Paul Doiron: The Poacher's Son

No one answered.

I knocked again.

“Who’s there?” whispered a woman’s voice.

“Game warden,” I said. “You called about a bear?”

Slowly the door opened a crack. A chain was stretched across the opening. Through it I saw half of a very small woman’s face and the darkened interior of her house.

“It’s about time! I called nearly an hour ago.” She looked past me in the direction of my truck. “They only sent one of you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But it’s still out there! The bear!”

“Tell me what happened, Mrs.-?”

“Hersom.” She looked to be in her late fifties, a pale, sinewy woman, with deep-set eyes and hair like a rusted Brillo pad. She closed the door, unfastened the chain, and swung the door open again. “Come in, quick!”

I stepped inside. Mrs. Hersom closed and locked the door behind me.

“You don’t need to do that, Mrs. Hersom. The bear’s not going to try to get in.”

“Ha!” Mrs. Hersom literally threw her head back when she laughed, like the villain in a Hollywood B movie. “That’s what you think. Well, take a look at this.”

She spun around and hurried off down a darkened little hall. The inside of the house looked as spic-and-span as the outside, not a hint of dust or disorder anywhere. But an acrid odor-like burnt bacon-hung in the air.

The smell was stronger in the kitchen where Mrs. Hersom stood waiting for me. She thrust her arm out, index finger extended at the back door.

I didn’t notice anything.

“Open it,” she said. “But be careful!”

I unbolted the door and opened it. Beyond was an aluminum-frame screen door, nearly yanked off its hinges. The metal was bent, the screen shredded. “The bear did this?”

Mrs. Hersom crossed her arms across her narrow breasts. “No, I did it. Of course the bear did it.”

I straightened up. “Tell me what happened, Mrs. Hersom.”

“I was cooking breakfast. I had the door open and that window there.” She pointed her chin at the window. “And suddenly I heard this noise behind me. It sounded like a knock and I thought it might be the little boy who lives down the street. He comes over for lemonade. So I said, ‘Who’s there?’ Then I heard another noise, and I turned around. And there was this huge black bear leaning against the screen door, trying to come in. I just about fainted!”

She didn’t strike me as the fainting type. “Then what happened?”

“I shut the door. What do you think I did? Invited it in?”

“And the bear clawed the screen?”

“Not at first. First it came around to that window. It stood up and stuck its head inside, like it wanted to climb in, but it couldn’t, so it went back around to the screen door and started tearing it apart. I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”

“What happened next?”

“Well, my daughter had left this thing outside-what do you call it?-a Thighmaster.”

“A Thighmaster?”

“You know, one of those exercise thingies you squeeze between your thighs. She had left it in the backyard. I looked out the window and the bear had the Thighmaster in its teeth. It was chewing on it and clawing at it and tossing it in the air.” Mrs. Hersom’s eyes grew wide. “I kept thinking, ‘That Thighmaster could be me!’ ”

“How long ago did this all happen?”

“Forty-five, fifty minutes. If you hadn’t taken so long to get here, you might have been in time to shoot it. Why do you let those things run around wild?”

“I’m sure you were scared, Mrs. Hersom, but black bears rarely harm human beings.”

“Don’t patronize me. That thing was dangerous. If I’d had a gun, I would have shot it. My daughter has a gun, and I’m going to borrow it.”

“That’s not a good idea, Mrs. Hersom. Believe me, you did the right thing in calling the police.”

My pager buzzed on my belt. Kathy’s cell number showed on the display. “Excuse me. My sergeant is trying to reach me.”

“You’re going to shoot it, right?”

“No, ma’am. Not unless I have to.”

“Well, what if it comes back?”

“Excuse me just one second.”

Kathy’s voice was full of merriment. “Guess what just ran across the road in front of me?”

“You’re kidding?”

“I’m at the corner of Bog and Tolman. Get over here.”

I said, “I need to go, Mrs. Hersom. The bear was just seen up the road.”

“What about me?”

I backed out of the kitchen. “I’ll come back. Close your doors and windows for now, and you’ll be OK.”

She followed me down the hall. “Who’s going to pay for my screen door?”

“I need to go, Mrs. Hersom.”

She called after me down the walk, “If you see that bear, shoot it!”

I found Kathy’s new GMC parked in the shade of some trees, a mile up the road. The trailer with the culvert trap was hitched to the back of it. Kathy was nowhere to be seen, but a ticked-off red squirrel was chattering in the beeches at the side of the road.

I pushed through some dusty roadside raspberries and found my sergeant standing underneath an old beech, looking up at the squirrel perched on a limb above her head. The little animal was scolding her as if she had given it offense.

“I hate to tell you,” I said, “but that’s not a bear.”

“And I was just thinking we could have used a smaller trap.”

“So where did it go?”

“Over there. Into the bog.”

Kathy Frost was a tall, sun-freckled woman with a bob of sandy hair and the toned arms and legs of a basketball player. Her uniform had a huge stain over her right breast.

She noticed where I was looking. “Breakfast burrito,” she confessed sheepishly.

“Actually, I was checking you out.”

“In your dreams.”

We spread out a topo map of the area across the hood of my truck and put our heads together. Kathy’s bug repellent of choice was Avon Skin So Soft, a perfumed lotion that gave her a feminine scent that seemed at odds with her mannish body language. Sarah had used that same lotion whenever we went hiking. In spite of myself, I found myself losing focus on what Kathy was now telling me.

She guessed that the bear was ranging out from a cedar swamp, roughly midway between Bud Thompson’s farm and the Bog Road. “In the winter,” she said, “that swamp’s a primo deer yard. They really bunch up under those cedars to get out of the snow. I could see your bear using it for cover from the heat.”

On my map a dotted line indicated an old logging trail that led from the road down into the heart of the swamp. That road seemed to offer the best access into the bear’s territory.

Getting down it with the trailer was another story. About fifty yards in, we came across a fallen tree-a storm-toppled spruce-that we had to winch out of the way before we could drive any farther. Then Kathy nearly got her truck stuck in a dry rivulet that had been carved in the road during the spring runoff.

A few hundred yards in we found the remains of a burned house. It was just a weed- and bottle-filled cellar hole today, but once, maybe a hundred years ago, someone had built himself a house there and chopped down the cedars and hemlocks to clear a yard. Now the forest had closed back in around the foundation, and wild rhubarb and sumac grew thick and tangled around the blackened stone walls. It was as if the place had somehow managed to slide backward into the past.

Kathy stopped her truck in front of me and got out. “Did you see those fresh claw marks on that beech back there?”

“I guess I missed them.”

“Let’s have a look around. I think this just might be the spot.”

Does a bear shit in the woods? You’d better believe it. Kathy found scat in the road beyond the cellar hole. She crouched down and broke the black turd apart with a stick.