Paul Doiron: The Poacher's Son

“Hey, you’ve reached Rum Pond Sporting Camps, and if we ain’t here, we’re probably out fishing.” When I was sixteen, I’d spent half a summer washing dishes at the camps. The only woman there had been Pelletier’s chain-smoking wife, but this pretty voice definitely didn’t belong to Doreen.

The machine started to record. “This is Mike Bowditch,” I said. “Jack’s son. I don’t know if he’s still working there-Charley Stevens told me he was, but we haven’t talked in a while-I mean, my dad and I haven’t talked. Anyway, I got a call from him last night. I’m not sure what it’s about. Can you tell him I called?” I rattled off my cell-phone and pager numbers and hung up, embarrassed at my stammering incoherence.

How come everything to do with my father left me feeling like I was nine years old?

The sun had risen over the pines and the day was shaping up to be another steam bath. I had two hours to kill before Kathy showed up with the culvert trap, so I decided to stop in town for breakfast. I desperately wanted to see a newspaper.

The Square Deal Diner, in Sennebec Center, was owned by a plump and hyperactive widow named Dot Libby who also ran a motel and gift shop out on the highway, served as chair of the school board, organized the municipal Fourth of July picnic, and played the organ every Sunday morning at the Congregational Church. She was the mother of six (four living) and grandmother of twenty-two. I knew all this within five minutes of meeting her. Dot liked to talk. Her late husband had passed away several years earlier from prostate cancer, but the joke around town-probably started by Dot herself-was that he died of exhaustion from trying to keep up with her all those years. She kept a photo of him on the wall of the diner, where he continued to stare down at her with sad, hound-dog eyes.

“ ’Morning, Mike!” she shouted as I came through the door.

Every head in the room turned to look at me. I felt blood rush to my cheeks. I’ve always blushed easily. “Hey, Dot.”

“So what are you gonna do about that bear?”

“News travels fast.”

“Heard it over the scanner.” She poured me a cup of coffee. “You gonna shoot it?”

“Hope I don’t have to.”

This early, the crowd consisted mostly of locals: carpenters, fishermen, auto-body mechanics, road crew workers. All males. Dot and her youngest daughter Ruth, who waited on the booths, were the only females in the place.

“Can I have the bear meat if you get it?” Dot had red blossoms on her cheeks and laugh-wrinkles around her eyes. Her face sometimes reminded me of a talking apple.

“You ain’t adding bear to the menu, are you, Dot?” said a prematurely bald young man I didn’t know at the end of the counter.

“It’s for the shelter, Stanley.”

From a booth behind me another voice said, “You’re not going to waste good bear meat on those dogs.”

I swiveled around to see who was speaking and saw Hank Varnum, the lanky proprietor of the town grocery. He was sitting with a clamdigger I recognized but whose name escaped me. As a newcomer to the area, I was still having trouble connecting names and faces, and since my position as district warden ensured everyone knew who I was, I often found myself pretending to recognize people who recognized me.

Dot made a face. “Bear’s too stringy for my taste.”

“You can make a decent chili with it,” said bald Stanley at the end of the counter. I noticed he had a newspaper spread out under his plate of pancakes.

“Or a good hash,” offered someone else.

“How big did Bud say it was?” asked Varnum’s clamdigger friend.

“He didn’t get a great look at it,” I said.

“And knowing Bud, I bet he was drunk off his ass. I bet he shit himself when he seen that bear eat his pig.”

“I’d thank you not to use profanity in my restaurant,” said Dot.

The clamdigger looked down at his ketchup-smeared plate and began scraping up the last shreds of scrambled eggs.

“I’ll let you know about the bear, Dot,” I said. “I’m hoping we won’t have to shoot it at all.”

“Oh, you’ll shoot it,” she said confidently. “You won’t have any choice in the matter.”

“I hope you’re wrong.” I gestured at Stanley Whatever-his-name was at the other end of the counter. “You mind if I take a look at that newspaper?”

“You gonna arrest me if I say no?” He gave a grimace that passed for a smile and shoved the paper down my way. Half of the pages slid off the counter. What was the deal with this asshole?

“You hear about that shooting last night, Mike?” asked Hank Varnum.

“Yeah, I heard about it.” I retrieved the sheets of newsprint from the floor. I found the front page and spread it out in front of me. The headline read:

TWO GUNNED DOWN IN NORTH WOODS AMBUSH

There was an old file photograph of the Dead River Inn, where the public meeting had taken place that led up to the shooting. It looked the same as I remembered it from the bar fight two years earlier.

The article didn’t say much beyond what Kathy had already told me over the phone: Somerset County Sheriff’s Deputy William Brodeur, and Wendigo Timberlands, LLC, spokesman, Jonathan Shipman, had been leaving the inn by a back road, driving to the Sugarloaf resort from Dead River, when a person or persons opened fire on the police cruiser.

“It was only a matter of time,” said Dot.

I glanced up.

She gestured at the paper. “Until something like that happened.”

I hadn’t followed the Wendigo land purchase all that closely, being so preoccupied, first with my new job and then with Sarah’s growing unhappiness. I knew the company had recently bought something like half a million acres of forestland in the northern part of the state, including scores of privately owned camps and sporting lodges. These were largely lake-and stream-front cabins built on sites leased from Atlantic Pulp & Paper, the local company that had previously owned all that timberland. It was the way Maine paper mills used to reward their longtime employees, by granting them leases to build rustic vacation camps on company property. Many of these leases had been in the same families for generations.

“People up there are madder than hell,” said Dot, “and I don’t blame them. They were promised that land, and now this Canadian company comes in and says, ‘Sorry, we’re ripping up your contract, get out.’ I’m not excusing what happened, understand. I’m just saying you could have predicted things might turn ugly.”

I thought of my father and Russell Pelletier and all the other people I had met up that way whose future was now in the hands of Wendigo Timber. “I hadn’t heard they were going to evict all those leaseholders.”

Hank Varnum, six foot six with a mug like Abe Lincoln, came over to the counter to pay his bill at the cash register. “They’re not really evicting them,” he said. “Not outright, anyway. What they’re doing is offering to sell them the land their camps are on.”

“For hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Dot. “Who can afford to pay that kind of money?”

“They have the choice of moving the buildings somewhere else,” said Varnum.

“You ever try to move a fifty-year-old log cabin?”

“I thought you were a believer in free enterprise, Dot.”

“I am.”

“Wendigo bought that land legally. It belongs to them, and by law they can do whatever they want with it.”

Dot’s face glowed red. “You know what they’re going to do, don’t you? They’re going to sell that forestland to rich out-of-staters, and it’s all going to get developed. They’ve already put up a bunch of gates. It used to be you could hunt or fish or snowmobile wherever you wanted up there. Now it’s all going to be off-limits. Is that what you want to see happen?”