“Only way,” he said. “If they suspect. Insurance company will. Screw my family.”
I chewed that one over for a minute. I was scared but didn’t know why. I’d done my job and found the lost man. Baffled by my fear, I grew short-tempered with him.
“You have hypothermia, sir. I can’t be sure that you’re thinking clearly.”
His mouth seemed to be loosening up from the exertion. “Do you understand? In physical pain every minute. Every hour. You’re not saving me. Condemning me to torture.”
“I couldn’t live with my conscience if I left you to die.”
“Why is your conscience more important than my life?”
The cold went right through me then. I might as well have been a ghost.
“I’m not here to pass judgment on you, Dr. Stoddard. I am the last person to claim that right. If it were up to me, I would let everyone choose their own ending.”
“You have that choice! It’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.”
“Come back to the cabin with me, Doc. Things will look different in the morning.”
He wobbled, seemed about to collapse. “So tired. Just want to sleep.”
“I can help you.”
“You could. But you won’t.”
“Things will look different.”
I reached out my paw. He let me take his rifle and sling it over my shoulder. He had no energy to fight me. He barely had enough to sit down on my sled, even with his self-anointed savior supporting his weight.
As I towed him out of that winter wonderland, I kept thinking how he was heavier than he should have been.
I kept my word and said nothing about his illness. When I left them all, the sick man was sitting silently beside the wood stove. There was a blanket draped over his slumped shoulders and color was returning to his tearstained cheeks. The other doctors had decided to leave the next morning, before the next storm was forecast to hit.
Dinsmore sloppily offered him a glass of Irish whisky. “You gave us a real fright there, Phil. I hope you’re not getting too old to be left alone without adult supervision. Ha-ha.”
Dr. Stoddard gulped down the expensive alcohol. He thrust out the empty mug for a refill. The Honigs were sober enough to notice how the rescued man burned me with his glare.
“We were frightened for you, Phil,” said Sam. He still sounded frightened. Maybe more than he’d been before.
“We’re just relieved to have you back,” said James. “Promise you’ll never do that again.”
Stoddard held out his empty cup.
About six weeks later, after the holidays had come and gone, I got word from the Marblehead Massachusetts Police Department. Dr. Philip Stoddard has shot himself in his study. He’d called the cops before he took his life and told them what he was going to do and what to expect when they arrived. This time he wouldn’t let an officer argue him out of the decision. He apologized in advance for putting them through the traumatic experience. To the end he was a conscientious man.
But it was his teenage granddaughter who found him. She’d come over to the house, after school, as a surprise.
You asked me about regrets.
I suppose I have as many as men my age. Fewer than most, probably. I guess the Almighty gave me extra credit for effort.
But dragging that sick doctor back to the cabin is something I would reverse.
Now that I’m an old man myself, I understand what he was trying to tell me that night. The truth I was too young to hear.
I should have left him in the woods, is what I’m saying. Should have hiked back to the cabin and told his friends I had lost his tracks in the snow. We would begin the search at first light, I should have said.
Then in the morning I could have pretended to find the lost doctor, and he would have been dead and all his earthly problems gone. Maybe his friends would have blamed me and leveled accusations of negligence. Maybe some of my cohorts in the Warden Service would have thought less of me as a tracker. But I would have had the comfort of my conscience over the past forty years.
Funny how the mind works. You’d think I would have a memory of Dr. Stoddard’s face glaring me. But that’s not what I see. Instead, the image is of a man like myself sitting motionless in the morning sun. His back is propped against a big pine. He’s got a rifle resting across his legs. And his entire body is wrapped in a cocoon of white snow.
It’s a pretty picture. But a damned dangerous folly.
Also by Paul Doiron
Almost Midnight · Stay Hidden · Knife Creek · Widowmaker
The Precipice · The Bone Orchard · Massacre Pond
Bad Little Falls · Trespasser · The Poacher’s Son
About the Author
A native of Maine, bestselling author PAUL DOIRON attended Yale University, where he graduated with a degree in English. The Poacher’s Son, the first book in the Mike Bowditch series, won the Barry award, the Strand award for best first novel, and has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity awards in the same category. He is a Registered Maine Guide specializing in fly fishing and lives on a trout stream in coastal Maine with his wife, Kristen Lindquist. You can sign up for email updates here.
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