The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

Get over here.”
    I said, “I need to go, Mrs. Hersom. The bear was just seen up the road.”
    “What about me?”
    I backed out of the kitchen. “I’ll come back. Close your doors and windows for now, and you’ll be OK.”
    She followed me down the hall. “Who’s going to pay for my screen door?”
    “I need to go, Mrs. Hersom.”
    She called after me down the walk, “If you see that bear, shoot it!”
     
    I found Kathy’s new GMC parked in the shade of some trees, a mile up the road. The trailer with the culvert trap was hitched to the back of it. Kathy was nowhere to be seen, but a ticked-off red squirrel was chattering in the beeches at the side of the road.
    I pushed through some dusty roadside raspberries and found my sergeant standing underneath an old beech, looking up at the squirrel perched on a limb above her head. The little animal was scolding her as if she had given it offense.
    “I hate to tell you,” I said, “but that’s not a bear.”
    “And I was just thinking we could have used a smaller trap.”
    “So where did it go?”
    “Over there. Into the bog.”
    Kathy Frost was a tall, sun-freckled woman with a bob of sandy hair and the toned arms and legs of a basketball player. Her uniform had a huge stain over her right breast.
    She noticed where I was looking. “Breakfast burrito,” she confessed sheepishly.
    “Actually, I was checking you out.”
    “In your dreams.”
    We spread out a topo map of the area across the hood of my truck and put our heads together. Kathy’s bug repellent of choice was Avon Skin So Soft, a perfumed lotion that gave her a feminine scent that seemed at odds with her mannish body language. Sarah had used that same lotion whenever we went hiking. In spite of myself, I found myself losing focus on what Kathy was now telling me.
    She guessed that the bear was ranging out from a cedar swamp, roughly midway between Bud Thompson’s farm and the Bog Road. “In the winter,” she said, “that swamp’s a primo deer yard. They really bunch up under those cedars to get out of the snow. I could see your bear using it for cover from the heat.”
    On my map a dotted line indicated an old logging trail that led from the road down into the heart of the swamp. That road seemed to offer the best access into the bear’s territory.
    Getting down it with the trailer was another story. About fifty yards in, we came across a fallen tree—a storm-toppled spruce—that we had to winch out of the way before we could drive any farther. Then Kathy nearly got her truck stuck in a dry rivulet that had been carved in the road during the spring runoff.
    A few hundred yards in we found the remains of a burned house. It was just a weed-and bottle-filled cellar hole today, but once, maybe a hundred years ago, someone had built himself a house there and chopped down the cedars and hemlocks to clear a yard. Now the forest had closed back in around the foundation, and wild rhubarb and sumac grew thick and tangled around the blackened stone walls. It was as if the place had somehow managed to slide backward into the past.
    Kathy stopped her truck in front of me and got out. “Did you see those fresh claw marks on that beech back there?”
    “I guess I missed them.”
    “Let’s have a look around. I think this just might be the spot.”
     
    Does a bear shit in the woods? You’d better believe it. Kathy found scat in the road beyond the cellar hole. She crouched down and broke the black turd apart with a stick.
    “It looks like dog shit,” I said.
    “That’s because he’s eating meat. If he was eating berries, it would be gloppier—like a cow patty.”
    “Gloppier?”
    “See how the grass is still green under the scat? That means it’s fresh. Now you see what I mean when I say a warden really needs to know his shit.”
    I groaned.
    Her knees cracked as she straightened up again. “Let’s set that trap, Grasshopper.”
    The trap itself was a barrel-shaped tube—identical to the metal culverts that run beneath roads—three feet in diameter and about seven feet long, perforated with holes the size of tennis balls. The culvert was welded sled-like to a pair of angle-iron runners that attached to the trailer. One end of the tube was closed with a heavy grate; the other consisted of a steel door that could be propped open and then triggered to fall shut when a bear upset the bait pan inside.
    “Bears are funny,” said Kathy as we propped open the gate. “Sometimes