Knife Creek

by Paul Doiron

  The man pulled up sharply. He fixed his wide eyes on my belt. Then he actually turned his whole body, paddleboard and all, in the direction of the campground; took a look at the pines; and then turned back. “Dakota’s not working today.”

  “He’s not working on the busiest day of the summer?”

  “No.” The man continued on his way to the water.

  “I believe that young man was lying to us just now,” said Charley.

  “Do you think? Do you want to go looking for him onshore?”

  Charley studied the position of the sun, which was the only watch he ever needed for telling time. “We should keep moving if we’re going to get back before my daughter blows her top.”

  As we drifted from shore, I experienced a familiar sensation. The skin of my neck felt as if someone were blowing on it. That usually told me I was being watched by someone with hostile intent. It might have been Rowe, hiding in the trees, or it might have been one of the dozens of other merrymakers who’d recognized me as the enemy of their fun.

  * * *

  In time we could no longer smell the evergreens for all the cook fires. The air took on the greasy taste of frying burgers and bacon. Charley and I collected empty beer cans as they floated past. We even salvaged a half-full plastic bottle of Smirnoff vodka. Suntan oil left iridescent slicks on the surface of the water.

  I had just turned twenty-nine in February, but I had never felt so old.

  I had read somewhere that in the eastern United States only the Delaware River sees more boaters on a weekend than this short stretch of the Saco River. I had never believed that oft-quoted statistic—until now.

  I had to give the Fryeburg police credit, though; we saw uniformed officers stationed at every canoe launch and spotted police cruisers prowling slowly through the campgrounds. It came as a relief that the town had absolved us wardens of acting as ward monitors on this riverine asylum.

  After another hour, we had passed through the logjam of boat traffic. We rounded a bend and found ourselves in the cool shadow of Walker’s Bridge, listening to the thump-thump-thump overhead of cars speeding along the highway to Portland. We saw another eagle.

  Upstream, it had been hard to imagine a sober person getting lost on the Saco. The brooks and creeks that flowed out of the swampy sections converged in the main channel, so it was only a matter of letting the current carry you back to the route. But increasingly now we were encountering forks in the river that would have forced Casey and her companions to make quick choices about which direction to go. Tall clumps of huckleberry and sheep laurel made it hard to see one’s surroundings from the low vantage of a canoe seat.

  “I think we go left here,” I said as we came up suddenly on a wider channel arcing deeper into the bog.

  “You’re the pilot,” Charley said.

  In only minutes I started questioning my internal compass. The passage narrowed dramatically so that we brushed driftwood and felt leatherleaf slapping at our arms as we tried to paddle. Then the channel opened again, the bottom dropped off so that we could no longer see it through the brown water, and a perfect isle of white sand came into view dead ahead.

  “This is it,” I said with relief. “This is Oxbow Island, where Casey and her friends pulled up to camp.”

  “Seems like they didn’t need to go so far out of their way for privacy.”

  I steered us into the shallows and heard sand rustle beneath the keel. “Menario said something about this being a lovers’-lane-type place.”

  “So, I see.” Charley used the flat of his paddle to dig something out of the water and then held it for me to see.

  A molted snakeskin? No. A used condom.

  Four years had passed, the Saco had flooded this spit of sand many times, had probably even reshaped it. That didn’t stop Charley from going exploring, though. The old man tramped back and forth across the island, which was probably thirty feet at its widest, with a crest of speckled alders in the center. He stopped occasionally to peer off across the bog. We were so low that no trees, hills, or any other landmarks were visible to help us situate ourselves. Finally he directed my attention to another channel on the east side of the island where the surface rippled from the strength of the flow.

  “If you were a young girl with a canoe and you were trying to find cover in a lightning storm, which way would you go?”

  “Back the way I came.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, leaning on his paddle. “If it was dark and raining, and you were scared, wouldn’t it be natural to mistake this creek here for the one you wanted? It’s wider than the way we came in.”

  “You and your intuition.”

  “Intuition, hell! It’s experience, young feller.”

  I followed my wise friend, stepping in his bootprints to make the going easier, back to the canoe.

  28

  Before long, we had lost sight of the island and the main channel. The disk of the sun seemed to become whiter and hotter as it ascended into the heavens. Charley stood up in the canoe so smoothly it didn’t even rock. I sometimes forgot that he had been a river driver once, trained as a boy to balance on rolling logs and even run across a floating jam without ever getting his ankles wet.

  He pointed to the northeast. “High ground up ahead.”

  We slipped our paddles silently into the stream and continued on. A great host of blue-bodied damselflies alighted on the canoe as if exhausted from some long migration and then, after a few minutes’ rest, flew off en masse.

  Now there was no current to speak of, just slack water. I noticed a frog staring up at me with eyes like copper beads.

  I dragged my forearm across my sweaty brow. “Pretty easy to get turned around back here.”

  “Eyup.”

  The channel began to narrow. You could see all the way down to the mud at the bottom. Then the first treetops came into view.

  “If you were a young lady from the city and you saw those oaks after paddling way the hell up here in a thunderstorm, what would you do?”

  “Abandon the canoe and try to make my way to dry land on foot.”

  And just like that Charley hopped out of the canoe. The water was only a couple of feet deep, but the muck was so thick he sank down to his chest. He let out a delighted laugh and slogged up onto firmer ground. His clothes, from his chest to his boots, were soaked and black from the rotting mire.

  While I sat in the stern with my paddle across my chest, he grabbed the painter, pulled hard on the rope, and dragged us up into the tangled vegetation. The wiry old man was brawnier than wardens a third his age.

  The clumps of cattails and leatherleaf only had the illusion of solidity. Hidden sinkholes were everywhere. One wrong step and you went in all the way to your thigh. At one point the mud sucked off one of my Bean boots and I had to go reaching down after it.

  “Now I can see why Menario thinks Dakota Rowe might have hidden Casey’s body here.” I dumped out a quart of dirty water. “The way this bog reeks, even the best cadaver dog would’ve had trouble sniffing out a corpse if it was hidden under a few feet of this muck.”

  Charley offered me a hand. “It’s mighty ripe. That’s for sure.”

  I stood up and felt my sock squish against the cushioned insole. “I don’t know that I’ll want to get back in my truck smelling like this. We might have to drive home in our underwear.”

  “Doubt that’ll be the first time it happened on the Saco.”

  Both of us fell in a few more times before we finally located a deer path. Unlike moose, deer will avoid soft ground since their slender legs and small hooves get stuck easily in mud. We followed the trampled trail through a scratching wall of alders, swamp birches, and red maples until we finally came to the tall trees beyond.

  “Should have left some bread crumbs so we could find my canoe again,” I said.

  “You haven’t noticed me snapping the heads off weeds to mark our way?”

  We set off into the forest. I wished I’d brought
along my GPS or at least my topo maps. I had a vague sense of where we must have been: on a peninsula of wooded land that rose out of the boggy floodplain. As best I could remember, there were no roads for at least a mile and certainly no houses that Casey could have gone to for help.

  Which was why it was so surprising to see the cat.

  It was black with white mittens, and it came mincing toward us through the forest as if we had opened a can of food for it.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  The cat rubbed itself along Charley’s leg until he dropped down on one knee to pet it. Even fifteen feet away from him I could hear the cat’s contented purring as he scratched its chin. “Now, where did you come from, little miss?”

  Feral house cats are so common in towns and cities that most people don’t realize why you rarely hear about populations of them flourishing far from humans. As effective predators as they are of birds and rodents, cats are excellent prey for all manner of larger creatures, from owls to coyotes to fishers to foxes. A big tomcat may seem fierce, but out in the real wilderness, he is no more than someone’s afternoon snack.

  “Do you think she’s lost?” I asked.

  Charley rubbed her drooping belly, always the telltale sign of a spayed cat. “She looks well fed.”

  “So where did she come from?”

  “Maybe she will show us.” The old man straightened up and waited for the cat to become bored with us, which took all of thirty seconds. She scratched an ear with her hind leg to dislodge a flea, cleaned her face with a paw, then gave us one more glance before setting off into the trees.

  Charley and I followed at a distance.

  Soon we smelled a cooking fire, not one made with charcoal briquettes: the smoke had the sharp, pine-scented odor of someone burning softwood.

  A battered blue pickup was parked in a clearing up ahead. The vehicle had a white cap over the bed, and a family-size dome tent was set up beside the open passenger door. I heard a woman’s voice making nonsense noises to a baby.

  Charley and I froze in place as if we’d snuck up on a ten-point buck. Wardens are taught at the “school” we attend after graduating from the Maine Criminal Justice Academy how to walk quietly in the forest and use natural cover to hide ourselves. Not to mention that Charley had three decades of real-world experience in the art of concealment.

  I couldn’t see the woman from my position, but I gathered she was behind the truck. It sounded as if she might be changing a diaper on the tailgate. After half a minute a young man appeared, whistling tunelessly. He had a brushy beard and long golden-brown hair tied up in a man bun. He was shirtless with a pronounced rib cage. In his long arms was a stack of kindling he had picked up from the forest floor.

  The cat trotted over to him as he dropped the firewood, which clattered onto the pine needles. “Sorry, Puddin, I ain’t got no food for you. How come you didn’t catch no mouse?”

  “There ain’t mice out in the woods,” said the woman.

  “The heck there ain’t.”

  Their accents weren’t southern exactly—but they definitely weren’t from Maine.

  Charley and I exchanged glances, then he stepped forward. “Good morning!”

  We hadn’t been more than fifty feet away, and not even that well hidden, but it was as if we’d cast off cloaks of invisibility. The man did a definite double take. I saw a young woman stick her head out from behind the blue truck. She had heavy acne and thick dark hair that made her look like a junior witch.

  The bearded man raised a hand in a weak wave. “Howdy.”

  “You folks camping?” Charley asked as if the answer weren’t self-evident.

  “Yes, sir.”

  I decided to assert myself. “How did you get in here?”

  The man stretched his arm off in a direction that I judged to be southeast. “Drove in on that road.”

  From the direction we’d come, we hadn’t been able to see the dirt track leading back through the pines and oaks. It was completely covered with dead leaves and fallen needles, multiple autumns’ worth, which meant it hadn’t been plowed or graded in years.

  I noticed their Pennsylvania license plate. The registration had expired months ago. “This isn’t your property, I take it.”

  “What business is it of yours?” The woman was a cute little thing, barely five feet tall. She wore a white halter, stained with baby vomit, and bell-bottom jeans.

  For the third time that day, I pulled up the tail of my shirt to show off the badge on my belt. “I’m a game warden. This is private land.”

  The woman stepped in front of her man. I had the feeling she was the assertive one in the family. “We got permission to be here.”

  “Permission from who?”

  “The owner. He comes in to check on the place, make sure no one’s burned it down. Lots of people camp here. We got the place to ourselves now is all. But there were three or four other groups here when we first came in.”

  Scanning the clearing, I saw old fire rings and brushed areas of ground where tents had been pitched. Tire marks in the dried mud, too.

  “Really?” I had a bad habit of resting a hand on the grip of my firearm. It could be a menacing pose.

  “We ain’t done nothing wrong,” the woman said, looking at my gun.

  Things might have grown confrontational were it not for my friend’s natural charm. “We should’ve introduced ourselves. My name’s Charley Stevens. What’s yours?”

  “Prudence Smith.”

  “And yours?” Charley held out his hand for the bony man to shake.

  “Jackson,” he mumbled. “Jackson Smith.”

  “This is Warden Bowditch. We were out on the river and decided to come ashore. Found your little cat roaming around and followed her back here. Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  “It’s hot,” said Prudence.

  “The bugs been bad?” Charley asked.

  “Manageable,” said Jackson. “But they drove out the last folks who was here. Guess our skins were thicker.”

  “You have a baby, I see. What’s his name?”

  The woman darted behind the truck again and snatched up her naked infant as if we might have been aiming to steal him. The kid couldn’t have been more than a year old but was already so long, he dangled past her hips.

  “We ain’t done nothing wrong,” she said again. “We got permission, like I said.”

  “You didn’t get the owner’s name, did you?” I asked.

  “John something,” Jackson said. “His last name was unusual.”

  “How’d you two find this place?” Charley asked.

  Prudence seemed to be relaxing her guard. “We were down in Portland for a while but didn’t like the crowd. Drug addicts and thieves. Got kicked out of a couple of other sites. Lady working at a bakery outlet gave us directions. Told us which road to take. She said drive until you see the cellar hole, and that’s what we done.”

  “You’ve had some bad luck then,” I said, trying a softer tone myself.

  Jackson looked at the ground as if with embarrassment. “I lost my job down in Pennsylvania. Then we lost our apartment. Almost lost the truck, too. So we decided, why not visit Vacationland?”

  But the young woman had already decided she didn’t like me. “Yes, we’re homeless,” she snapped. “No, we’re not vagrants. No, we’re not beggars. We just barely are making it.” She gestured at the truck, the tent, the blanket spread with baby toys and picture books. “What you see is by the grace of God.”

  “You decided to go on the road,” said Charley calmly. The cat had begun circling his legs again.

  “Why not?” Prudence asked.

  In my time as a warden I had encountered my share of illegal campers. It used to be that people parked their pop-up trailers at the ends of logging roads because they couldn’t afford cabins of their own or were too cheap to pay for a campground site. And as long as they didn’t start forest fires, the timber companies didn’t mind.

  But more and
more, I was hearing stories of people like this couple who were living in the woods because they were homeless and had nowhere else to go. The city of Portland had razed much of the scrub woodland around its interstates for the express purpose of giving transients no place to pitch their tents. One of the effects had been to drive the displaced and the desperate into actual forests such as this one.

  “And you said other people have camped here with you over the past month?” I asked.

  “A bunch,” said Jackson.

  “So why’re you hassling us?” the woman said.

  Charley cooed at the baby. “What did you say this big guy’s name was?”

  “This is Carson.” Prudence allowed herself the most tentative of smiles. “He’s our little peanut butter and jelly.”

  “He’s going to be a bruiser. Maybe he’ll play for the Steelers someday.”

  The father grinned. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

  Charley nodded, but I could tell the compliment was a polite ruse to ask another question. “You mentioned a woman at a bakery outlet—”

  “We don’t want to get her in trouble,” said Prudence.

  “She told you to drive until you saw a cellar hole. Where would that hole be?”

  Jackson, the proud father, waved for us to follow him. He was so gangly, he walked as if there were springs in his knees.

  We ducked our way under some oak branches and stepped over a fallen pine that someone had used as an improvised commode. Flies buzzed excitedly around the dark pile beneath it.

  Another clearing opened before us. The trees were just saplings along the edges. Hay-scented ferns grew in a verdant patch in the open sunlight.

  “Never heard the term cellar hole before,” said our guide. “The guy who owns the land said it used to be his dad’s hunting and fishing cabin.”

  “Is that so?” Charley asked.

  I wasn’t sure what the old man’s interest was in a vanished building unless it was just his natural curiosity. I trailed along behind them, wishing I hadn’t left my water jug back in the canoe.