Paul Doiron - Massacre Pond

“Now you’ve got my interest.” I glanced around into the dense underbrush. “Where’s Nimrod?”

“Probably on a bird somewhere. He ran off this morning in the pouring rain. When I finally found him, he was shivering, soaking wet, and pointing at the sorriest-looking woodcock I’d ever set eyes on. That fool dog had probably been there for four hours, waiting for me to show up with a shotgun.”

He motioned for me to follow him down the logging road. I paused a second to listen. Sure enough, he moved among the leaves and fallen branches without making the slightest sound.

“So I’ve been getting daily updates on your moose case,” he said in that offhand way he had of broaching important subjects.

“You probably know more about it than I do.”

“Sounds like Rivard has his head firmly wedged up his rectum.”

“No comment.”

“McQuarrie tells me that Bilodeau is chasing his own tail again, too. How that man became an investigator, I will never decipher. He doesn’t have the brains to pound sand into a rat hole.” He hitched up his pants, which were getting loose from the weight of the hatchet. “Why pick on that Chubby LeClair feller? He’s more of your opportunistic-type poachers, one of those hotheads with no impulse control. He sees a deer and shoots it.”

“The other guy they’re looking at is Karl Khristian.”

“You mean Wilbur? Oh, he’s a dangerous character and a crack shot to boot. That melee at Morse’s lodge sounds like his handiwork. A moose massacre, though? I’m having a hard time connecting the dots there, so to speak.”

“Do you know two men named Pelkey and Beam?”

“They sound like two folksingers. No, I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Billy Cronk says they’re expert deer killers. I’m not supposed to be investigating anything, but I went to see them out in Talmadge, and I got a definite vibe.”

“In what way?”

“They didn’t seem surprised to see me.”

He veered off the path into a stand of red maples that clung to a steep cut bank to our left. “Your friend Cronk is an interesting case.”

I had to scramble, grabbing branches and pulling myself against gravity, to follow him up the hillside. “How so?”

“Billy’s a good woodsman,” he said. “Handy with a rifle. Knows those woods like nobody’s business. Has a key to the gate. Left his fingerprints in some inconvenient places. And McQuarrie says he’s been acting squirrelly since the morning you found the first moose.”

“That’s because he was afraid Morse would fire him,” I said. “With good reason, it turns out. Whatever’s up with Billy, it has nothing to do with him shooting those moose. I mean, I suppose he could have done it and then called me over, pretending to have been the first person on the scene. But that’s not the man I know.”

“In that case, I trust your judgment.”

I stopped in my tracks. “Since when?”

Charley had a laugh that seemed to start down in his belly. “I guess I should say I mostly trust your judgment. You made a few boneheaded calls when you were a green warden, but you’re older and wiser now. Older anyway.”

“I don’t know, Charley,” I said. “I’m not sure I’m even cut out for this job anymore.”

“Who says that? Rivard?” He scowled. “The colonel made a mistake promoting that man, and I told him so at the time. He’ll get his just desserts. You wait and see. Men like that always do.”

“I always feel like I’m swimming upstream with him.”

“That just makes you a trout.”

“I’m serious, Charley.”

“Your problem is you’re a free thinker,” he said. “Now, most law-enforcement officers lack imagination. That’s not a bad thing when you’re patrolling a beat. You don’t want cops who get bored too easily. But investigators need to be a little crazy, on account of the general weirdness of humanity. A normal person tries to apply logic to every unexplained event. A good investigator, though, he knows that sometimes the best way to solve a mystery is to let go of everything he thinks he knows.” He stopped and pointed at a rotting stump. “Take this mushroom, for example.”

At the base of a moldering hunk of wood, the remnants of a formerly impressive tree, was a bulbous brown fungus the size and shape of a brain. “What is it?”

“Hen of the woods,” he said. “Some folks call it a ram’s head or sheep’s head. That fungus there-if I drove it down to one of those fancy restaurants in Portland, I could probably sell it for three hundred bucks.”

“Jesus.”

“And it ain’t even the biggest hen I’ve found.”

“I think you might consider a new line of work in your retirement,” I said.

“Who says I’m retired? The thing about these hens is that you almost always find them around red oaks. Sometimes you might see one under a black locust. But what do you see around you here?” He gestured at the nearly leafless trees around me.

“These are maples,” I said.

“Red maples,” he said. “This mushroom has no business being up here. It’s supposed to be in a stand of oaks, down on wet ground. Instead, it’s up on this sandy hillside, where no forager would ever think to look for it.”

“So this is supposed to be a metaphor about solving mysteries? Isn’t the point that you got lucky when you stumbled on it?”

“Not exactly,” he said with a wink. “See the thing of it is, that stump used to belong to an oak. She was a big beauty that blew down years ago when I was a young warden in this district. Crashed right down onto the tote road, blocking traffic. The Skillens crew had a devil of a time hauling it out of these woods. I happened to remember that giant tree when I was out poking around, so I scrambled up here, and what do you know? There’s a baby hen.”

“It still seems to me like you lucked out,” I said.

“Call it luck, then. I guess my point is that if I were following a guidebook, instead of thinking about my early days as a young warden, I would’ve strolled past this beauty. Instead, I let my imagination wander and it brought me somewhere I never would’ve explored otherwise. I only found it because I stopped looking where I was supposed to.”

I scratched a new mosquito bite on my neck. “I’m not sure I’m persuaded.”

“That won’t stop you from eating it, though, I bet.” He grinned. “Stand back a way while I give her a whack with this tomahawk.”

I stood aside while Charley chopped the mushroom free from its stalk. It had lobes that reminded me a little of feathers on a grouse, which was probably how the fungus got its name. He let me heft it in my hand, and it weighed a lot more than I’d expected. Then he eased it into his mesh sack, rearranging the smaller mushrooms to keep from damaging them. “The Boss is making a pasta dish with wild mushrooms,” he said, using his pet name for Ora. “But there’s more than enough to feed a Marine platoon, so I guess I’ll be drying some of these for the winter.”

As we clambered back down onto the tote road, I noticed how dark everything had gotten. The lichen on the boulders seemed luminescent in the half-light, and the hairy cap moss seemed to give off a spectral glow. If you looked up, you could see the gap between the trees on both sides of the road, but the bushes around us seemed to be closing in, and I found myself experiencing an unexpected sensation of claustrophobia. I loved being in the woods at night and never felt the slightest anxiety. It took me a minute to allow my mother’s gaunt face back into my thoughts.

I felt something brush past my head, flying in the same direction as we were going, back along the tote road beside the lake.

“Here they come,” whispered Charley.