when he heard another thud and the sound of shattering plastic and glass and looked back to see the lights of a car spinning crazily toward him like a malfunctioning top. He grasped the man by the collar and tried to judge where the spinning car would end up, preparing himself to haul the injured man out of the way. But the vehicle suddenly veered sharply to the east side and shot down into the cattails, stopping with a sudden and resounding sucking sound.

  Service grabbed two flares from his emergency kit and lit them. One thing at a time, he told himself. Two vehicles and a pedestrian with an arrow in his chest. This had the makings of a giant cluster-fuck and he needed to get out warnings before it got worse.

  He heard a door slam from the vehicle that had just gone into the ditch.

  “Are you okay?” he yelled.

  “B-bear,” a woman shouted weakly.

  Bear? He headed for the overturned van but saw the lights of another vehicle coming from the south and slowing as the driver spied the flares and the second vehicle in the cattails.

  The logging truck stopped with its air brakes screaming. The truck was a double trailer loaded with pulpwood. The driver dropped down from his cab.

  “Get on your radio, call for help. Get more flares out and check the car behind you,” Service shouted at the trucker as he ran toward the van.

  The mini van was on its roof, its engine still running. He got down on his knees in the cold muck, reached across the driver, and turned the key off. The driver was unconscious, strapped in, no air bag, pulse spotty. There was another person in the passenger seat, strapped in and hanging upside down and sideways.

  He circled the vehicle and tugged on the door. It was jammed, but he managed to get it open a crack and wedge it wider using his thigh and hip. Booze fumes wafted out of the vehicle as two Old Turkey bottles and a couple of empty plastic schnapps pints tumbled out. The passenger was alive and bleeding profusely from a lacerated forehead. The man’s stringy hair hung down, blood dripping from the strands. Fucking mess, Service told himself as he pressed a sterile gauze pad against the wound and held it there.

  The truck driver came to the van, followed by a woman.

  “What can I do?” the trucker asked.

  “Pressure on this,” Service said, worried about the man with the arrow in him.

  The woman was behind the truck driver, shaking badly.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “S-s-scared,” she said. “B-b-bear. Back there,” she added, pointing.

  He gave her the once-over. No visible blood. He sent her to his truck to get blankets and his extra flashlight. By the time she got back he was with the man on the shoulder of the road. He put one blanket on the man and then draped the other around the woman’s shoulders.

  The man on the ground was breathing, but it was shallow. Lots of blood on the ground where the arrow stuck through his back.

  “Can you stay with him?” Service asked.

  “I’m not trained,” she said.

  “Just talk to him, try to keep him calm, and don’t let him move.”

  “What if h-h-he dies?”

  “Stay with him, okay? He needs to hear someone close.”

  The trucker was where Service had left him.

  “The driver’s making weird sounds,” the trucker said calmly. “Breathing problems.”

  Service went to the driver and felt no pulse.

  He managed to get the man’s seat belt released and supported him as he lowered him to the ground and pulled him a few feet up toward the road to get him out of the muck. He was still not breathing. Service knelt beside the driver, checked the airway clear, and began CPR. Nothing. He kept at it, getting the rhythm, trying to focus on the life in his hands.

  The trucker said “Help’s rolling from Seney—volunteer fire. There’s a county mountie five minutes away, and a trooper in ten.” Service cursed Bozian’s budgets; night patrols in U.P. counties had been reduced to one county and one state car. He heard sirens coming south toward them. He kept breathing into the prone man’s mouth and didn’t stop until someone was beside him telling him in an authoritative voice to move over.

  Service hurried back to the man with the arrow and found the woman holding his hand and talking gently to him.

  The morning darkness was filled with blinking emergency lights. A man in a firefighter’s coat was beside him, checking the man on the ground.

  “We gotta roll with this guy,” the fireman said. “He’s bleeding out.”

  It felt like Vietnam, people bleeding all around him and everybody scared shitless and desperately trying to stay calm in order to do the right things. Service helped others shift the man onto a gurney. Somebody put an oxygen mask on his face.

  “What the fuck is this?” someone asked, seeing the arrow.

  “Don’t touch it,” a woman said. “Immobilize it.”

  “With what?”

  “Your hand, asswipe. Just hold it steady until we get him loaded.”

  A Troop arrived at the same time as a Schoolcraft County deputy.

  The Troop went to help at the van. The deputy took the woman from the other vehicle and walked her over to his patrol car.

  Service sat down on the cold asphalt and leaned back, his adrenaline beginning to relent, but his heart still pounding. He sat there for several seconds, his mind unfocused, and was shocked back to reality by a woman screaming angrily.

  “Goddammit, Ernie. Goddamn you!”

  She trudged out of th
e woods on the far side of the road, stomping and splashing through cattails and muck.

  Service went to her. When he tried to touch her arm, she pulled it away. “Where’s my Ernie!”

  Her eyes were wide with fear, emergency lights illuminating her face, her hair matted and askew. She wore sweatpants and a T-shirt and had thick black mud up to her thighs.

  “Who’s Ernie?” Service asked, trying to calm her.

  “My husband.”

  Service grasped her arms firmly above the elbows and held her in place. “Ma’am! Please try to calm down and talk to me. Just calm down, okay? Take a deep breath.”

  The woman stopped trying to push toward the congestion of lights.

  “Ma’am, where did you come from?”

  She nodded her head to the east. It was all wildlife refuge land in that direction. “What’s your name?”

  “Barb, Mrs. Barbara Wildwood.”

  Service talked calmly and deliberately. “Okay, Barb. I’m Grady. We’ve got a lot of confusion out here right now, so I need for you to listen to me and help us, okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Allegan.”

  “I mean now, this morning.”

  “Camped.”

  “You’re camped in the refuge?”

  “Ernie says it’s federal, our taxes pay for it. The truck’s got one of those tents that fits in the bed. Ernie backed us up a two-track. We got here last night and celebrated. I thought Ernie would sleep in this morning, but he’s got his mind set on a damn bear. He’s been up here a couple of days every week, got a bear coming in to his baits. Big bear. I told him, this time I’m going with you. Here we are married a year and he’s gone hunting all the time. I wasn’t going to stay home alone again.”

  “How far is your truck, Barb?”

  “Don’t know. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”

  “And you heard the commotion and walked out here?”

  “I woke up and Ernie and his bow were gone and I went after him. He was too drunk last night to be up in a tree stand this morning.”

  Frightened people were difficult to talk to. Service knew to guide gently, let the story come out at her pace in her way. “What does Ernie look like?”

  “Forty-five, six foot, long hair. He wants to get it cut, but I tell him I like it long, makes him look younger.”

  “He wasn’t in his tree blind?”

  “I got turned around, couldn’t find it,” she said. “I heard the sirens and came to them. Have you seen my Ernie?” She looked at Service with lost eyes.

  He put his arm around her shoulders and led her up the road to the emergency vehicles. One ambulance was already gone, the second one just pulling out, headed north.

  Of all the places for an accident, he thought. There was no hospital closer than Newberry, Munising, and Manistique, none of them closer than forty-five minutes at emergency speed.

  There was a man by a fire truck. Service left the woman in sweatpants by the county cruiser and walked over to him. His hard hat said da chief, the words hand-lettered.

  “Service.”

  “Dino Halmarik. Real mess, dis.”

  “A woman just came out of the woods back there. She’s looking for her husband. Name is Ernie and he was up in a tree stand.”

  The chief nodded. “Ernest Wildwood, the one wit da arrow. Dey’re takin’ him Newberry. But my people just call, say da guy is gone. You don’t see dis every day, fella arrow in da gut. Think happen?”

  “One thing at a time,” Service said, which this time of year was rarely how it went.

  He left the fire chief and went to the overturned van. A third ambulance had arrived; the passenger was on a gurney behind it.

  Service introduced himself to the Schoolcraft County deputy named Nighswaander.

  “Driver in the ambulance?”

  “He didn’t make it.”

  Shit. “You talk to the passenger yet?”

  “Nope. Thought I’d wait for you. Helluva mess.”

  Service nodded. Both men squeezed into the ambulance and knelt by the man on the gurney. His head was bandaged; someone had tried to wipe the blood off his face and left it streaked like warpaint. The man’s shirt collar was wet and dark. Alcohol wafted off him.

  “Uh-oh,” the man said, staring up at the two police officers.

  “What happened?” the deputy asked.

  “Where’s Yank?”

  “Yank?”

  “My brother, Yank Kranker.”

  “He’s the driver?”

  Service was impressed that Nighswaander avoided past tense.

  “He’s gone to the hospital in an ambulance. Who’re you?”

  “Reb Kranker, his brother.”

  “Yank and Reb,” Nighswaander said.

  “Our folks thought it was funny. Is my brother okay?”

  “The hospital will take care of him,” the deputy said. “Can you tell us what happened?”

  “Some guy come stumbling up on the road. Yank and me was singing, headed for deer camp over to Eben. Yank cut hard to avoid the guy but I think maybe we nicked him.”

  “Where are you from, Mr. Kranker?”

  “Hamtramck.”

  “How fast were you going, Mr. Kranker?”

  “Yank was drivin’ and I wasn’t payin’ attention. He does the speed limit. Yank don’t speed.”

  “There were open intoxicants in the vehicle.”

  “I maybe had a few snorts,” the man said.

  “Was Yank drinking?”

  “Yank don’t drink. He used to, but he give it up. Is my brother okay?”

  “He’s headed for the hospital,” the deputy said. “How many snorts did you have?”

  “I wasn’t driving so it don’t matter, right? We were goin’ to deer camp.”

  Nighswaander patted the man’s leg. “Okay, Mr. Kranker, we’re gonna let you head over to the hospital and get you checked out. I’ll talk to you there later.”

  “What about the van—our rifles?”

  “Let’s just get you to the hospital and then we’ll worry about the other stuff.”

  “Okay. You guys smoke? I’m out.”

  “You’ve got oxygen in here.”

  “Can’t smoke nowhere anymore,” the man said. “Are Yank and me gonna be on TV?”

  Neither officer answered. They watched the ambulance drive north.

  “Poor bastard,” Nighswaander said. “His brother’s dead.”

  “So’s the man they hit,” Service said.

  “The one with the arrow?” The deputy shook his head, made a clucking sound. “You first on the scene?”

  Service pointed at the refuge driveway. “On my way to the Soo for a meeting. Pulled in there to get some sleep. I heard the impact.” He explained what he had heard, seen, done.

  “You come outta there couple of minutes later you mighta been smack in the middle of it. You fellas don’t get much sleep this time a year, do ya?”

  Service looked at his watch: 6:42 a.m. “You guys do?”

  Nighswaander laughed. “Not much.”

  “The wife of the deceased pedestrian is in your patrol car.”

  The deputy nodded. “She know the score yet?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll tell her. Who’s the other woman?”

  “She was in the car back there.” Service pointed. “She said something about a bear.”

  The deputy went to the new widow. Service got coffee for the other woman and walked her back to her PT Cruiser, which was mired in muck on the side of the road. The grill was smashed in, hood popped and crumpled, a piece of plastic hanging off at a strange angle, one headlight gone.

&n
bsp; “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I’m afraid I got a little emotional. I’m Lorelei Timms, Lori.”

  The name seemed vaguely familiar. “Grady Service. Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I was headed to Marquette to meet my husband, Whit. We’ve got a place near Big Bay. I was driving along, no traffic, and suddenly this black thing came out of nowhere. Ran right under me and I was flying and spinning all over the place. I thought I was going to roll, but it stayed up and I went into the swamp. I was hanging on, not steering. Scared the hell out of me.”

  “Thanks for getting the blankets and light.”

  She smiled. “That was smart, getting me to do something to get my mind off me. How did that man get the arrow in him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He died, didn’t he?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “My God,” she said. “You’re a conservation officer, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you handle this sort of thing often?”

  “Never one quite like this.”

  “How will you sort it out?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he admitted. It had all happened at once.

  She nodded. “I’m sorry that man died. What about the man you were giving mouth-to-mouth?”

  “He didn’t make it either.”

  “My God,” she said in a whisper.

  The volunteer fire chief came back to them and said, “Senator Timms, anything we can do for youse?”

  “If a wrecker can pull me out, we’ll see if it’ll start and I can be on my way—if you’re done with me.” She looked at Service.

  “That thing ain’t gonna run,” the chief said. “Somebody we can call for you?”

  “My husband,” she said, giving the chief a phone number, which he wrote down on a pad.

  Senator Timms: That’s why the name was familiar. She was a state senator from Petoskey, Charlevoix, someplace north of Traverse City. He’d heard her name before, but couldn’t remember the context.

  “Glad you’re running for governor,” the fire chief said. “You can’t do no worse den Sam Bozian comes to da folks up here.”

  She said gently, “I haven’t announced yet. Is that an endorsement, Chief?”