Badges, Bears, and Eagles

by Steven T. Callan

  By 10:00 a.m., the temperature had climbed to a hundred degrees and was quickly rising. We felt like a couple of eggs, frying on a hot rock.

  “Where are you, Squeaky?” asked Szody, groggy and beaten down by the elements.

  “Do you hear something?” I asked, reaching for my binoculars.

  Szody picked up his spotting scope and pointed it upriver. The faint sound of a distant outboard motor teased our ears. At first we thought we were just imagining things; then the hum of the motor grew slightly louder. A big smile spread across Szody’s face as a small boat came into view. “Is that you, Squeaky?” he wondered aloud.

  The tiny skiff continued to make its way downriver. There appeared to be one man aboard, wearing a big straw hat and a light colored shirt. We dropped to the prone position, failing to acknowledge the 130 degree rock we were lying on. Szody continued to watch with his spotting scope and I with my binoculars.

  The slow-moving skiff eventually reached the first limb line and pulled in close to the bank. The operator reached over and pulled up the line. Apparently there was nothing on it, because he dropped it back down and proceeded to the next line. Szody and I had seen enough to make a case but it would be so much better if we could catch the violator with a fish in his possession. The small boat finally reached the base of the cliff and the location of our large flathead catfish. Like excited kids, we scampered to the edge of the rock just in time to see the object of our all-night vigil remove the trophy-sized flathead from his hook. With the fish flailing from side-to-side, it took all of the strength the diminutive boatman had to wrestle it into a large ice chest. Once the catfish was secured, he re-baited the hook with a live goldfish and dropped it back in the water. Hanging off the bow of the skiff were two heavy duty fishing rods with reels attached. These were obviously props, as Szody’s informant had described.

  This must have been the last of his limb lines, because the sneaky little outlaw turned his boat around and headed back upriver. Szody and I knew we could easily overtake the slow moving skiff, so we gathered our gear and headed across the plateau. Like mountain goats, we traversed the back side and made our way to the state boat.

  Once underway, it only took us about five minutes to catch up with the limb liner’s slow moving ten-horse outboard. The boat’s operator, oblivious to our presence, was steering from the stern seat when he casually peered over his right shoulder.

  “Hello Squeaky,” said Szody, in a voice that only I could hear. Squeaky clearly saw us but failed to slow down or change course. Szody pushed the throttle forward and, in a quick burst of speed, pulled the Fish and Game boat alongside. I stood up and motioned with my hand for Squeaky to cut his motor. Squeaky finally complied and both boats immediately began drifting backwards in the swift current.

  “Pull your boat over to that shore,” I shouted, pointing to the California side of the river. We kept a keen eye on the cunning little man, making sure that he didn’t throw anything overboard as he followed instructions and beached his boat. The state boat pulled in beside him.

  Believing this to be a routine license check, Squeaky pulled out his California Fishing License and handed it to Warden Szody.

  “That’s great that you have a fishing license,” said Szody. “Now I need to see a driver’s license.”

  “What for?” whined Squeaky. “I ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”

  I reached over and opened Squeaky’s ice chest. Suddenly subjected to the bright sunlight, the twenty pound flathead inside began flopping violently. As expected, Squeaky swore up and down that he had caught the fish legally, with one of the fishing rods in his boat. Szody reviewed, in minute detail, every move that Squeaky had made in the last hour. Every time Squeaky would start to bend the truth, Szody countered with what had really happened.

  Normally, we would never have argued or carried on a heated conversation with someone we were in the process of busting. This time, however, there was a method to our madness. Squeaky became so convinced that two of his associates had squealed on him that he returned the favor by hinting about a current camp just upriver. This was a common ploy—the real bad guys went thataway—which Szody and I easily recognized.

  Because Squeaky had opened the door, Szody cleverly seized the moment to press him further about what might be going on upstream. There was no need for a Miranda warning, since we were not questioning Squeaky about his own violation. We had just witnessed that one firsthand.

  While Squeaky described the camp upriver to my partner, I attended to the big catfish—still alive and flopping around in his ice chest. I opened the lid and photographed the fish for future evidence purposes. Grabbing the ice chest by both handles, I carefully lifted it out of Squeaky’s boat and carried it to the water’s edge. I could hear Squeaky trying to recant what he had just said from the shade of a cottonwood tree, about ten yards away.

  “Squeaky, you lying son of a bitch!” said my exasperated partner. River water rushed into the ice chest as I tipped it forward and brought the dehydrated catfish back to life. With a few flips of its tail, the whiskered predator was back in the river, out of sight and headed for the bottom.

  By the time Warden Szody finished his field interrogation, Squeaky had offered up a detailed description of where his two associates were camped, where their limb lines were located and what each man had eaten for breakfast. Szody issued Squeaky a much-deserved citation. As the outmatched catfish poacher stood on the riverbank with his mouth hanging open, we headed upriver to find out if anything Squeaky had told us was actually true. Telling the truth wasn’t something that came easily for Squeaky, but retribution can sometimes bring out the best in people.

  Surprisingly, everything we found was pretty much as Squeaky had described it. Two middle-aged men were sitting at the water’s edge, drinking beer. The heavier man wore a swimsuit and a black tank top with the name of some bar written across the front. He covered his head with a straw hat. The other man wore nothing but cutoff jeans and had the typical, dark brown river-rat tan.

  “How are you guys doing?” I asked, as Szody beached our patrol boat next to their twelve-foot aluminum skiff. “Are you catching any fish?”

  “We caught a couple,” replied the shirtless man.

  By then Szody and I were a finely coordinated team. While I continued my conversation with the laid-back fishermen, Szody quietly looked around. “Where are the fish?” I asked. The shirtless fisherman pointed toward a line that was tied off the stern of their boat. Szody had already spotted the suspected stringer, but continued to survey the camp. Lying across a small, portable table were several limb line sets, probably prepared for use that evening. Szody gathered them up and carried them to the state boat.

  Two heavy-duty lines hung over the side of the aluminum boat. Szody carefully stepped onboard and pulled up the first one. At the other end was a plastic bait box, filled with live goldfish. The second line was tied to a metal stringer containing three large channel cats and a fifteen pound flathead. I inspected the men’s fishing licenses and asked to see their driver’s licenses, which confirmed that they lived in the same trailer park as Squeaky. I advised them that Warden Szody and I would be keeping their identification until we returned.

  “We’ll be back,” said Szody, as we climbed in the patrol boat and headed upriver. About a quarter mile from the campsite, we came to the small island Squeaky had described. One by one, I began pulling in baited limb lines. Each line had a live gold fish attached and was set up exactly the same way as the ones found in camp.

  Warden Szody and I returned to the camp and confronted the two fishermen with what we had found. “These limb lines we just pulled are set up exactly like the ones my partner found on your table over there,” I explained. “They’re freshly baited with live goldfish, just like the ones in your bait box.”

  “Who told you where them lines were?” asked the man with the hat.

  That question, alone, was as good as an admission. Confronted with a few more de
tails, the fishermen came clean and admitted that they had put out the limb lines. All their equipment and the catfish were seized into evidence. The catfish were photographed and released. I refused to tell the two violators who had tipped us off, but they already had a good idea. Before heading back upriver, we returned to Squeaky’s baited limb lines and carefully pulled each one.

  The next day, Dave Szody walked into Bowman’s Bait and Tackle and was greeted with a standing ovation. Several of the local fishermen were in the store, thrilled that three of the Colorado River’s worst fish poachers had been caught and would finally receive their just desserts. Squeaky paid a couple hundred dollars for his violation and lost his fishing privileges for one year. We heard he couldn’t handle not being able to fish, so he moved back to Oklahoma.

  Chapter Four

  Dove Opener

  I

  September first was generally the busiest day of the year for California Fish and Game wardens working down along the Colorado River. Throngs of hunters traveled from big cities like Los Angeles and San Diego to bag those fast-flying gray birds that congregated by the thousands in cultivated fields and mesquite thickets near the small desert town of Blythe.

  Mourning doves were the most numerous of the three native species found there. The slightly larger white-winged doves usually hung around for a few days after the opener before heading south into Mexico. Mexican ground doves—about half the size of the other two species—were far less common; though protected by law, this solitary member of the dove family seemed to end up in more than a few game bags. There was really no excuse for shooting a Mexican ground dove: a flash of red appeared when these tiny birds were in flight—ample warning for any discriminating sportsman.

  II

  Early one September morning in 1975, I was patrolling south on State Highway 95, between Vidal Junction and Blythe. I had spent the previous two days working my first dove opener. Most of the dove hunting activity was in the cultivated fields south of Blythe, so we had concentrated our enforcement effort in that area. On this particular morning I was basically mopping up—seeing if there were any hunters still around and checking out a few of the fields overlooked during the opener.

  I was about twenty-five miles north of Blythe, when I turned east onto a dirt road leading across a large, fallow field. There were still a few doves around. Small groups of four and five birds would burst out of the low-lying vegetation as I slowly passed by.

  Most of the well-traveled, unpaved roads down along the Colorado River were covered with a layer of fine, powdery dust. This dust could be up to a foot deep in places, depending on how often the road was used. The first thing I learned when I came to the river was, never drive faster than five miles per hour on these roads unless you want a thirty-foot-high dust cloud to announce your approach to anyone within five miles—not to mention the fact that any equipment stored in the back of your patrol rig would end up buried in the stuff.

  I stopped and walked around until I had reached the field’s midpoint. Every few minutes a gust of wind would come up and scatter tiny, gray down feathers in my path. Judging from the large number of expended, number eight shotgun shells lying on the ground, the previous two days of hunting had been very good.

  Eventually I reached the far end of the field and what appeared to be a shaded campsite. Someone had raked and cleared the brush under a grove of mature mesquite trees. I couldn’t fail to notice several fresh vehicle tracks and human footprints throughout the area. It appeared that a large group had camped there within the past twenty-four hours; a warm fire pit confirmed my suspicions.

  Looking around, I noticed two well-trod foot trails leading out into the thick patches of seven-foot-high arrow weed that grew between the campsite and the river. One of the trails led to a makeshift restroom site. The other was less obvious, extending for about thirty yards and leading to a small clearing.

  There before my eyes was a three-foot high by four-foot wide pile of carcasses and dove feathers. Ants had already begun working on some of the carcasses. I began sifting through the pile, wondering just how many doves these people had killed. With more than half of the pile still left to count, I reached two hundred.

  “Damn!” I said. While I had been busy working another patrol district during the opener, somebody was having a field day up here in my district. As I drove back across the field and out to the highway, I said to myself: “They got away with it this time, but next year will be a different story!”

  III

  All winter and into the following summer, I thought about what had happened whenever I drove by that particular field. August finally came around and with it, what the locals referred to as the Sonoran Desert monsoon season. The weather was not only hot, it became humid and sticky. Tropical thunderstorms turned dry desert washes into raging torrents in a matter of minutes. For a short time, the desert turned green and teemed with life. The riparian zones along the river hosted bird species I had never seen before—cardinals, blue grosbeaks, vermillion flycatchers—some coming up from Mexico and others from the east.

  Doves arrived by the thousands. Mourning doves had always been more plentiful than the larger white-wings, but during August of 1976, white-winged doves seemed to be everywhere.

  As this year’s season opener approached, doves flocked by the hundreds into the field where I had discovered the abandoned hunting camp. I brought Dave up from Blythe to show him the incredible concentration of game birds. We figured there had to be a thousand birds or more feeding on seeds from the various plant species growing in that fallow field.

  There was no way I was going to let those scofflaws repeat their performance from the previous dove opener. “If they show up this year, I don’t want them to even know we’re around until late the second day,” I explained to Dave. “When they’re packed up and getting ready to leave, we’ll give them the surprise of their lives!”

  On the morning of August 31, 1976, I left Earp and headed for the annual pre-season dove opener meeting in Blythe. Instead of taking Highway 95 on the California side of the river, I drove across the Parker Bridge and went south by way of Arizona. My plan was to give my field a wide berth in case the group from the previous year showed up early.

  As was usually the case, wardens and warden supervisors from all over southern California were brought in to work this annual, two-day event. There were no lieutenants back then, so the meeting room was filled with wardens and a few captains. Captain Reynolds was in charge of the meeting, but he let the two Blythe area wardens, Jim Worthington and Dave Szody, do most of the talking. Everyone was given an assigned area to work and provided with maps and court information. Dave didn’t have much to say, but Jim kept us sitting there for a good hour, discussing some of the local outlaws and good places to eat.

  Jim Worthington was a very large, barrel-chested man with a booming voice to match. Dave Szody and I used to say that Warden Worthington could be telling a joke at one end of a crowded restaurant and people sitting at the other end would be able to repeat the punch line.

  As Jim continued his lengthy presentation, a slight smile crept across my face. My mind wandered to an incident that had happened the previous December. It was about 5:00 a.m. and Jim and I were getting ready to work duck hunters downriver in Warden Worthington’s twelve-foot, aluminum Jon boat. While I retrieved some equipment from my truck, Jim climbed into the boat and began revving the little ten-horse outboard motor. I was returning to the boat when Jim shifted the motor into gear and slowly turned the throttle. With two hundred and eighty pounds sitting in the stern of the boat and virtually no weight in the bow, it’s not difficult to imagine what happened next—the bow of the boat flew into the air and continued right over the top of Warden Worthington. A few seconds later, he popped his head out of the water—unhurt, but more than a little embarrassed. It looked like something out of a Laurel and Hardy movie.

  That evening, several hours after the dove opener briefing, I headed north on Highway 9
5. It was just getting dark when I passed my field. Without slowing down, I glanced eastward and saw exactly what I had anticipated: several pickups were parked at the far end of the field and a fire was burning. “Yes!” I shouted, continuing north. “Welcome back boys.”

  “They’re here, Dave!” I exulted over the telephone. “I saw three or four rigs parked at the far end of the field when I drove by.” Dave and I knew that our group would hunt at least two days, with a morning and an evening shoot each day. We decided to stick to our plan and leave them alone until late in the afternoon of the second day.

  It was just before 4:00 p.m., on September 2, 1976, when Szody and I pulled off the highway and hid our patrol truck in a wash just south of our suspects’ field. It was like entering a warzone. Shotguns were blasting away in rapid succession. We found shade under a palo verde tree and continued to watch and listen until about 6:00 p.m. Convinced that the group had finally finished hunting and would soon be hitting the road for home, Dave and I plotted a course of action.

  The field was surrounded on three sides by thickets of mesquite, salt cedar and arrow weed. I would approach the camp on foot, concealed by heavy vegetation. When I reached the camp, I would signal Dave, who would drive the patrol truck four hundred yards across the field to the campsite. Our intention was to get a feel for what was going on before we made contact and so prevent the hunters from destroying or hiding any evidence after they spotted the approaching Fish and Game truck.

  With the patrol vehicle well out of sight, Szody hunkered down behind some brush and watched the campsite through his binoculars. I carefully began working my way through the dense vegetation at the south edge of the field. The early evening temperature was well over one hundred degrees. Conditions reminded me of a time when a high school friend and I had crashed our way through poison oak, hiking into Chico Creek Canyon to go trout fishing. Poison oak didn’t grow in the desert, but one could step on a rattlesnake. These weren’t the Pacific rattlesnakes I was accustomed to seeing in Northern California; they were western diamondbacks, some of them reaching seven feet and as big around as the arm of a good-sized man. Wading through classic diamondback habitat was a little risky, but I was experienced enough to know where to put my feet. If I encountered a snake, I would simply say hello and give it plenty of space. I had never killed one of those rodent-eating machines and hoped I would never have to. Diamondbacks are very much a part of the desert’s mystique and natural beauty. As a young wildlife protection officer, I understood and respected that.