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There were four doctors staying at the hunting camp. Two of them were brothers, and they owned all the land for a mile in every direction. I had tramped around those woods when I got assigned to the district, the year before, and I remember some nice stands of oak and beech and a couple of cedar swamps where the deer could yard up when the snow got heavy. It was a pretty sweet spot.
Then one of the doctors didn’t show up after a day of hunting.
Ora was putting dinner on the table when the phone rang. Thanksgiving leftovers. There’s nothing better.
“The man who’s lost is Dr. Phillip Stoddard,” the dispatcher told me. His friends had been searching for him since nightfall. They were worried he might be injured.
“How old is he, do you know?”
“Sixty-eight.”
At the time, I was only twenty-eight, understand. Sixty-eight made the man a Methuselah in my eyes.
“One of them will meet you outside the Crossroads Variety Store,” the dispatcher said. “His name is Dr. James Honig, the man I spoke with just now.”
“And how I will be able to pick out Dr. Honig from the crowd?”
“Well, gee, I’m not sure.”
The dispatcher never appreciated my cock-eyed sense of humor. Crossroads was halfway up the backside of nowhere. I wondered how a business could stay open in such a God-forgotten place. And in fact it closed soon after.
Ora gave me a hug, awkward on account of her pregnant belly. “You find that poor man, Charley. Don’t you come home until you do.”
“Whatever you say, Boss.”
“I hate your calling me that. Just be careful, all right?”
“Ten-four, my love.”
It hadn’t started to snow yet, but I could smell snow on the air. There was already a foot of it on the ground from the last storm. Everything seemed beautifully reversed. The earth was pale and the sky was dark. Not so much as a glimmer of moon.
The variety had closed by the time I arrived forty minutes later. The lights were all extinguished, the gas pumps nonfunctional. I saw a sedan with Massachusetts plates parked at the edge of the plowed lot. Dr. Honig was inside, running the car to stay warm. I could tell from how the exhaust slunk away from the tailpipe that the air pressure was falling.
The hunter jumped out of that fancy automobile as soon as he saw me roll up. He was wearing one of those head-to-toe jumpsuits. Plus a blaze-orange cap. Only a blind man could have mistaken him for a deer, dressed as he was in all that fluorescence.
“Are you the game warden?” he asked.
“If not, I’ve got everyone fooled.”
I don’t know why I always had to be a cut-up. The man was worried about his lost pal.
“You need to follow me! We have a man missing, my colleague, Dr. Phil Stoddard. We were supposed to meet back at the cabin after hunting, but he didn’t return. He’s the best woodsman among us, no question. We’re terribly concerned he might have had an accident.”
“Does Dr. Stoddard have any health problems you know about?”
“Health problems! I hope I’m in as good a shape as Phil is when I’m that age. We’ve been firing shots for him to hear, hoping he’d reply, but we haven’t heard a thing. Please, there’s no time to waste.”
Some wardens would have resented the assignment. Locate some old doctor from Boston who didn’t belong in the Maine woods in the first place. But my stomach told me I was going to find this Stoddard feller and deliver him to safety and maybe even get my name in the papers.
So I followed Dr. Honig’s sedan back onto the Hornbeam Road with an excited optimism, I guess you could call it. We took a turn, then another, and then we were headed off into the williwags. The first flakes appeared in my headlights after we left the paved road.
It was coming down pretty hard by the time we reached the cabin. There was already an inch on the other Mercedes parked in the dooryard. The heavy air was pushing smoke from the chimney down among the trunks of the trees all the way to the snowpack.
The two other doctors came outside when they heard us drive up. One was the twin of Dr. James Honig, whip thin and balding. This was his brother Sam. The other was a bantam rooster named Dr. David Dinsmore. Dr. Stoddard seemed to have been some kind of mentor to the younger men. They threw a lot of information at me until finally I had to slow them down.
“Where and when was Dr. Stoddard last seen?”
“Here at lunch,” said the first Dr. Honig. “We all came back from hunting, as was our practice. Afterwards, Phil and I decided to go back out and try our luck again while Sam and Dave played cribbage. That must have been around twelve thirty.”
“Closer to one o’clock,” Dinsmore said. The liquor on his breath nearly knocked me down.
“Did he say where he was going to hunt?”
“He was going to follow the stream to the cedar swamp,” said James Honig. “He spooked a big buck there this morning.”
“Is that the same brook we passed on the way in?”
“Yes.”
“How familiar would you say he was with the country around here?”
“Very familiar. Phil’s hunted with us the past three years, ever since he retired.”
“Can you tell me what he
