When I stepped out, I could see my breath like my spirit leaving my body. The temperature was at least fifteen degrees colder than it had been in the bottomland.
I pulled on a pair of gloves. “If you brought me out here to kill me…”
“Don’t make jokes about things like that.”
“I wish I could say that I knew what body of water that is, but I don’t have a clue.”
“It’s Tantrattle Pond, and I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of it. It’s so shallow that it freezes down to the mud during hard winters, meaning it’s a bad place for fish. The state built this cabin back in the late 1980s to house a crew of trailblazers who were going to build a new hiking path up Mount Blue. But then the economy went to shit, and the old Bureau of Parks and Lands was strained maintaining the existing system.”
In the failing light, the cabin looked solidly built. The chimney, straight and square, bore the handprints of an experienced mason. The roof shingles, or what I could see of them peeking out from beneath the snowcap, didn’t appear to be warped.
“What’s the deal with all the snowmobile and ATV traffic on the way in?”
“Some riders have taken to detouring over from Route 89 of the Interconnected Trail System to have a look at Tantrattle. This cabin used to be quite the place for parties. It was getting vandalized every winter, until my husband, Peter, and his crew made the building harder to break into. Would you like to have a look inside, or have you already decided it doesn’t meet your delicate standards?”
“What are you talking about? This is my dream cabin!”
Ronette reached back into the door well of her Sierra for a Maglite. I removed my little SureFire from the pocket of my coat. We circled around the side of the building. Quite a few bootprints showed in the remaining snow, no doubt from intruders looking for a way in to steal whatever there was to steal.
Ronette straightened up. “Damn it!”
In the beam of her Maglite I saw the cabin door. More precisely, I saw the rectangular hole where the door had been battered, kicked in, and smashed to pieces. I followed a visibly irate Ronette into the dark void.
A sour odor overwhelmed me even before the flashlight revealed the source. Urine. The determined vandals, having rammed their way inside, had left yellow stains the way predators mark their territory.
“This was recent,” I said.
Ronette was an experienced warden. She’d noticed what I’d noticed. “If it had happened weeks ago, there would’ve been windblown snow heaped inside the threshold.”
“Exactly.”
I stepped carefully and began sweeping the light around the interior. The first thing I saw was a couch with a broken back and an overturned easy chair. The cabinets had been ransacked, but Ronette said the entomologists who came to the pond to study dragonflies never left anything of value inside the cabin.
Under the circumstances I supposed it was lucky the sons of bitches hadn’t burned the place to the ground.
I searched through the rooms and found damage to varying degrees in each of them. But one bedroom—containing nothing but a card table and a set of bunk beds—had been left entirely untouched. Ronette snapped some crime-scene photos, knowing nothing would come of them, that the vandals would never be identified unless one of them boasted to the wrong person, or the criminals turned on one another to avoid being prosecuted for a more serious offense.
My hot breath drifted from my nostrils. “I don’t suppose you installed game cameras outside.”
My question made Ronette smack her forehead. “How could I have forgotten?”
Almost every unattended outpost overseen by the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has hidden surveillance. Because these cameras are camouflaged and hidden by veteran wardens, such as Ronette Landry, they are remarkably hard for anyone but a true woodsman to locate.
Not hard enough, it seemed.
Around a handful of the local trees Ronette found severed cables lying like dead black snakes. The Tantrattle vandals had suspected cameras would be recording their actions and were woods-wise enough to find and steal them.
“That’s a tough break, Ronnie.”
When she turned, I spotted a gleam in her coppery eye. “We’re not finished yet. Can you give me a lift up?”
She motioned to a birdhouse mounted under the eaves above the door. The weathered wooden box had white guano stains that suggested it had once hosted a nesting pair of chickadees or nuthatches. Only upon reconsideration did I understand why Ronette had reacted with such enthusiasm.
She stood on my shoulders while she pried the box loose from the logs. When she had it down on the frozen ground, she popped the back open with a hunting knife. Inside was an expertly hidden Bushnell game camera.
I fingered the white paint she had dabbed on the birdhouse. “The fake guano was a nice touch.”
“The real hard part was hiding the openings of the motion sensors. That took some trial and error.”
She unlatched the camera case until she could see the little screen inside where you could review the photos or videos you had taken. She clicked through a number of shots until she came upon the incriminating pictures.
“Got you, bastards!”
She angled the screen so I could have a look. I glimpsed the shadowy outlines of three men with what looked like impressive heads of hair.
“You recognize them?” I asked doubtfully.
“They’re the Beliveau brothers. They’re trappers, and they all wear beaver hats. It’s their signature headwear. It wouldn’t surprise me if they shot that
