Widowmaker (4 page)

“So how are things going up there in Moose Vegas?” I asked.

“Winter just started. The moose still have full coats and haven't been sucked dry yet by the ticks. Ask me again in April.”

“I'm not going to have to wait that long to see you, am I?”

“That depends on the moose.”

“You sound like you have a cold.”

“It's just the sniffles.”

“So are you still too frozen for phone sex?”

She laughed that rowdy laugh of hers. “I'm thawing,” she said. “But I'd better lock my door if you're going to start talking dirty.”

 

4

That night, in my dreams, I found myself back in the mountains and hardscrabble farmland of my childhood. I was a boy again, standing outside my father's trapping shed, and there were patches of snow on the ground. I was watching him expertly cut the fur off the otters and muskrats he had caught in leg-hold traps, then throw the skinned carcasses into a fire he had lit in an oil drum. My father's hands were bloody, but when he looked up at me, he was smiling and his face was kind. He waved me over to come help him—something he had never done in life—offering me the bloody knife to take. But as is often true in dreams, I found myself unable to move, and he began to get red in the face. He started cursing and brandishing the knife as he came toward me, and that was when I woke up.

I felt no more rested than when I'd gone to sleep. There was a dull pain behind my eyes from the bourbon the night before. I swallowed some ibuprofen and stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, letting the hot water scald my back.

When I picked up my uniform shirt from the floor, my dad's dog tags fell out of the pocket. For some reason, I was seized by a sudden impulse to put them around my neck. Then the urge passed, and I was left wondering why I would have wanted to carry around a reminder of a man who had nearly ruined my life. I gripped the tags tightly in my hand and glanced around the bedroom for a place to hang them.

As I made my way down the stairs to the darkened kitchen, I made a conscious decision to focus on my work that day. I wasn't going to think about Amber or her misbegotten son.

Standing at the counter, watching the black windows fade to blue, I ate half a box of Cheerios, then filled my travel mug with coffee for the road ahead. I was supposed to cover two districts that day: my own and the adjacent district to the northwest. The warden who normally patrolled that section, Tommy Volk, was in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out divorce and was taking a personal day to spend in court, battling with his soon-to-be second ex-wife. The joke around the division was that Volk already had a third ex-wife lined up.

Strange as it sounds, the love lives of game wardens were often the stuff of soap operas.

When I reported in with the dispatcher, he said, “I got a call from a lady who claims to have seen a timber wolf in her backyard.”

“There are no timber wolves in Maine.”

“Tell her that. She was pretty agitated. Said it was killing deer. She's called twice now, in fact. I think she's going to keep calling us every hour if you don't go over there this morning.”

The woman's name was Gail Evans, and she lived over on Pondicherry Pond, near Bridgton, which was part of Volk's district and not a place I knew particularly well. Ms. Evans had probably seen an eastern coyote: an animal with which I had some unhappy history. It felt like a portent of a miserable day to come.

Outside, I found three inches of weightless snow on my truck and a scrim of frost on the windows that required five hard minutes of scraping to clear. The air was crisp enough to stiffen the hairs in my nostrils. I decided to replace my brimmed duty cap with a knit snowmobiling hat. I didn't want to lose any earlobes.

The road around the west shore of Sebago revealed an expanding sheet of ice that still hadn't yet hardened all the way across. Indigo waves continued to churn a mile out in the center. Some winters, Maine's deepest lake never froze entirely. The open water made me think of the World War II bomber who had crashed out there during a training mission. The fuselage had never been recovered. The plane was still down there in the murk and the mud, a rusting tomb for its skeleton pilots.

Lord God, I was in a morbid mood.

Most of the morning traffic was moving in the opposite direction, heading into the distant city of Portland. Southernmost Maine was the only part of the state that was growing, gaining in population. Everywhere else, it seemed, the old mill towns and fishing ports were losing their young people. The last time I had visited the mountains of my childhood, I had counted abandoned houses and trailers until the number got too depressing.

Which, inevitably, made me think about my father again.

And Adam Langstrom, my alleged brother.

It wasn't even seven o'clock yet, and I had already broken my promise to myself.

*   *   *

Gail Evans was waiting for me in the middle of the road, and I could tell from her expression that she had been waiting a long time. She stood beside a sign that read
THREADS
:
FIBER ARTS STUDIO
,
WEAVING AND SPINNING LESSONS.

I guessed her to be in her late fifties or early sixties. She had sun-damaged skin, bright eyes the color of Navajo turquoise, and silver curls that escaped from under a fibrous, fuzzy cap that reminded me of a purple Furby. She was dressed in blue jeans, a rainbow-hued sweater, and heavy Birkenstock sandals ill-suited to the time of year. She held a snow shovel at port arms across her torso.

“What took you so long?” She spoke as if she suffered from lockjaw.

I treated the question as rhetorical. “You reported seeing a ‘wolf'?”

She waved the shovel at me. “Two hours ago! It chased a little deer right through my yard.”

Contrary to popular belief, there is no population of wolves living in Maine. Occasionally, one might materialize in some northern corner of the state: a lonely wanderer from some distant region of Quebec. My father claimed to have seen a wolf once while he was hunting. There might also be some outcasts that had been let loose by crazies hoping to repopulate the Maine woods with species from the Pleistocene. But the official line from state biologists was that wolves had been eradicated from the northeastern United States in the nineteenth century, and there were no plans whatsoever to bring them back.

In all likelihood what this woman had seen was a coyote: a once-nonnative species that had migrated east to fill the ecological niche vacated by their larger cousins. As the small western coyote drifted into Maine, it evolved into a formidable predator capable of taking down everything from an adult deer to a newborn moose. I'd seen dead coyotes, shot by night hunters (because the best time to hunt them is after dark), that measured five feet in length and weighed in at nearly seventy pounds. Damned big dogs.

“Can you show me where, exactly, you saw this ‘wolf'?” I asked.

The muscles in her neck stiffened. “Why do you keep saying it that way—‘wolf'? You don't believe me, do you? Well, I can show you the paw prints.”

I followed her down her driveway to a cottage that looked like something out of a storybook. The house was purple, with a green-shingled roof, bright orange doors, and numerous stained-glass windows. In the yard were all manner of sculptures—from enormous wrought-iron human figurines to granite birdbaths, now frozen, to immense metallic balls like gold meteorites that had dropped from the sky to become half-buried in the snow.

“See, there!”

She used her shovel to point at a heavily trampled plot of snow beside a flat-tray bird feeder. There were hoofprints of all sizes everywhere in the yard.

I scratched my nose. “You seem to get a lot of deer here.”

“I put out corn and apples for them. Cortlands.”

“That's a bad idea, Ms. Evans.”

“Feeding deer in general or giving them Cortlands in particular? Whatever for?”

I started an often-recited speech: “I know you mean well, but feeding deer actually reduces their ability to survive during the winter. It makes deer more vulnerable to predators by drawing them out of their protective cover, and it lures them close to roads, where they get hit by cars. And when they congregate in herds, they pass on illnesses—like chronic wasting disease—to one another.”

Her expression told me she didn't believe a word I was saying. “So I'm supposed to watch them starve?”

“You could invite hunters onto your land instead of posting it.”

“Right!”

“Well, you shouldn't feed them, in any case.”

Gail Evans remained unmoved. “That's ridiculous.”

I had no doubt she would keep putting out feed corn and fruit baskets for the deer no matter what I said. “You're going to continue having problems with predators, in that case.”

I circled the trampled area, which was littered with cracked kernels of corn and apple scraps the deer hadn't yet eaten. Sure enough, I saw the prints of a very large canine—five pads with visible claw marks. Felines, like bobcats and lynx, typically don't show their claws. By the size, I would have said they belonged to a domestic dog.

I rose to my feet and brushed my gloved hands together to remove the snow. “Can you tell me what you saw, exactly?”

She had a rare gift for speaking complete sentences through clenched teeth. “I was in my studio, and I heard howling, and then I saw the deer come through and, a moment later, this fast black shape. And I said, ‘Oh, my Lord, that's a wolf!' It scared the hell out of me. No one ever told me there were wolves here.”

“That's because there aren't any,” I said. “Are you sure it wasn't more of a bark than a howl?”

“What—like a terrier?”

I tried to frame my words carefully. “Ms. Evans, I'm sure it seemed to you like a wolf.”

Gail Evans flashed her jewel-like eyes at me. “Here we go.”

“In all likelihood, what you saw was someone's dog,” I said. “It doesn't take much to awaken their predator genes. You'd be surprised by some of the breeds I've seen—Shetland sheepdogs, boxers, even poodles—chasing deer.”

“This was no poodle.”

I tried another tack. “It could have been a coyote. There are a lot of them in this area, and they hunt deer. But the prints would be smaller.”

She pushed her fuzzy hat back from her forehead as if it was itching her. “Didn't coyotes kill two hikers on the Appalachian Trail? If you're trying to reassure me, you're not doing a very good job! Besides, I saw dozens of coyotes when I lived in Santa Fe, and this was too big to be one. I'm telling you, it was a wolf.”

I didn't want to rehash what had actually taken place on the AT; I had spent too many hours trying to put a stake through the heart of rumors that refused to die. Nor did I want to get into a taxonomic debate about the subspecies of coyotes—western versus eastern—with this impossible woman.

There was a long silence while I tried to formulate a response that didn't sound even more condescending. Some crows far away in the treetops began making a ruckus.

Finally, Gail Evans lifted her chin as if trying to balance a Ping-Pong ball on it. “You're not even going to make a report of this, are you? Or if you do, you're going to write something about a crazy woman ‘from away' who doesn't know the difference between a timber wolf and a poodle.”

The complacent self-confidence of this woman was bringing out a side of me I disliked. As a rookie warden, I had sometimes been abrupt to the point of rudeness with difficult people, but I had worked hard at managing my anger during the past years. Nevertheless, I needed to get away from her before I said something I regretted.

“I think I'm going to follow these tracks a ways and see what I find. If you want to wait inside—”

“I'm going with you.”

“This is something I need to do alone, ma'am.”

She shook her head in frustration, causing her Furby cap to slide forward again. But she had recognized the seriousness in my tone. When I left her, she was attacking the snowbank around one of her buried statues with the blade of her shovel.

With the new coating of snow, running the track was easy. The prints led across the side yard and through a wall of white cedars that the deer had chewed to shreds. The track shifted course where the young deer had made long leaps trying to escape the death snapping at its heels. I found tufts of deer hair pinned to some bayberry thorns, telling me the chase had happened very recently. A strong wind would have blown those wisps of fur loose.

Stacey teased me about being a compulsive noticer, but I believed my attention to details was one of my better qualities. It certainly helped me in my work on days like these.

The temperature seemed to drop as the shadow of a cloud passed over me. I looked up and felt my heart skip. Directly over my head hung an enormous oak branch—roughly the size of a railroad tie—that had broken loose in a recent storm. The branch should have come crashing to the ground, but it had gotten snagged in the boughs of the surrounding pines. The weight was causing the boughs to sag, and it looked like the next strong gust might send it plummeting to earth. Maine loggers called these looming hazards “widowmakers,” for obvious reasons. They had killed many men in the woods.

Widowmaker was the name of the ski resort where Amber worked. The universe seemed intent on nudging me in a direction I didn't want to go. I stepped out from under the death trap as the wind rustled the snow out of the boughs around me.

I kept following the deer trail.

A few hundred yards into the forest, I finally came across the corpse of the young deer. It was still warm. Flecks of spittle showed along its lips. The yearling had run until its heart had given out. The ribs rippled beneath my fingertips as I rubbed the animal's side.

The stomach was torn open, and a bloody pulp of half-chewed organs had spilled out onto the snow.