The name made my heart sink. “I suppose I will.”
“If you do, tell Denis Cormier hello.”
“My uncle and I aren’t on the greatest of terms.”
“But he’s potentially one of your best sources.” Pulsifer made another pass with the napkin. “You know, Mike, the odds of finding the guy who shot your wolf—”
“They’re long odds, I admit.”
“And even if you do find him, he’s going to claim he mistook Shadow for a coyote. And the state says you can kill as many of them as you please, provided you do it by the book.”
“You don’t seem to understand my interest here. If Shadow dies, I need to know what happened to the female he’s been seen with. Was she shot and killed, too? Maybe the hunter has her pelt hanging in his man cave. This is the only known wild wolf in the state of Maine we’re talking about.”
“And the chances of finding her in thousands of square miles of timber…”
“Improve considerably if I find the son of a bitch who wounded Shadow and learn where it happened.”
Pulsifer lifted his gaze to the tin ceiling as if he could see heaven through it. “This is the part of the conversation where I remind you, as your union representative, that you can’t break rules because you find them inconvenient. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to use the pissoir.”
While I waited for him to return, I stared at the mounted head of the coyote on the wall. The taxidermist had given the animal a postmortem snarl. The suggestion was that the vicious canine had been preparing to rip out the hunter’s jugular when a well-placed bullet had ended its short, savage life.
What was it about human beings, I wondered, that we needed to categorize other creatures as “good” or “bad”? Nature cared not a whit for humankind’s morality. And a good thing for us, too, or it would have wiped our small, selfish species from the earth eons ago.
14
In the gray light of morning the paper mill loomed over the town like an industrial fortress, abandoned and falling into ruin. I watched its snuffed-out smokestacks disappear in my rearview mirror as we drove up the hill until there was nothing behind and nothing ahead except trees and more trees. We were following the road that cut through the pass between the mountains.
Ahead of me, Pulsifer roared along in his black GMC Sierra. The patrol truck had a big 285-horsepower V-6 engine that found no challenge in the steepness of the grade even as my four-cylinder Compass labored to keep pace. I had taken my Warden Service vehicle in the event I discovered something that would prompt a sudden return to duty. But my Scout was a hell of a lot more fun to drive in Mud Season.
Because of the tall pines that shadowed the road, it felt to me as if night were falling all over again. Down along the river, the snow had largely melted, but high in the uplands, the white carpet might not melt before Memorial Day. Even with the heat blasting, I felt a chill.
I hadn’t seen or spoken to Pulsifer in months, but he seemed different. More than that, he seemed transformed. He was still a wisecracker extraordinaire, but at the Boom Chain he had showed flashes of vulnerability and restraint: two qualities I would never have used to describe the man.
He had let slip that the probably alcoholic father of the dead CO, Kent Mears, resided in Pennacook. Aside from his having been a brutal sadist, I knew nothing about the younger Mears. If I didn’t have other matters concerning me, I might have liked to meet the father, if only to satisfy my curiosity. Maybe I could ask Dani about the family. She had to have known them.
By the time Pulsifer and I reached the turnoff to Webb Lake, the sun had finally cleared the summit of Mount Blue. The frozen lake was big but shallow and ringed around with seasonal camps and cottages. Generations had summered along its shores, drawn by the scenic vistas of the mountains that rose in every direction, their names almost ridiculous in their quaintness: Tumbledown, Spruce, Blueberry, Jackson, and Little Jackson. Not to mention Blue itself: neither the tallest, nor the most spectacular, and yet somehow the defining prominence of the range, perhaps because of the signature fire tower at its summit, a landmark in every sense of the word.
Continuing on, we crested the heavily wooded ridge that marked the watershed between two valleys. To the south, the streams and brooks emptied into the Androscoggin; to the north, the tributaries fed the farms along the smaller Sandy River. Having crossed over the divide, I noticed a subtle change in the landscape. I became aware of how the friendly cottages around Webb Lake had been supplanted by isolated homesteads, set far back in the conifers, often with signs at the foot of their drives warning trespassers of prosecution and dangerous dogs.
At a fork in the road, Pulsifer veered off to the left onto a poorly maintained track that seemed to consist of nothing but ice-filled craters. Then the pavement dropped off hard. The half-frozen grit sucked at my tires until I could hear the pebbles banging around the wheel wells.
We passed through a thick grove of sugar maples, every one of which had been spiked with a steel spile and connected by an arterial system of blue tubing to some distant pumping station. I’d never seen such a sophisticated sugaring operation before. This network of sap-sucking pipes must have been the sugar bush Pulsifer had described.
The best weather for sugaring is mild days and below-freezing nights, neither of which we’d consistently had. It would be a bad year for the maple syrup makers. I hoped Mary Gowdie had pumped out plenty of moonshine from her still.
I hailed Pulsifer on the radio. “How much farther?”
“A couple more miles. How’s that glorified sports wagon
