The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

this solitary and morbid profession without excuses and not have to look too deeply into the dark of myself.
    That was when I noticed a small blinking light across the room.
    It hadn’t occurred to me to check my answering machine. I’d been gone only an hour and a half, and most everyone I knew had my pager number if they needed to get a hold of me. My first thought was that it had something to do with the bear. Maybe someone else had seen it outside their house, or maybe it had gotten into another pigpen.
    When I pushed play there was the raspy sound of breathing on the other end for a while before a man finally spoke: “Mike? Hello? Pick up if you’re there.” There was a long pause. Then, in the background, came a woman’s voice: “Is he there?” The man said: “No, goddamn it! He’s not home!” Followed by a disconnect.
    I didn’t recognize the woman, but the other voice was deep and monotone, just like mine, and hearing it again after two years was enough to start my pulse racing. Why was my father calling after all this time? What could he possibly want from me now?
    I stood still in the dark while the tape rewound.

 
     
    2
     
    M y father made his living in the Maine North Woods. In the cold-weather months he cut birches and maples for logging companies, snapped the boughs off fir trees to make Christmas wreaths, and ran a trap line for beaver, muskrat, and mink. In the spring and summer he did some guiding for a hunting and fishing camp up at Rum Pond near the Canadian border. All told, I doubted he earned more than twenty grand a year—not counting what ever he brought in poaching. But it was the life he’d chosen for himself and, ultimately, none of my business.
    He’d grown up in the remote logging town of Flagstaff, the son of a U.S. Border Patrol agent and his Quebec-born wife, and from what I heard he was a gifted student and promising athlete. Vietnam changed all that. After boot camp, he joined the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and did two tours in the jungle with a long-range recon patrol unit. Then an NVA grenade sent him home with shrapnel scars across his back and shoulders. In Maine, the Purple Heart qualified him as a hero, but people in Flagstaff said they no longer recognized him as the same sweet and shy Jack Bowditch he’d once been.
    After the war he held down jobs at paper mills and trucking companies, never for very long, but long enough to convince my mother he had prospects he never really had. She left him after nine on-and-off years of marriage, moved south with me in tow, and got remarried to a better man than my father could ever be.
    What her leaving did to him, I can only guess. For years he’d functioned more or less as part of society, but after my grandparents died and my mom left, his drinking got worse and his impatience with the failings of other human beings hardened into something like contempt. Now he tended to live as far from people as possible, wherever the trees were thick.
     
    The last time I saw him, I got my face smashed in a backwoods bar fight.
    It was the summer after Colby. My dad didn’t show up for graduation, which was just as well, because I knew there’d be an argument if my stepfather was around, and I didn’t want them making a scene. But a few weeks later Sarah and I decided to drive to Rangeley to do some fly-fishing. She’d always wanted to meet my dad, and since he was living at Rum Pond, which was more or less on the way, I couldn’t think of a way to squirm out of it. So I gave him a call, and we arranged to get together for beers at a place called the Dead River Inn near Flagstaff.
    It turned out to be a northwoodsy sort of tavern—cedar logs, deer heads—attached to an old hotel. It wasn’t as seedy as most of my father’s watering holes, but it was a Saturday night, there were a dozen motorcycles outside, and the stares that followed Sarah through the door made me think of broken bottles and bloody fists.
    My father sat at the end of the bar with a shot of whiskey and a long-necked beer in front of him. He wore a flannel shirt and Carhartt work pants, and his boots were caked with mud. His thickly muscled body—a solid fifty pounds heavier than my own—seemed too big for the stool on which he was balanced. As always, his hair and beard were wild as if they never knew a comb. But every woman I knew seemed to find him dashingly handsome.
    “Dad,” I said. “This is Sarah Harris.”
    The way he looked her up and