The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

after that. I heard him talking on the radio—presumably to Soctomah, giving him our estimated arrival time—but I couldn’t focus on what he was saying. The hour was approaching when I was expected to report to Lieutenant Malcomb’s office, and very soon it would become clear that I wasn’t going to show. What would happen then? I wondered. Would he send Kathy Frost to my home to drag me in, or just start dismissal proceedings? At the moment, I couldn’t recall what the policy manual said on the subject of unexplained absences from duty.
    When I could finally bring myself to look out the window again, the land had changed. No longer were we flying over patchwork fields and house lots. Instead, a mixed evergreen and hardwood forest extended out to the horizon, a lush green expanse broken only by ponds and rocky hills.
    This was the wild country I’d dreamed of as a boy—what Ernest Hemingway had called “the last good country” of big maples and hemlocks—but it had been a false dream then, and it was a false dream now. The last of the old-growth stands had been cleared half a century ago. Swaths of razed ground opened up like ragged wounds on the hillsides. Slashings littered the edges of these man-made barrens and a network of dirt-and-shale logging roads connected them to one another.
    “Look at all these new roads,” I said.
    “They keep building them. Used to be they’d leave the cedars and birches standing. But these days, you know, they can find a use for every tree. I swear they have saws now that can cut a straight board from a crooked tree.”
    Old clear-cuts and plantations of new saplings showed themselves as pale green patches against the darker green of the second-growth woods. From the air the forest looked like the commercial crop that it was.
    But still there was a
wildness
here—at least in the speed with which the forest healed its scars. I saw deer browsing in a clear-cut, a big bull moose using a logging road as a short cut from one bog to another. Nature will forgive humankind just about anything, and what it won’t forgive I hope never to witness.
    We passed a ribbon of road that must have been Route 144, but I didn’t see any of the landmarks—the fish hatchery or Wally Bickford’s cabin—to orient myself. Over to the right I thought I spotted the Dead River, creasing the tops of the trees. The Bigelows loomed ahead.
    “Is this the Wendigo land?”
    “Part of it,” said Charley. “Did you see the new gate and check-point back there?”
    “Where’s Rum Pond?”
    “Over there.” He gestured off to the right. “It’s way behind those mountains, so you can’t see it. But that little lake up ahead is Flagstaff Pond. Back in the forties a power company was going to dam the Dead River and flood this whole valley—until people got up in arms about it. Just like they’re doing now. It’s always something.”
    As we drew nearer and began turning for our descent, I could see a little downtown between the Dead River and marshy Flagstaff Pond. I saw clapboard houses and a Mason hall and not a whole lot else. As the plane touched down on the lake, I was beginning to think that I’d just made the worst mistake of my life by coming here.
    “The evidence you mentioned,” I said as we floated, motionless, beside a dock. “None of it’s incontrovertible. It could be someone planted it to set him up.”
    Charley didn’t respond directly but instead asked a question of his own. “Where do
you
think he ran off to?”
    “The last I heard he was across the border in Canada. That’s what he told my mom yesterday.”
    “But you don’t believe it.”
    “No.”
    “Nor do I,” said Charley Stevens, opening the door.
    Climbing out, I glanced again at my watch. It was 11:05 a.m. And I was officially AWOL from the Maine Warden Service.

 
     
    21
     
    W e left the plane tied to the dock and walked into the village. It was a short walk, not more than a quarter mile or so, but hard going because of the heat. The sun was burning a hole in the sky above Jim Eaton Hill, and the air was suffocating even in the shadows of the pines. We passed some cabins for rent near the lake and then a row of farm houses with blistered paint and gardens all gone to seed. Grasshoppers sprang up at our every step, the only signs of life around. The entire population of Flagstaff—all hundred-and-something people—seemed to be taking a collective siesta.
    A sheriff’s patrol car and an unmarked