The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

it was the bear running. He went crashing clear of the spruces. Branches snapped as he bulled his way through.
    I followed as best I could. Keeping my head down to avoid being jabbed in the eye by a sharp branch, I shouldered through the boughs. Then I was back outside the densest part of the thicket. My heart was beating so loud I could no longer hear the bear, but I caught a glimpse of movement through the timber, and I went after it at a dead run. I let gravity carry me down the slope.
    The bear turned on me at the bottom of the hill. He’d run himself into a streambed that cut like a ravine between this slope and the next, and he didn’t have the energy to climb out. He turned and lowered his head beneath the hump of his shoulders and bared his teeth.
    I had to slide on the dead leaves to stop my momentum. I fell backward, onto my ass, and suddenly found myself sitting upright on the ground, like a toddler surprised at having lost his balance, not twenty yards from the bear. For a split second neither of us moved. In the twilight the bear looked im mense. I saw that one of its eyes was a bright red mess. Then, suddenly, the bear charged. He was halfway to me before I could even blink, and I was swinging the shotgun barrel up. I don’t remember pulling the trigger, but the explosion brought stars to my eyes, and when I could see again, the bear lay motionless five yards in front me.
    I had a hard time getting to my feet. I heard a strange sound and then realized it was my own raspy breathing. My eyes were wet and stung as if I had dust in them.
    Keeping the shotgun trained on his head, I approached the bear. But he was already dead. The slug had torn a big hole through the front of his skull, blowing away a chunk of bone, lifting a flap of skin and thick hair. The smell of the animal was strong, all sour musk and blood, and standing over it, I saw that I’d been wrong about his size. Stretched out on the ground, dead, he was only about as big as a medium-sized man. He even looked a little like a man wearing a bear suit.
    The breeze blew again, and the sudden chill made me realize that my undershirt and shirt were soaked with sweat. I shivered and clicked on the shotgun safety and took a seat on a big, moss-covered stump. My tailbone ached from where I’d hit the ground. The bear was too big to drag out of there on my own; I would need to get help. I glanced back up the wooded hillside. From this angle, it looked as sheer as a cliff and about a mile high.
    “Shit,” I said.
     
    All the way up that hill, I cursed Bud Thompson. I’d known from the start that I might have to kill the bear. Dot Libby had even said so. Killing wounded and nuisance animals was part of what I did for a living as a game warden. Death was part of nature, a fact of life.
    But seeing that bear stretched lifeless on the ground and knowing that maybe a mile away my culvert trap was sitting empty filled me with an almost unbearable sense of waste. The bear’s death felt absolutely unnecessary, and the thing that bothered me most was that I couldn’t understand why the bear had returned to this farm when there was no longer a pig here.
    It took me at least fifteen minutes to hike back to Thompson’s farm, and even before I reached the hilltop I saw blue and red lights flashing through the trees. A sheriff’s cruiser and an ambulance were parked in Thompson’s driveway and there was another Maine Warden service patrol truck, beside my own, pulled up on the lawn.
    Kathy Frost was waiting for me outside the pigpen. “I was on the road and I heard the call come over the radio.” Her forehead was furrowed with concern. “Your face is all scraped.”
    I touched my cheek; my fingertips came away red.
    “What happened?” she asked. “Where’s the bear?”
    “It’s dead. About a quarter mile down that hill.”
    “Shit. That’s a long way to haul it out.”
    “It would have died, anyway,” I said. “It had lost a lot of blood.” I glanced up at the house. The first-floor windows were all alight. “Where’s Thompson?”
    “Inside. The EMTs are trying to convince him to go to the hospital. You should have stayed with him, Mike. You should have waited for us to bring a dog in.”
    “I was pissed off,” I said. “So why the hell did the bear come back here? It doesn’t make sense”
    “He was baiting it.”
    “What?”
    “He was putting out food for it.” She motioned for me to follow her around the pigpen. Inside the