It lay on its side in a puddle of congealing blood. Its throat had been torn out, and its haunches had been chewed to a red pulp. The bear had not attempted to bury the carcass or cover it with leaves. It was possible it had heard me coming.
I switched off the flashlight and stood under the dripping trees, listening. I knew retired game wardens and ancient trappers who could hear the rustle a buck made passing through alders across a stream. Men who were so at one with the woods that they didn’t fully exist among other human beings but were only truly themselves outdoors. Maybe someday I’d be one of those old woodsmen. But for the moment I was still a twenty-four-year-old rookie, less than a year on the job, and my senses told me nothing about where the bear was.
I turned the flashlight back on. Then I went up to the house to tell poor Bud Thompson what I had found.
By the time I got home it was well past midnight. I’d left the light on outside the screen door and moths were swirling about, butting themselves stupidly against the glass.
As I stepped inside, I was surprised again by my empty house. Sarah had taken most of the furniture with her when she moved out. It always startled me, coming home, to see how little I actually owned. Stacks of books and newspapers, a steel gun cabinet, fallen antlers I had collected in the snow.
Moonlight shined in through the windows, bright enough to see by, so I left the lights off as I moved through the house, shedding my damp shirt and boots as I went. I unbuckled my gun belt and put it away, then wandered into the kitchen. Frosty light spilled out of the refrigerator when I swung the door open. I found a bottle of beer and pressed it against my forehead as I made my way out into the living room.
I cracked open the beer and toasted Bud Thompson and Mike Bowditch-two womenless men dousing our loneliness with alcohol. Except that unlike Thompson, I had chosen to be alone. An empty house was what I’d wanted all along, even if it had taken Sarah years to realize it.
She’d hung in there with me from Colby College, where we’d met, through the Maine Criminal Justice Academy and the Advanced Warden Academy and my long weeks of field training. She’d toughed it out, thinking it was a phase I was going through, that eventually I’d go to law school like we’d talked about and become a prosecutor and maybe someday a judge. But it wasn’t a phase, and it was only after I had gotten posted in coastal Knox County that she realized that being a game warden was a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week way of life, and for reasons neither of us fully understood, I’d chosen it over her.
So she left.
And I missed her-and counted the days since she’d gone away. But I was relieved, too. Relieved that I no longer had to justify my emotions to anyone else. I could spend the night alone in the woods searching for a dead pig and be content in a way that made absolutely no sense to anyone who wasn’t a game warden. With Sarah gone, I could love 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
My 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 whatever 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 down, it was as if he were trying to breathe her in. Not that I could blame him. Sarah was wearing a sleeveless top and hiking shorts that showed off her tanned legs. Her short blond hair was swept back behind her ears, and her heartshaped face was shining from days in the sun.
“Mike’s told me a lot about you,” she lied.
“Don’t believe a word of it,” he said, taking her small hand in his rough paws.
We found a seat at a round oak table in a dark corner of the bar. There was a little oil lamp in the center with a dancing flame that gave all our faces a golden cast. My father ordered us beers and another shot of Jim Beam for himself.
“You want one?” he asked.
“I’m driving.”
He snorted. He didn’t think it was much of an excuse.
Sarah glanced back and forth between us with a big smile. “I see where Mike gets his blue eyes.”
“I guess the kid turned out OK,” he said with a wink. “But he didn’t get all his old man’s best parts.”
“Mike says you work at a sporting lodge,” she said.
“I do some guiding over to Rum Pond. I don’t suppose you like to fish.”
“We’re headed over to Rangeley tonight,” I said.
“Yeah?” He looked over my head into the crowd.
