Paul Doiron - The Poacher's Son

“There’s no sign of a knife wound,” I said aloud. “Which means the blood on the knife isn’t his. Before he died, he must have stabbed the person who shot him.”

“Truman,” she said, speaking slowly and softly. “Truman did this.”

I rose to my feet and closed my hand around her bare arm, trying to move her toward the door. But her whole body was dead weight. “We have to call the police.”

“But he’s still out there.”

“I think he’s wounded. He won’t get far.”

“You have to find him-before he kills us.”

“We’ll sit tight and wait for help. We’ll be fine.”

“What was that?” She turned her head sharply in the direction of the open door. “I heard a noise!” She pulled loose of me and darted outside.

“Brenda!”

I saw her sprint around the corner of the cabin, headed for the main lodge. Then, taking a step into the open, I heard a sharp metal-on-metal sound come from somewhere in the trees. The noise put me in mind of a car door slamming. The killer was still here. And I was letting him escape.

The blood trail showed brightly in the sunlight, a wet red path leading into the bushes. When Pelletier stabbed his murderer, he must have severed an artery, there was such a spray of it. A man couldn’t bleed like that and live, not without medical attention. My heart was seized with a perverse hope: It was Truman trying to get away, Truman dying from loss of blood. But what if it wasn’t him? What if it was my father? I couldn’t leave him to die in the forest. I had to know for certain.

I took the first few steps without realizing what I was doing. Then a cloud drifted across the sun and the fear hit me. I entered the woods, following the blood trail.

I put my feet down softly, as I had learned stalking deer, heel first and then toe, avoiding dry leaves and fallen branches where I could, pausing every few steps to listen. Young birches and poplars had sprouted up along the forest edge, and the green of their leaves showed the red of the fallen blood.

The trail could have been made by a drunken man. It staggered left and right, leading first deeper into the woods and then veering back toward the camp road. Here and there, shafts of sunlight pierced through the canopy to the pine-needle floor of the forest. In those sunlit patches the blood drops were bright as rubies.

Sweat rolled down into my eyes and stung like acid. I thought of the stories my father had told me of trailing gut-shot deer for miles, how often the deer ended up circling back because, even mortally wounded, they feared to leave the safety of their home territories, as if anything worse could happen to them. And I wondered whether the man I was tracking had circled back behind me and was even now aiming a rifle at me from some secret place in the trees.

The trail angled sharply to the right. Up ahead a green wall of raspberry bushes grew along the shoulder of the camp road, blocking it from view. The bushes were very thick, and I knew I would have to bust my way through them to get to the road. When I stepped out into the sun, I would be an easy target for a man with a rifle.

I paused beside a big pine and scanned left and right, looking for a way through the tangle of bushes.

That was when I caught sight of the truck. It was parked up the road from the camp, thirty or so yards from me. All I could make out was a metallic flash of blue amid the forest-green. But I knew.

It was a blue Chevy with an ATV in the bed.

Truman’s truck.

I felt a giddy, lifting sensation in my heart, as if I’d just taken a strong drink. It was Truman after all. He had killed Pelletier, he had killed Shipman and Brodeur. Charley had been wrong about my father. Everyone had been wrong.

But where was Truman? Maybe he had made it to the truck and passed out. Maybe he was sprawled in the road, dead. Or maybe he had heard me coming and was waiting in ambush to shoot me even as his blood drained away.

If he was waiting for me, it made sense that he was watching the road in the direction of the camp. He would expect me to come that way. In which case, the best bet would be to come around him from behind. I would need to circle a dense stand of firs to do that. The balsams were no taller than big Christmas trees, but they grew together so closely I couldn’t easily slip through them. I followed the outer edge of the stand deeper into the forest, stepping carefully over fallen trees whose branches rose into the air like spikes. The ground was very dry, and no matter how slowly I stepped, twigs snapped. I felt as stealthy as a freight train.

A bend in the road hid the truck from view. My scratched and sweaty arms were powdered with dust, and my T-shirt was smeared red with raspberries. I wiped the perspiration from my hands on my pants and did my best to dry the shotgun grip with my shirttail. Then I filled my lungs full of air.

I moved along the side of the road, staying in shadows as much as possible. Soon I could see the rear end of the truck. The bed was open. Truman was nowhere in sight. I crossed to the other side of the road to have a look at the driver’s side.

Truman was slumped against the door, his legs out in front of him, holding both hands over his stomach as if he’d eaten too much. He wasn’t moving. Even from a distance of twenty yards I could see the puddle of blood under his legs. The rifle lay in the dirt a few feet away.

I trained the shotgun on him and edged forward. “Truman Dellis!”

He didn’t move.

I drew closer, keeping the shotgun aimed at his chest. I’d seen so much death in my job, I thought I could always recognize it. But now I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.

Truman’s eyes were closed and his head lolled to one side, motionless. I saw the slash where Pelletier had stabbed him in the gut. His shirt bore the red handprints he’d made trying to keep the life from draining out of himself. The blood lay in a viscous puddle at my feet. I kicked the rifle away from his hand. He didn’t even twitch.

I wedged the butt of the shotgun in the crook of my right arm to hold it one-handed, and then I knelt down to feel for a pulse in his throat. And as I did, Truman grabbed me.

I lurched backward, but his grip was too strong to break. Wild eyed, panting hard, with blood smeared across his teeth, he yanked with his free hand at the barrel of the shotgun. I tried to bring the butt up against his jawbone, but he threw his weight, and we both fell over onto the bloody ground.

My breath exploded out of me with the impact, and it was all I could do to keep hold of the gun. He had the barrel by both hands now, trying to wrench it away. I brought a knee up between us, wedging us apart, pushing against his wounded gut.

He let out a howl and punched me hard in the nose. Lights flashed in my eyes. He was fighting for his life, struggling for control of the gun. I drew my knees up again, but he just kept coming.

Hands slick with blood, I felt myself losing my grip.

I don’t know which one of us pulled the trigger.

It all happened in a millisecond. The recoil drove the shotgun hard into my stomach. Through a blue haze that burned my eyes I saw him jerk back, as if in super-fast motion, and in that same instant I was splattered with blood.

The smell of cordite hung in the air. My eardrums ached.

Oh, God, I thought.

Somehow I was on my feet, breathing hard, pointing the empty, shaking shotgun at his motionless body. Half of his head was gone. Above the jaw there was nothing I recognized as a human face, just blood and tissue and scraps of skull.

I had to brace myself against the truck bed to keep from collapsing, trying to swallow down the taste of vomit. How had this happened?

Truman’s hunting rifle lay in the dirt near the front tire of the truck. I stared at it dumbly. Why didn’t he just shoot me as I came up on him? Why had he played dead? None of this made sense.