Running Dark

by Joseph Heywood

  Garwood was fiddling with a battery cable. “Garden flu,” the sergeant said glumly. “It can hit anyone at any time.”

  The outboard motor gurgled and rumbled as they worked their way out of the sinewy river mouth, curving left, passing jutting boulders as they moved toward the open water of Big Bay de Noc.

  “Your first time out here?” the sergeant asked, yelling over the straining motor as he tightened his life preserver.

  Service nodded. The boat was bouncing and bucking against three-foot swells.

  “You got green gills?” Garwood asked.

  Service shook his head. He had never been seasick, but he also knew that motion sickness, like flu, could strike at any moment. Garwood patted the bench seat behind the console where he sat, indicating that Service should join him.

  “We got shit for power. Putting the weight back here will help us get onto a plane,” he yelled as he pushed up the throttle. The boat’s nose rose up and the motor howled and groaned as the boat drove through the surface resistance and began to skip over the water, dislodging a fine spray that soaked both of them. Service used his hand to brace himself on the console as the boat raced along, slapping the waves beneath them.

  “We’re running south toward Round Island,” the sergeant shouted. “We got a tip last night from a tourist that some rat fishermen out of Fairport and Garden are working whitefish spawners. No way to tell if this will amount to anything, but we have to check it out. Keep your eyes open and do what I tell you.”

  Service nodded, uncased his binoculars, and began scanning ahead.

  Twenty-five minutes later Round Island appeared over the bow, and Garwood was pointing with his binoculars. Service saw a white boat with a horizontal red stripe and a huge outboard motor. Two men seemed to be scrambling to pull in nets.

  The sergeant shoved the throttle forward and Service glanced at the instruments, which showed 32 mph, the tachometer at 5,000 rpm, and near its red line. “This is all we have!” Garwood yelped.

  Service saw the striped white boat’s motor come to life, its nose lift, and bubbles erupt from the stern. One of the two crewmen was dumping something out of white boxes over the back.

  “How many boxes?” Garwood asked.

  “Four,” Service called out. “So far.”

  Despite having speed and the angle coming in, the white boat began to steadily pull away from them. As they passed the area where the boxes had been dumped, Service caught a glimpse of fish floating in the water. “Whitefish, I think,” he yelled as they raced past them, knowing they could have been anything.

  The sergeant nodded, picked up the ship-to-shore radio microphone, and requested ground units be dispatched to Fairport. Service had no idea why Garwood thought the boat was headed to Fairport instead of Garden, but he kept his mouth shut and let the sergeant do his job.

  “ETA, thirty minutes,” Garwood said, concluding his transmission. “Marine Patrol One clear.”

  At 12:40 p.m. Service saw the two-hundred-foot-high multicolored limestone cliffs of Burn’t Bluff looming ahead. The white boat continued to steadily pull away.

  “This bloody equipment—” the sergeant griped, not finishing his thought. Service saw him pushing the throttle so hard that it looked like he’d risk breaking it off if it would have produced more power.

  Service saw another boat appear in front of them and run parallel to the white boat, keeping up with it. Both boats were two hundred and fifty yards ahead, but he could see that the second craft’s motor was a huge red Evinrude.

  As the two boats rounded Burn’t Bluff heading southeast, the two craft separated, the new arrival veering northeast toward Sac Bay and the white boat cutting due west toward open water. After four or five minutes the white boat angled sharply back to the southeast and accelerated, raising a gaudy roostertail.

  “Fairport for sure,” the marine safety sergeant called out.

  Just before 1 p.m. Service saw through his binoculars what looked to be a pier on the west end of the village. Beyond it were at least two more, one of which led to a commercial fish house, the other cluttered with moored commercial fishing tugs. The piers looked crude, made of nothing more than large black boulders held together by aged gray railroad ties, laid horizontally. As they passed three hundred yards offshore, Service saw four vehicles pull up to the westernmost pier and discharge eight people. Two men from a lime-green pickup with a white camper cap brandished rifles.

  “Guns,” he reported to Garwood, who didn’t alter course.

  Service heard the report of a rifle followed almost immediately by a splash not five feet from their port side. A second shot was not as close, but in the same general midship area, and Service hunched slightly as the bullet ricocheted off the water and zipped over their heads.

  Garwood didn’t flinch.

  The white boat stopped at the pier cluttered with larger cigar-shaped commercial fish tugs, but nobody got off, and as the Glastron closed the gap, the back of the white boat erupted in froth and bubbles as it took off racing west. Garwood cut his wheel to get in behind the white boat and shorten the distance between them, playing the angle. As they zoomed back past the western pier in pursuit, the white boat cut sharply to starboard and reversed direction back to the east.

  “They’re trying to suck us in!” the sergeant yelled as they headed back for the tug dock. Garwood didn’t alter course.

  Service heard another shot and saw a water spout twenty feet directly in front of them. A second shot stitched the water twenty feet to their port side, and Service shouted, “More shots fired!”

  Garwood was immediately on the radio, profanely wanting to know where their “goddamn land units” were, but the radio was silent.

  They were beginning to close on the tug dock when the white boat turned sharply, its bow coming up out of the water, pivoted, steadied, and came roaring directly back at them. Service immediately saw somebody on the bow with a rifle. Four shots sounded in close order, but Service didn’t see where the rounds hit because the Glastron swerved sharply as Garwood began to zigzag in evasive maneuvers. The hunters had suddenly become the hunted.

  “Drop line!” Garwood screamed. “Throw the line!” he said, gesticulating at an equipment box. Service grabbed handfuls of nylon coils and began flinging them over the stern.

  “Cocksuckers!” Garwood cursed, aiming the Glastron for shoals between Summer and Little Summer islands. Once into the shallows, he retarded the throttle to idle and cut the wheel hard, causing the boat to yaw sideways in a lazy circle. “Line?” Service asked as the motor idled.

  “To foul their props,” the sergeant replied. “Sometimes it works.”

  The white boat immediately turned back toward Fairport and Garwood slammed the throttle forward and renewed pursuit.

  As they passed the north tip of Summer Island, Service saw a small aluminum boat near shore. It had a large blue motor and two men in red hunting clothes, both with rifles aimed at the DNR boat. He tapped the sergeant’s shoulder and pointed. “More long guns.”

  “This is how Custer felt!” Garwood said with a distressed laugh as he pushed the throttle to red line, and veered northwest to keep out of rifle range.

  In the process of avoiding the potential ambush they lost sight of the white boat, but as they approached the Fairport fish house dock they saw a CO patrol car parked near it and three more DNR vehicles quickly roll in behind it, spilling their passengers. Garwood roared toward the end of the dock and cut the throttle. As they drifted past, a stocky blond man with a scoped, high-powered rifle jumped on board, unslung a second rifle, and thrust it at Service.

  “How many shots fired?” the man asked.

  Service thought for a moment. “Eight—four we saw hit the water.”

  “Damage?”

  Garwood shook his head. “Service threw line.”r />
  “You get their prop?”

  Garwood shook his head again. “Did the white boat pull in?”

  The new man said no. Garwood headed west, and they began to poke into every bay and inlet north of Fairport toward Garden. During the search the new man introduced himself as Len Stone. He wore the three stripes of a sergeant on his jacket sleeve.

  Later Garwood picked up the mike and radioed Fayette State Park.

  “This is Marine Patrol One. We’re low on fuel; can we top off with you?”

  “Affirmative,” came the reply from the park, which was between Fairport and Garden.

  As they motored into Snail Shell Harbor, the small bay in front of the park, the radio crackled. “This is Air Four, Blake. I’ve got a white boat in a slip in Fairport.”

  “We’ll head down that way as soon as refueling is complete,” Garwood radioed.

  “Thanks, Pranger.”

  Service asked, “Is that Joe Flap?”

  Garwood nodded.

  Joe Flap had been a contemporary of his father’s. Flap had been a DNR pilot, but when the department came under budget constraints, he had become a CO; when budgets were healthy again, he resumed flying for the DNR. The pilot had flown combat in Korea with the marines and for the U.S. Forest Service out west after that. He had come to Michigan after a stint of bush flying in Alaska and northwest Canada, and had crashed so many times he was nicknamed Pranger. Service had always assumed that Flap would leave Michigan and head back west or to Alaska. He was surprised to hear his voice.

  Heading south, the radio came to life again. It was one of the shore units. “Where are you right now, Marine Patrol One?”

  “Sac Bay headed southeast,” the marine safety sergeant reported.

  “Hold your position. We’ve got a Troop unit with us and we’ll go down to the docks and check out Air Four’s report.”

  “Marine Patrol One is clear,” Garwood said, cutting the throttle to idle and allowing the boat to wallow into the rocky confines of the small bay. There was no sign of the boat with the Evinrude motor that had ducked into the bay during the earlier pursuit of the white craft.

  Thirty minutes later they got word that the boat in the slip did not have a red stripe and that all seemed quiet in Fairport.

  “Okay,” Garwood said to Stone and Service, “let’s pack it in for today.”

  It took two hours to get back to the Fishdam River launch, and while they pulled the boat, a mud-spattered blue pickup did a donut in the lot and sped away too quickly to get a license plate. Service saw only that the driver was a dark-haired male and his passenger, a woman with long, unkempt blond hair.

  As they prepared to leave, the same vehicle came by twice on US 2, the last time racing east toward the Garden Peninsula.

  Garwood walked with Service to his patrol unit. “This was a good tip, and if our equipment was equal to theirs we could have had them,” he said wistfully.

  “Is this a normal patrol down here?” Service asked.

  The sergeant shrugged. “What’s normal? If we don’t change our tactics or upgrade our equipment soon, we’re gonna keep sucking hind tit with these rats.”

  Stone said with a hiss, “Dis is so much bullshit,” and drove off with Garwood.

  Service drove around the perimeter of the Mosquito Wilderness on the way to his 1953 Airstream trailer, thinking about the frustration of the day’s mission and the intensity he’d seen in Garwood and Stone. He didn’t really think much about getting shot at, because he had been in that position before and this time the firepower was limited. He got into his bunk just after 10 p.m. and rolled around, trying to get comfortable. His last thought before falling asleep was that he needed to build a damn cabin and stop living like a damn gypsy.

  4

  ESCANABA, DECEMBER 15, 1975

  “ . . . Only a fool pokes a stick into a hornet’s nest.”

  The small conference room in the Escanaba DNR office was smothered in attitude, expressed mainly in body language. There were twenty conservation officers jammed into the room, all of them from the two law enforcement districts that spanned the north shore of Lake Michigan. The room was as quiet as the aftermath of a fatal accident, in part because the officers were only a couple of weeks out of the fifteen-day-long firearms deer season and nearly worn out from long days and nights, dealing with every imaginable human behavior. Service felt a mixture of gloom and anger in the air. He found a seat behind the other officers and sat quietly. Several of the men nodded to acknowledge his presence, but nothing was said. Even the usually ebullient Colton Homes looked glum. Homes was in his early thirties, a six-foot Sumo with chipmunk cheeks, a military haircut, a perpetual smile that implied that he was up to something, and black horn-rim glasses that made him look like a hungry owl.

  They waited ten minutes before two unsmiling lieutenants and Captain Cosmo Metrovich sashayed into the room. Metrovich was the Upper Peninsula’s regional law enforcement supervisor; his officers called him the law boss, and in the U.P. he was the penultimate authority for game wardens. Service had been in the U.P. nearly a year and a half, and whenever Metrovich’s name came up, even over beers, nothing was said about the man, good or bad. Maybe the silence was because he was new to the force, Service thought, but in the Marine Corps, and even in the Michigan State Police, gossip and carping about supervision was a refined art. He had expected much the same from COs, but so far had not seen it and wondered what this signified. His company commander in Vietnam had always insisted a bitching grunt was a happy grunt.

  “All right, men,” Metrovich began. “I’ve asked both districts here today to review the strategy for the Garden Peninsula.”

  Sergeant Lennox Stone from Menominee thrust his hand in the air and waved it like a tomahawk.

  Service’s only exposure to Stone had been the one bizarre and frustrating marine patrol on Big Bay de Noc, and that day Stone had not bothered with small talk. All Service knew was that Stone, like himself, was a native Yooper, and that he was reputed to have started with the DNR when he was fourteen, sitting in fire towers, and later working as a state hunter, trapping, poisoning, shooting, and removing problem animals before taking a game warden’s position. Stone, in his mid-forties, was short and barrel-chested with piercing blue eyes and a shock of blond hair overrun with cowlicks.

  “Far as we know,” Stone said, “dere ain’t no strategy down dere to da Garden.”

  Service saw Homes and a couple of other officers nod in agreement, and based on his one-time experience down there, he had to agree that unlike the marines, where every action was thought out in advance, it was difficult to see any strategy in effect in the Garden.

  The captain showed a tight-lipped grin. “It’s good to have a man willing to speak up,” Metrovich said. “We’re a team, and I expect all of you men to speak your minds,” he added.

  “Maybe da boys is full-up saying how dey feel and gettin’ ignored,” Stone said, putting his hand just under his chin. “Dose outlaws down to da Garden do as dey damn well please, Cap’n.”

  “Not everyone in the Garden Peninsula is an outlaw,” Metrovich said, sharply correcting his sergeant.

  Stone ignored the rebuke. “We know da ones in da cemeteries sure ain’t—at least no more, Cap’n—but all da rest of dem we got our doubts about, eh?”

  More nodding heads and a few smiles.

  “You cannot paint all residents with the same brush,” the captain said.

  “Like to paint ’em wit’ tar and feathers is what,” Stone mumbled.

  The captain slapped the table. “This is the problem!” he said forcefully. “You men have to look at the big picture . . . and at history. These people have lived off fish for generations, and we have to expect—and try to understand—that it will take time for them to adjust to the new rules and regulations.”


  Stone didn’t back down. “Cap’n, dat buncha rats has never followed rules or laws, and even if you don’t wanta see it, dey’ve declared war on us. We got good officers don’t want to go down dere because dey know dey won’t get no support. Even county and Troops don’t go down dere unless dey got to. Dis Order Seventeen’s got no teeth.”

  Service saw that Captain Metrovich looked uneasy and heard a shift in his voice. “All right, while it’s accurate that Order Seventeen does not carry criminal penalties, I will remind all of us that there are license revocation procedures clearly outlined, and these will be adhered to, understood?” the captain said. “Due process, gentlemen, due process.”

  Stone grimaced. “No offense, but you call dat strategy, Cap’n, to act like gentlemen wit’ a buncha rats?”

  The supercilious Metrovich glared at the sergeant. “We do not have to become the animals we hunt,” the captain said haughtily. “This is not the good old days when game wardens did their talking with their fists.”

  Stone said, “Wit’ all due respect, Cap’n, whatever it is we’re doin’, it ain’t workin’. Maybe it’s time to go back to da old ways, or give da boys somepin’ different.”

  Service saw that even Lieutenant Dean Attalienti nodded at this. The other lieutenant, Cooper Edey, showed no reaction. Edey was responsible for the district that contained the Garden Peninsula, but he was retiring soon, seldom showed emotion, pretty much went along with what Metrovich wanted in order to get along with him, and, Service had heard, never went on risky patrols with his men. Technically, Edey was his boss, and so far, with the single exception of his one unscheduled Garden run, Edey and his sergeant had left him alone in the Mosquito, which suited Service just fine.

  “The strategy,” Metrovich said, “is stated thusly: Only a fool pokes a stick into a hornet’s nest.”

  Stone huffed audibly. “Dis ting’s about money, Cap’n, and I say if it’s about money, den we need to make some dents in dere bloody wallets.”

  Attalienti stepped up beside the captain. “What have you got in mind, Len?”