The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

off if we can find him quickly and get him to surrender. So if there’s anything else you can think of, any other piece of information that might help us, we need to know about it.”
    “Only this,” I said. “He didn’t murder those men.”
    Soctomah blinked, clearly taken aback. “Why do you say that?”
    “Because I know what’s in his nature. He may be a son-of-a-bitch—I know that better than anybody—but he’s too smart to kill a cop. I don’t expect you to believe that. But the man you’re looking for is some sort of terrorist kook. He killed that V.P. from Wendigo to send a message. My father wouldn’t do that.”
    “So if he’s innocent,” asked Menario, “then why’d he run?”
    “I don’t know.”
    A look came into Soctomah’s eyes that I didn’t recognize at first. Then I realized: He was embarrassed for me. He thought I was deluding myself, and he felt pity.
    “I know it looks bad,” I said. “But you’re mistaken about him.”
    Soctomah stood up in such a way as to make me stand up, too. “Thanks for taking the time to talk with us, Mike,” he said, escorting me to the door. “We’ll keep you posted.”
    “You know where to find me,” I said, putting on my sunglasses to face the daylight again.

 
     
    10
     
    T he search got under way and I had nothing to do. Lieutenant Malcomb said I’d be an observer, and that’s exactly what I was: a spectator forced to watch while a platoon of heavily armed officers was deployed into the wooded hills east of the Bigelow Mountains.
    When I was a teenager I used to have nightmares about being a ghost. In my dreams I’d float around like a phantom watching my family and friends, unable to speak to them, unable to interact. It was the worst thing I could imagine, and it was exactly how I felt now. Stuck in a crowded room, forced to follow the search on topographic maps, hearing the bloodhounds only in my imagination.
    The dogs had picked up my dad’s trail easily enough at the crash scene. But my father was a professional trapper, and he knew about scents and how not to leave them. His boots were always rubber-bottomed because leather and canvas leave a human odor. And he knew how to zigzag across streams and find paths of bare stone more or less impervious to smell. He scrambled through bogs so choked with fallen trees—spiked branches everywhere—that the dogs cut their pads to shreds trying to follow. He knew he probably couldn’t outwit the hounds, but he could definitely exhaust their handlers and gain himself some time.
    The reports came back by radio. Trail lost. Trail found again.
    The tension got to people in different ways. I drank coffee until my stomach burned. The officer in charge, Major Carter, of the state police tactical team, kept checking his watch. The sheriff left the room every fifteen minutes to piss. Lieutenant Malcomb found a pack of Lucky Strikes on a desk and stepped outside.
    I found him behind the building, standing beside a bubbling spillway, lighting a cigarette. “Lieutenant,” I said. “I know what we talked about before, but I’d like to be posted into the field. Let me direct traffic or something. I can’t just stand around like this, waiting.”
    “We’re all waiting.”
    “But you need more men out there.”
    “The governor’s got the National Guard on standby.” He dropped the cigarette and crushed it beneath his boot. “I think we can spare you, Bowditch.”
    There was nothing to say to that. Overhead I heard a faint drone and then saw a small airplane flash in the sun. It banked and swung westward into the deepening shadows beneath Little Bigelow and disappeared from view.
    “That’s Charley Stevens,” said the lieutenant, as if identifying a species of bird. He left me staring up at the darkening peaks. In the mountains you really do run out of daylight early.
     
    The Bigelows were named for Major Timothy Bigelow, who came through here with Col o nel Benedict Arnold on his march to Quebec in 1775. It was a chapter of the Revolutionary War nobody talks about much anymore, but I remembered how jazzed I was as a kid to learn that my hometown was near a site of historic significance. My dad told me that Arnold brought a thousand men from the sea up the Kennebec River in leaky bateaux, portaging the heavy boats over Pleasant Ridge to the Dead River, then along the Chain of Ponds, heading overland again across the Height of Land that fences the border with Canada, and finally