The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

to get back to that book I’m reading. You two go.”
    “We’ll miss you.” Charley knelt down and kissed her on the lips. Then in the near dark we watched Ora wheel herself back up the ramp and into the house. A moment later the light flickered on in the hall window, and we saw her smiling face shining back at us.
    *   *   *
     
    We were riding along over a dirt logging road in Charley’s pickup truck, the headlights cutting a path for us through the dark.
    “Can I ask you a personal question?”
    He laughed. “You sound like my wife. Whenever she says those words, I get the hell out of the room. But go ahead.”
    “Why is Ora in a wheelchair?”
    He smiled, a tired smile. “I knew I should have left the room.”
    “I don’t mean to pry.”
    “It’s all right. It’s common knowledge. Hell, I thought everyone in the Warden Service knew.” He kept his eyes on the road while he spoke. “We were in a plane crash six years ago, before I retired. I’d been nagging her to learn to fly for thirty-odd years and finally she gave in. I practically live in the air, so I figured she’d take to it the way I did.”
    “What happened?”
    “I had another plane back then. I showed her a few things on the ground, the instrument panel and how to use the stick, but I didn’t spend near enough time. Then the first couple times we went up together she did fine, better than I hoped, so I figured that was it. She was a natural, I thought.”
    He rolled down the window, letting air rush in between us.
    “Well, the third time we went up together the wind was really blowing and she panicked bringing us in to land. We came in at the wrong angle, and there was nothing I could do. The plane got crumpled down to half its size. It was a miracle we didn’t both get killed. She broke her back, and I got off with a concussion and a busted flipper.” He lifted his right elbow. “But then I’ve always been close to indestructible.”
    We turned off the main dirt road down a narrow path. Tree branches brushed the sides of the truck as we blundered ahead.
    “I’m sorry,” I said.
    “Me too. And of course it was harder for me being the one relatively uninjured, although Ora never blamed me for what happened.”
    “But your daughters blamed you.”
    He glanced over at me, eyes narrowed. “You’re quite the perceptive young warden. I guess I’ll have to watch what I say around you from now on.” He swerved slightly to avoid a toad in the road. “Yes, Anne blamed me at first, but not anymore. Stacey, though . . . I think she blames us both. But me more.”
    I didn’t say anything else, and he didn’t, either, until we’d finally come to a stop.
    The path dead-ended at the edge of a small black pond in the hollow between wooded hills. There was a dark cabin there half-hidden in the trees and the ruin of an old pier jutting out into the water. “That’s Jim Grindle’s old cabin,” Charley said. “He’s living in a nursing home down in Waterville with Alzheimer’s. I suppose it’s just as well, given what’s happening with Wendigo.”
    He flicked off the highbeams and we got out of the truck and walked down to the waterline, letting our eyes adjust again to the darkness. In the weeds frogs were blowing like bagpipes. And the sky was an enormous black bowl overhead.
    “How’s your astronomy?” Charley asked.
    “I know the Big and Little Dippers, of course, and there’s Mars. Those are the Pleiades. I’m fairly certain that’s an airplane. Or a UFO.”
    In the starlight I could see Charley smiling at me. “That’s not so bad. My dad made us memorize all the different constellations, summer and winter. They say birds navigate by the stars.”
    We stood there for a while breathing in the rich balsam smell of the forest and the algae smell of the pond.
    “Let’s see if I can get those dogs singing.”
    He cupped his hands around his mouth, just as he did with the owl, but this time the sound he let loose was a thin, mournful howl.
    Almost instantly there came a cry from across the pond, a high-pitched wail that sent shivers up my spine.
    Charley called again, and the first coyote answered, and then a second coyote, off on one of the hills, joined in. Then a third and a fourth replied.
    “This pond is the boundary between two family packs,” said Charley softly. “I think they’ve got a feud going on over whose it is. Some nights it doesn’t take much to get them worked up.”
    Back and forth the