Paul Doiron - Massacre Pond

“It was alive last night,” said Billy. “I drove by here to close the gate, and I would have seen it in my headlights.”

“Do you think it might have been a poacher, and you scared him off, either last night or this morning? Before he could take the meat and head, I mean?”

“Nope.”

“I guess that means you found something else.”

Billy hitched his jeans up on his narrow hips and spat hard into the road. “Yep,” he said.

We returned to our trucks and set off again. I had to roll up my window to keep from choking to death on the billowing dust. I put on my expensive new pair of Oakley sunglasses, hoping they would help against the glare, but they didn’t.

Whatever this trouble was, I already knew I didn’t need it. I’d spent the previous week running myself ragged during the annual Maine moose hunt. I’d patrolled miles of logging roads and clear-cuts and visited every tagging station within a hundred-mile radius of my cabin. The nonstop action had frayed my nerves. I’d been hoping to spend some time with my friend Charley Stevens hunting partridge and woodcock, or scouting around for chanterelle mushrooms down in the wetlands behind the house. Maybe even read an actual book for once. Now I would have to cancel my plans for the morning-and probably the afternoon and evening, as well.

The dirt road entered a thicket of yellow birches and white pines that someone had logged fifty years ago and then allowed to grow back in anticipation of a future harvest that never came. Every now and then, I caught a reflection of the sun hitting the surface of a half-hidden pond through the trees: a brilliant sparkle that reminded me of light shining on shattered windshield glass. Eastern Maine is beautiful country-not particularly mountainous, but expansive and largely empty of people, with evergreen forests that stretch to the horizons and blue lakes so numerous as to almost defy counting. It was how I always pictured northern Minnesota, around Voyageurs National Park and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. No wonder Queen Elizabeth wanted to protect this magnificent forest forever. Wasn’t it for the same reason I’d become a game warden-to guard places like this from reckless human intrusion?

The road branched a couple of times, heading away from the lake into the wilder country of the Machias River watershed. After fifteen minutes of spine-jolting bumps, we came to another treeless meadow. This one was significantly larger and damper than the first. Despite the August-like temperatures, the vegetation was painted with the palette of autumn: sun-faded greens, tarnished golds, and burnt umbers. On one side of the meadow, a sluggish brown stream flowed out of a pond shaped like a kidney bean. Fallen leaves, red and yellow, drifted on the surface of the water.

As Billy rolled to a stop, I saw two ravens lift up from the puckerbrush, big black birds that beat the air heavily with their wings. One of them called, making a distinctive quork sound, to express its displeasure at being interrupted in the middle of its meal. The ravens flapped across the clearing to the exact distance where they would be safe from a man with a shotgun-ravens somehow know these things-and settled together at the top of a tree to await our eventual departure.

I followed Billy through the dying grass. Late damselflies flitted in the air, blue-bodied and faster than thoughts. I felt sweat ooze down my spine beneath the ballistic vest the Warden Service made us wear beneath our olive-drab uniforms.

“The ravens were here when I found them,” Billy said quietly, speaking with the hushed tone one uses in a house of worship. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have noticed anything.”

I swallowed hard to keep my breakfast from coming up in my throat.

“Those beaks of theirs ain’t too sharp,” he said, “but they really did a job on the little calf’s face.”

I took note of the location: seventeen yards from the road.

“You ever seen anything like this before?” Billy whispered.

I shook my head no.

The cow moose had both sets of legs crossed, almost as if someone had posed her that way for a formal portrait, but I knew the big animal had fallen heavily, dropped by a single bullet to the head. The first calf, the baby, lay beside her, with its face torn open by the ravens and the bloody skin peeled away from its mouth. The birds had pecked away at her lips, giving her a perpetual smile that she would wear into eternity. The other calf-a yearling bull that had the gangling look of a teenager that hadn’t grown entirely into his body and now never would-was lying closer to the pond. It had been shot through the eye. The bullet had left a star-shaped hole that you could slide your index finger into all the way to the knuckle.

I would need to dig the slug out of its brain for evidence, I realized. I would need to cut them all open with my knife to find the bullets. The entire family.

I removed my black duty cap and wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my arm, but the perspiration just streamed back into my burning eyes. Billy was still speaking, but his words were unintelligible; it was as if I were lying at the bottom of a pool, my ears full of water, while things happened in the world above.

In my imagination, I watched a vehicle creep slowly through the trees under the cover of darkness. I saw the small moose family turn curiously toward the sound of the engine, their eyes glowing green in the handheld spotlight. How long had they been blinded by the intense illumination? Thirty seconds? Less? Enough time for three bullets to be fired in rapid succession. The animals had died so quickly, they’d never even realized they should run.

As Billy’s voice rose, I found I could understand his words again. “Whoever shot them didn’t even bother to take the meat! He just killed them for the fun of killing, and then he drove off down the lane to shoot another one, like it was a fucking video game. What the hell is this, Mike?”

The sun seared the back of my neck. “It’s a serial killing, Billy. I don’t know what else you’d call it.”

The ravens watched us from the edge of the clearing like nosy witnesses lingering at the scene of the crime.

“What did you see?” I heard myself mutter.

I’d recently picked up the alarming habit of thinking out loud. My job meant that I worked alone a lot, patrolling remote places without backup, and sometimes I felt the need to hear a human voice, even if it was only my own. Living in the woods does strange things to lonely men.

I turned in a complete circle beneath the rising sun, trying to get my bearings. The air smelled of pine pitch and stagnant water. There were no hilltops or other landmarks visible, but my internal compass placed us four miles northwest of the gate we’d entered.

“Are we still on Morse’s property?” I asked Billy.

“This whole township belongs to Ms. Morse, from Sixth Machias west to Mopang.”

“It’s all gated?”

“Yep. I supervised the crew that put the gates in over the summer. Ms. Morse wanted someone from the staff on-site during the construction.”

“So if this section of woods is blocked off, how was the shooter able to drive in here?”

Billy blinked a couple of times and then lowered his head to look at my boots, his braid dangling down. “Maybe he walked in.”

“That’s a long haul in the middle of the night. There wasn’t even much of a moon with those clouds.”

“We might have missed one of them old Jeep trails when we were installing the gates,” he said. “There are so many logging roads to keep track of. Christ, I don’t know! Maybe the shooter came in on an ATV. What does it matter?”

“I’m trying to reconstruct the sequence of events. How the killer got in here and his specific movements are important if I hope to solve this case.”