The only answer was the wind.
Then, about half a mile down the ice-crusted stream, I came to what looked like a deer bed. Took me a minute to realize the depression had been left by a man, sitting down and stretching out his long legs.
Now, no hunter I had ever met would plop his ass down in the snow. Not unless he wanted his butt cheeks to go numb.
Dr. Stoddard seemingly had sat there for a spell. Maybe he had felt dizzy or just needed a breather. But whatever he’d felt hadn’t caused him to turn around for the cabin.
His tracks continued up the side of the little gully through which the stream flowed. The direction puzzled me. I couldn’t figure out why he would move off the trail.
By this time the snow was falling slantwise, and the tip of my nose was tingling. My flashlight beam bounced right off those fat flakes.
I decided to fire three shots from my revolver. The gun was a .357 Magnum and had quite the retort. The sound carried for miles, even in branch-bending wind.
After I fired the last time, I cupped my hands around my ears and turned this way and that. I listened for five whole minutes.
No response.
I won’t lie. I was getting anxious, mostly for Dr. Stoddard, but also because I couldn’t stomach the thought of failing in my duty.
Once they were clear of the ravine, the pattern of the tracks underwent a change. Now they showed signs of stopping and pausing, as if the doctor really had lost his way. The prints zigzagged back and forth through the trees in a slalomlike fashion. They ranged off in an oxbow loop than returned to the original path after a lazy detour.
The overall course might indicate a confused man wandering. Hypothermia can prompt a kind of delirium. Some sufferers even throw off their clothes and go naked through the woods.
As I rounded a cluster of balsams, pulling my toboggan on a rope over my shoulder, a buck exploded out of the powder at my feet. He was big brute of a deer, let me tell you, a twelve-pointer, with a ridge of snow down his back like a white crest. He disappeared before I could get my flashlight on him. The gray ghost left behind a secret bed, the snow melted from the heat of his body, tufts of gray hair trembling in the wind before they got snatched away.
Being spooked by that buck got to me. I couldn’t say why, but I felt as if the missing man was toying with me. I spat out the whistle, reached for my pistol, and fired three more angry rounds into the blackness above.
After the echoes had been pushed aside on the wind, I did my ear-cupping trick. Again with no happy result. By now the weather had erased all signs of the hunter’s passage. I would have had an easier time following that trophy deer than locating Dr. Stoddard.
It was only the sharp crack of a branch breaking that saved me from turning tail. The sound came from a place to my left and slightly ahead. Nor did I reckon it was the wind.
“Dr. Stoddard!”
Another branch broke, this one not as loud. I set off into the thicker cover in pursuit. The trees were mostly pines of various widths and heights. And under one of the biggest, oldest pines was an impression like the one I’d found before: the outline of a man’s bottom, legs, and boot heels. I bit off my mitten, passed my palm over the melted snow, and felt the same lingering warmth I had felt in the deer’s bed.
Fresh tracks showed where the doctor had jumped up and fled into the forest.
What else could I do but chase down the poor delusional man before he injured himself or eluded me for good?
He’d tried to walk backward in his own prints, the way a child might hope to fool another child, but I recognized the gambit for what it was. I switched off my flashlight and let night vision take over.
I found him crouched behind a cabin-sized boulder, one of those erratics the glaciers had left behind on their retreat north ten thousands year past. He held his military rifle at waist height, pointed at where he thought his pursuer might appear, coming around the rock.
“You don’t need that rifle, Doc,” I said. “I’m one of the good guys.”
“Who’re you?”
His mouth had gone blue. And he was shivering so hard, the snow was dropping off him like it would from a wind-shaken pine. Hypothermia had addled his brain, I could tell.
“Warden Charley Stevens. Your friends were worried when you didn’t return to the cabin. They asked me to come find you.”
“I’m not lost!”
If you asked a child to draw an angry face, his would have been the result.
“There’s no shame in a man losing his way. Hell! It happens to me at least once a month.”
His dead lips couldn’t spit out more than a few words at a time. “I know. What I’m doing. Please! Leave me alone.”
“I can’t do that, Doc. I can’t abandon you out in this miserableness.”
“How. Did you. Find me?”
“I am a Maine game warden. That’s what we do.”
I shouldn’t have grinned.
“Cocksure! Son of a bitch. Someday you’ll realize. The horrible mistake you made.”
“Dr. Stoddard—”
“I’m dying. Damn you! Cancer. Pancreatic. I’ll be dead. In months.”
He might as well have slapped all that smugness off my face. My cheeks burned, but not from the wind or cold. It was from the brutal chastisement of his words.
“I am truly sorry to hear that.” And I was.
“No one knows. My family. My friends. Only my doctors.”
I was a young man. What did I know of delicate considerations? “Maybe if you shared the news—”
“My family can’t know!”
I saw his plan now as if it was typed out on paper with a spotlight shining on the page.
