The Poacher's Son

by Paul Doiron

  “Mr. Thompson?”

  I heard a whimper. The bathroom door was ajar, light spilling out through the crack. Inside, Thompson was seated on the toilet. He had rolled up his pant leg and was clutching a bloody towel to his calf. He looked up at me with red, tear-filled eyes and shuddered. He smelled like he had showered in malt liquor.

  “What happened?”

  “I thought I killed it.”

  “It bit you?”

  “I went out to have another look. I must’ve only stunned it.” He shook his head sadly. “I hit it in the head. I thought I killed it.”

  “Let me see your leg.”

  “It’s bleeding pretty heavy.”

  He peeled back the towel. Blood began pumping out from the torn flesh. The bear had torn an egg-sized chunk of meat from the muscle of his calf.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “You’re going to need some stitches, but you’ll be all right. Keep pressing hard against the wound.”

  He nodded and shuddered again.

  “What happened to the bear?”

  “It went off into the woods.”

  “Great,” I said.

  I left Thompson and went back to my truck to request an ambulance. With the sun down, the sky was turning violet and shadows were creeping out from beneath the trees at the edge of the forest. I didn’t have much time. I removed my Mossberg 12-gauge from its locked holder and ejected the buckshot shells from the chamber and magazine. Then I loaded the shotgun with heavy deer slugs and hooked my Maglite on my gunbelt.

  When I came back inside the house, I found that Thompson had dragged himself out to the kitchen. He was seated at the table, with a new towel knotted around his leg, and he was gulping down a can of beer like a man dying of thirst.

  I reached out to take the beer can away from him, but it was already empty. “If you move around, you’re just going to make it bleed more. The ambulance should be here in twenty minutes or so. Stay still and keep applying pressure to the wound. And lay off the beer.”

  He looked at the shotgun in my hand. “Where are you going?”

  “To find that bear.”

  He turned his head in the direction of the window. “It’s too dark.”

  “I’m not going to leave it out there all night suffering on account of your stupidity. Where did you last see it?”

  “Back behind the pigpen.”

  “Where was it shot?”

  “Back behind the pigpen.”

  “No, I meant where was it injured?”

  “In the head. I must have just stunned it.”

  I glanced at the rifle on the table; it looked like a child’s toy. “I told you you’d have a hard time killing a bear with a.22. You’re lucky it didn’t maul you just now.”

  “I thought I got it through the eye.”

  Under the fluorescent kitchen light I could see the feathery blue veins in his cheeks and along his nose. I doubted if he was even fifty, but he looked like a man twenty years older. “A deputy will probably arrive before the ambulance does,” I said. “Tell him where I’ve gone, but let him know that he shouldn’t come after me. I don’t want anyone else in the woods right now.”

  “Don’t go out there.”

  “You won’t bleed to death, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  His eyes filled with tears again. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” I said.

  On the doorstep I paused and drew a deep breath. Darkness was coming fast. The sky in the west had turned the color of a bruise, and overhead I saw Vega, the first star of evening. I had only minutes to find the bear before it became too dark to hunt.

  I crossed the yard to the pen, searching for the spot where Thompson had brought down the animal with his gun. I found it easily enough: a patch of trampled weeds and claw-scratched dirt near the place where we had buried the pig. Dust-coated pearls of blood clung to the grass there.

  Why did the bear come back here?

  I crouched down and touched two fingers to the spoor, smelling the ferrous, rusty smell of fresh blood and feeling a quickening of my pulse as I scanned the edge of the forest. The animal might or might not be dying. I knew that when a heavy bear is shot, the thick fat beneath the skin can plug up the wound. This one had probably found a hollow under the cover of some nearby spruce to hide and rest. All I knew for certain was that a wounded black bear was capable of killing me now if I stumbled upon it suddenly in the darkness beneath the trees. I might get a shot off, but not before it crushed me beneath its weight and fastened its jaws around my skull.

  I wiped my hand in the dirt and rose to my feet. Even in the weakening light the blood trail showed clearly in the weeds leading back across the field. A wind was blowing at my back, just the faintest of sea breezes, really, but it would be enough to carry my scent to the bear where it was hiding in the timber. Bad luck for me.

  I followed the track through the wall of sumacs and alder, ducking my head against the leaves to enter the forest. Here the wind diminished, but I could still feel its breath against the back of my neck, and when I set down my feet on the dry leaves, the sound was sharp and brittle. The trunks of the trees crowded close about me, the paper birches glowing ghost-white in the shadows. Every spruce seemed large enough to conceal a bear beneath its dark, shaggy boughs.

  I tried to remain still.

  There were no crickets, no sound whatsoever beyond the whisper of wind in the treetops.

  After a minute, my eyes had adjusted themselves to the gloom as much as they were likely to do, given the lateness of the hour. I figured I’d have to look hard to find the trail again. But I didn’t. At my feet there was a small, starry splatter of blood on some moss.

  I followed the spoor down the hillside. The bear, bleeding hard, had gone fast at first. I could see where his claws had gouged the pine-needled floor of the forest, and even where there was no blood, the crushed ferns and snapped branches of alders showed the violence of his passing.

  Then he found his way into a dense stand of black spruce trees that had bristling boughs like pipe cleaners. The trunks of the trees grew very close together here, and I could not push my way through without going blindly, noisily, with the breeze driving my scent ahead of me. I figured the bear had hidden himself somewhere deep inside the thicket, crouched down there amid the darkening shadows, waiting for night to come to make him safe. He could be lying inside those spruces, and I would not see him until I was only a few feet away. By then it would be too late.

  I knelt down and rested the butt of the Mossberg on the ground. I wished again that I had a dog to help me track. My better judgment told me to call Kathy Frost and ask her to bring her dog, Pluto. With a K-9, we could find the bear, even in pitch darkness. But I seemed to be disregarding my better judgment as a matter of course these days. To hell with being careful, a voice said in my head. Be a fucking man and get the job done.

  I eased myself through the nearest spruces putting my foot down as quietly as I could, heel first and then toe. Dead spruce branches scraped the skin of my face and bare arms, then sprang back into place behind me, making a whipping sound. Almost instantly I realized that I would never be able to track the bear here. It was too dense, too dark.

  That was when I heard the crash. Maybe twenty yards off to my right, at the edge of the spruce thicket, came a sound like a big tree falling, and I knew it was the bear running. He went crashing clear of the spruces. Branches snapped as he bulled his way through.

  I followed as best I could. Keeping my head down to avoid being jabbed in the eye by a sharp branch, I shouldered through the boughs. Then I was back outside the densest part of the thicket. My heart was beating so loud I could no longer hear the bear, but I caught a glimpse of movement through the timber, and I went after it at a dead run. I let gravity carry me down the slope.

  The bear turned on me at the bottom of the hill. He’d run himself into a streambed that cut like a ravine between this slope a
nd the next, and he didn’t have the energy to climb out. He turned and lowered his head beneath the hump of his shoulders and bared his teeth.

  I had to slide on the dead leaves to stop my momentum. I fell backward, onto my ass, and suddenly found myself sitting upright on the ground, like a toddler surprised at having lost his balance, not twenty yards from the bear. For a split second neither of us moved. In the twilight the bear looked immense. I saw that one of its eyes was a bright red mess. Then, suddenly, the bear charged. He was halfway to me before I could even blink, and I was swinging the shotgun barrel up. I don’t remember pulling the trigger, but the explosion brought stars to my eyes, and when I could see again, the bear lay motionless five yards in front me.

  I had a hard time getting to my feet. I heard a strange sound and then realized it was my own raspy breathing. My eyes were wet and stung as if I had dust in them.

  Keeping the shotgun trained on his head, I approached the bear. But he was already dead. The slug had torn a big hole through the front of his skull, blowing away a chunk of bone, lifting a flap of skin and thick hair. The smell of the animal was strong, all sour musk and blood, and standing over it, I saw that I’d been wrong about his size. Stretched out on the ground, dead, he was only about as big as a medium-sized man. He even looked a little like a man wearing a bear suit.

  The breeze blew again, and the sudden chill made me realize that my undershirt and shirt were soaked with sweat. I shivered and clicked on the shotgun safety and took a seat on a big, moss-covered stump. My tailbone ached from where I’d hit the ground. The bear was too big to drag out of there on my own; I would need to get help. I glanced back up the wooded hillside. From this angle, it looked as sheer as a cliff and about a mile high.

  “Shit,” I said.

  All the way up that hill, I cursed Bud Thompson. I’d known from the start that I might have to kill the bear. Dot Libby had even said so. Killing wounded and nuisance animals was part of what I did for a living as a game warden. Death was part of nature, a fact of life.

  But seeing that bear stretched lifeless on the ground and knowing that maybe a mile away my culvert trap was sitting empty filled me with an almost unbearable sense of waste. The bear’s death felt absolutely unnecessary, and the thing that bothered me most was that I couldn’t understand why the bear had returned to this farm when there was no longer a pig here.

  It took me at least fifteen minutes to hike back to Thompson’s farm, and even before I reached the hilltop I saw blue and red lights flashing through the trees. A sheriff’s cruiser and an ambulance were parked in Thompson’s driveway and there was another Maine Warden Service patrol truck, beside my own, pulled up on the lawn.

  Kathy Frost was waiting for me outside the pigpen. “I was on the road and I heard the call come over the radio.” Her forehead was furrowed with concern. “Your face is all scraped.”

  I touched my cheek; my fingertips came away red.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Where’s the bear?”

  “It’s dead. About a quarter mile down that hill.”

  “Shit. That’s a long way to haul it out.”

  “It would have died, anyway,” I said. “It had lost a lot of blood.” I glanced up at the house. The first-floor windows were all alight. “Where’s Thompson?”

  “Inside. The EMTs are trying to convince him to go to the hospital. You should have stayed with him, Mike. You should have waited for us to bring a dog in.”

  “I was pissed off,” I said. “So why the hell did the bear come back here? It doesn’t make sense”

  “He was baiting it.”

  “What?”

  “He was putting out food for it.” She motioned for me to follow her around the pigpen. Inside the fence was a heap of trash. I saw an empty tin for a canned ham and a Dunkin’ Donuts box and other refuse that I hadn’t noticed before.

  I stood there gazing at it. “Son of a bitch.”

  Kathy came up behind me. “There’s something else we need to talk about, Mike. The reason I was out this way was because we got another call from Anthony DeSalle. Have you lost your mind? You know better than to have contact with someone who’s made a complaint against you.”

  There was a buzzing sound in my head and I was having a hard time hearing her. It was the sound of the flies amplified about a hundred times.

  “It comes across as a pattern of harassment,” she said. “Mike, are you listening to me?”

  “He was trying to lure it in,” I said.

  “What? Who?”

  “Thompson. He knew I had a trap out there, but he was trying to lure it in so he could shoot it himself.”

  “The bear killed the man’s pig,” she said. “Cut him some slack.”

  “That was three days ago.”

  “He’s allowed to shoot a wild animal destroying his property.”

  “Not three days later he’s not.” I turned and started walking in the direction of the house. “He baited that bear and he shot it illegally. He broke the law.”

  Two medics came out of the kitchen door carrying Thompson on a stretcher. His pant leg had been scissored off, and his wound was wrapped in a new white bandage.

  I stepped in front of the EMTs, blocking their way. Thompson gave me a confused, boozy smile. “Is it dead?”

  “It’s dead.”

  “You shot it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I have the skin? I always wanted a bearskin rug.”

  It was all I could do not to punch him. “You didn’t tell me you were putting bait out. That’s illegal, you know.”

  His smile drooped at the corners. “It killed my pig.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “It was self-defense.”

  “The hell it was. You baited that bear.”

  “Excuse me, Warden,” said one of the medics. “Can we continue this conversation later?”

  “Get out of the way, Mike,” said Kathy Frost from behind me.

  “The man needs to go to the hospital,” said the other EMT.

  I pointed my finger at Thompson’s nose. His eyes bounced back and forth from my face to the shotgun in my other hand. “You broke the law, Thompson, and after they stitch up your leg, I’m taking you to jail.”

  “No, you’re not,” said Kathy in her hardest voice. “Come on, Mike. Let these men do their jobs.” Her fingers dug like talons into my shoulder. “Let these men do their jobs.”

  I stopped resisting and let her pull me back a step.

  We watched the EMTs carry Thompson to the ambulance. When they’d closed the back door and started the engine, Kathy released my shoulder. “You were out of line back there.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Drunks just piss me off.”

  “You’re off duty. As of now.”

  “What? I said I was sorry.”

  “Fine. I accept your apology, but I still want you to go home. You’re on vacation as of tonight.”

  “What the hell does that mean? Are you suspending me?”

  “Only if you force me.”

  I opened my mouth to speak.

  She held up her long, callused hand. “We’re not discussing this. You’re going home, and you’re going to get some rest. You have tomorrow off, and then you’re on vacation for a week. We’ll talk about the DeSalle complaint when you get back. Maybe by then you’ll have your head together.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means we’re all sorry about your father, and we understand how freaked out you must be about it. But if the situation’s screwing up your judgment, then it’s better if you’re out of uniform for the time being.”

  “What about the bear?”

  “I’ll take care of it.” She gestured at my truck. “Go home, Mike. I mean it.”

  Her expression was unflinching. I knew I’d crossed some sort of line with her, and I wasn’t sure how it had happened.

  Halfway across the lawn I turned and said, with half a smile, “You wouldn’t really susp
end me?”

  But the look on my sergeant’s face gave me no comfort.

  That night I got really drunk for the first time since I’d become a game warden. I took out a half-empty fifth of Jack Daniels a college friend had left behind the last time he’d rolled through town, and I sat on the porch. A mist was rising off the marsh, and the smell of tidal mud and sea salt was thick in the air. A killdeer kept flying back and forth along the creek making a hysterical cry as if it had lost something irreplaceable.

  When I awoke the next morning, I found myself inside, lying facedown on the couch. The phone was ringing, and it took everything in me to stumble across the room to answer it. Sunlight, flooding through the windows, burned my eyes.

  “Hello?”

  “I need to see you,” said my mother.

  17

  The town of Scarborough is where I’d spent the second half of my childhood after my parents divorced and where my mom and stepfather still lived. It is only a two-hour drive south along the coast, but it always feels longer because the land changes so much with every passing mile. These days, southern Maine is just an extension of the Boston suburbs.

  When we first moved to Scarborough, right after the divorce, there were still cornfields and thick oak forests that stretched for miles. Then the houses really began to sprout, first along the country roads heading down to the beaches, and then in vast subdivisions wherever there was enough land for building. Soon the weedy fields where I’d caught garter snakes became a grid of neocolonial homes and impossibly green lawns. Woods where Wabanaki Indians had once hunted deer were cleared to make way for “Indian Woods Estates.”

  As a teenager, I fought the future as best I could. Rather than taking up soccer or skateboarding, I cast for striped bass in the Spurwink River. Instead of playing video games I read The Last of the Mohicans. I watched the pavement spread under my feet and dreamed of moving to the North Woods and becoming a game warden. As if you can ever really escape what’s coming.

  My mother had received a call from my father, and she was in a panic. She didn’t want to go into the details over the phone. “I need you here,” she said.