The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

me any. I watched him pop it out of its foil packet and stuff it in his cheek.
    My mouth was very dry. “You don’t have an extra stick of that, do you?”
    He smiled at me, the first time that day. “It’s nicotine.”
    “I don’t care,” I said.

 
     
    9
     
    T he State of Maine is the largest in New En gland, roughly as big as all the others combined. From Portland, on the coast, you can drive to New York City in five hours, but it takes more than six to reach the town of Madawaska, where Aroostook County juts up into Canada. These distances can make it hard for newcomers to get their bearings—everything seems farther away than it should be. As a result, most people never travel beyond the lower third of the state. They cling to the coast, with its light houses and beaches and picture-postcard fishing harbors. Relatively few travelers venture into the state’s northwestern mountains, but that was where Lieutenant Malcomb and I were now headed.
    It was a familiar road. As a child I had once lived along Route 144 before my mother stole me away to southern Maine. The twolane forest road forks off the busier Carrabassett highway and curves roughly northwest, through the backwoods townships of Dead River Plantation and Flagstaff, before reconnecting with the highway again near the Canadian border at Coburn Gore. It is the gateway to one of western Maine’s last remote regions, a wedge-shaped section of forested mountains and moose bogs between the Kennebec River and eastern Quebec. Deep in the heart of that wild land, accessible only by logging road or floatplane, is Rum Pond.
    We weren’t going that far, thankfully. The search zone, according to Lieutenant Malcomb, was concentrated between the highway and the Dead River, a circle twenty miles in diameter. Even so, it was a forsaken stretch of woods. There were some newer split-level homes and spiffed-up old farm houses back near the Carrabassett River, but as we traveled north, farm houses gave way to mobile homes, which in turn gave way to cabins with yards full of junk cars and barking dogs chained to posts. The sight of these shacks filled me with a sort of gut-sick nostalgia. I’d spent the first part of my life holed up in identical white trash mansions—just my mother and father and me. It was a childhood straight out of the Brothers Grimm, and I hated anything that reminded me of it. Which was just about everything at the moment.
    This was my father’s country. He used to brag that you could drop him, blindfolded, anywhere in the woods between Rangeley and Jackman and in five minutes he’d deduce his location. It wasn’t an idle boast. He’d hiked hundreds of miles through these mountains with a rifle slung over his shoulder, needing no compass to guide him home. Maybe a man couldn’t actually disappear here anymore, not in this age of heat-sensing he li cop ters and GPS trackers. There were too many roads, too many people. But if anyone could vanish into these North Woods, it was my dad. I wondered if the searchers knew what they were chasing.
     
    We ran into the first roadblock in a barely settled area of industrial timber south of the Dead River and east of the Bigelow Mountains. Two state police cruisers had angled themselves across both lanes, blocking traffic. There were a handful of cars and campers and pickup trucks pulled off to the side of the road, waiting to be let through the outer perimeter.
    A state trooper approached Malcomb’s window. “The command post is set up at the Otter Brook hatchery,” he told us.
    “Who’s the OIC?” asked Lieutenant Malcomb.
    “The sheriff, sir. But Major Carter is en route.” In other words, the sheriff was temporarily the officer in charge until the state police tactical team arrived.
    “Are the K-9 units here?”
    “Not yet, sir.”
    Which meant the grid search, as such, hadn’t begun. I checked my watch. By my crude reckoning, my father had already been on the run for close to two hours.
     
    There was another roadblock set up at the ditch where Deputy Twombley had careened off the road. Half a dozen police officers, most in body armor and carry ing semiautomatic weapons or shotguns, were clustered around their vehicles, waiting for something to happen. I’d never participated in a hunt for an armed fugitive, but I’d taken part in grid searches for an Alzheimer’s patient, missing hunters, and a couple of lost children. Hurry-up-and-wait was the way these operations usually