The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

spray shooting off the lake as it touched down on the water. I watched it turn and taxi in my direction. Then the propeller sputtered to a stop, and the plane drifted in the rest of the way to the ramp. The door swung open, and Charley Stevens stepped onto a pontoon. Being retired, he wasn’t wearing a warden’s uniform, but his outfit still gave him a semiofficial authority—he had on a pair of green Dickies and a matching T-shirt. Cocked at an angle on his head was a green baseball cap with the Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife logo.
    “I heard somebody here needed a ride,” he said.
    “That would be me.”
    “Then climb aboard, young man.” He jumped off into the shallow water and turned the plane slightly so its nose was facing deeper water. Then he held it steady by one of the braces like a groom holding the reins of a horse.
    Using a strut to pull myself up, I climbed onto the pontoon. The Super Cub was a little two-seater—about seven feet tall by twenty feet long—and it seemed about as rugged as a child’s kite.
    “What’s this thing made out of—balsa wood?”
    Charley laughed. “Might as well be.”
    I ducked my head and climbed into the cockpit’s cramped rear seat. As I fastened the shoulder harness, I wondered what possible good it would do in a crash.
    Charley waded around to the rear of the plane and gave it a shove toward deep water. Then he leaped after it, landed on the pontoon, and walked on it like a river driver walking on a log. He swung into the cockpit and belted himself in, saying over his shoulder, “It gets kind of noisy in here with the engine going, so you’ll need to use that intercom to talk.”
    As we skittered along the calm surface of the pond, I watched the wall of trees along the far shore draw nearer and nearer. Then, as if a balloon were inflating inside me, I experienced the lift of the wings via a sudden lightness in my stomach, and we were airborne. I looked down at the jagged treetops and wondered how we’d missed clipping them.
    Charley was right about the noise. Between the sound of the throttle and the rush of wind outside the cockpit I was half-deaf. I put on the intercom headset.
    “Keep your eyes on the horizon if you get to feeling green about the gills,” said Charley. “There should be a bucket back there, too, if you need it.”
    “I’ll be all right.”
    “That’s what they all say!”
    Beneath the plane the midcoast was spread out in a quilt of blue and green. Behind us were the indigo waters of Penobscot Bay, with its islands scattered about like puzzle pieces. Ahead stretched miles of broadleaf forest and blueberry barrens and pocket farmland, all crosshatched with roads.
    To the south I saw the muddy coils of the Segocket River and my own little tidal creek. I glimpsed the Square Deal Diner and the Sennebec Market. But what really struck me, from above, was all the new development—whole neighborhoods being carved out of wooded hilltops, luxury houses sprouting up in lawns of mud. It was a domesticated landscape, growing even more so, and the thought of a few fugitive bears hiding out along the ridgetops and in the remaining cedar hollows filled me with a melancholy ambivalence.
    “Jerky?” Charley asked through the intercom.
    “No, I’m fine.”
    He held up a plug of what looked like withered shoe leather. “I meant moose jerky. The Boss made it.”
    “The Boss?”
    “My wife, Ora.”
    “I’ll pass,” I said.
    Charley began gnawing at the plug of dried meat. For some reason my eyes kept focusing on the white line above the tan of his neck where his hair had recently been barbered. In the close quarters of the cockpit the hickory smell of the jerky was pungent.
    He said, “So why did you join the Warden service, if you don’t mind me asking?”
    The shuddering motion of the plane was beginning to get to me. “Because it’s all changing.”
    “What’s changing?”
    “The woods. The state. Everything. More and more people keep coming up here, up to Maine, and they don’t understand what’s special about this place. They have these distorted ideas about nature that comes from growing up in a city or a suburb. Kids think meat comes from a supermarket. They’re disconnected—the whole country is—and I didn’t want to live that way. I thought that if I joined the Warden service maybe I wouldn’t have to, and maybe I could help a few people see things differently. It sounds stupid to say it.”
    “No, I