the thing that bothered me most was that I couldn’t understand why the bear had returned to this farm when there was no longer a pig here.
It took me at least fifteen minutes to hike back to Thompson’s farm, and even before I reached the hilltop I saw blue and red lights flashing through the trees. A sheriff’s cruiser and an ambulance were parked in Thompson’s driveway and there was another Maine Warden Service patrol truck, beside my own, pulled up on the lawn.
Kathy Frost was waiting for me outside the pigpen. “I was on the road and I heard the call come over the radio.” Her forehead was furrowed with concern. “Your face is all scraped.”
I touched my cheek; my fingertips came away red.
“What happened?” she asked. “Where’s the bear?”
“It’s dead. About a quarter mile down that hill.”
“Shit. That’s a long way to haul it out.”
“It would have died, anyway,” I said. “It had lost a lot of blood.” I glanced up at the house. The first-floor windows were all alight. “Where’s Thompson?”
“Inside. The EMTs are trying to convince him to go to the hospital. You should have stayed with him, Mike. You should have waited for us to bring a dog in.”
“I was pissed off,” I said. “So why the hell did the bear come back here? It doesn’t make sense”
“He was baiting it.”
“What?”
“He was putting out food for it.” She motioned for me to follow her around the pigpen. Inside the fence was a heap of trash. I saw an empty tin for a canned ham and a Dunkin’ Donuts box and other refuse that I hadn’t noticed before.
I stood there gazing at it. “Son of a bitch.”
Kathy came up behind me. “There’s something else we need to talk about, Mike. The reason I was out this way was because we got another call from Anthony DeSalle. Have you lost your mind? You know better than to have contact with someone who’s made a complaint against you.”
There was a buzzing sound in my head and I was having a hard time hearing her. It was the sound of the flies amplified about a hundred times.
“It comes across as a pattern of harassment,” she said. “Mike, are you listening to me?”
“He was trying to lure it in,” I said.
“What? Who?”
“Thompson. He knew I had a trap out there, but he was trying to lure it in so he could shoot it himself.”
“The bear killed the man’s pig,” she said. “Cut him some slack.”
“That was three days ago.”
“He’s allowed to shoot a wild animal destroying his property.”
“Not three days later he’s not.” I turned and started walking in the direction of the house. “He baited that bear and he shot it illegally. He broke the law.”
Two medics came out of the kitchen door carrying Thompson on a stretcher. His pant leg had been scissored off, and his wound was wrapped in a new white bandage.
I stepped in front of the EMTs, blocking their way. Thompson gave me a confused, boozy smile. “Is it dead?”
“It’s dead.”
“You shot it?”
“Yes.”
“Can I have the skin? I always wanted a bearskin rug.”
It was all I could do not to punch him. “You didn’t tell me you were putting bait out. That’s illegal, you know.”
His smile drooped at the corners. “It killed my pig.”
“I don’t care.”
“It was self-defense.”
“The hell it was. You baited that bear.”
“Excuse me, Warden,” said one of the medics. “Can we continue this conversation later?”
“Get out of the way, Mike,” said Kathy Frost from behind me.
“The man needs to go to the hospital,” said the other EMT.
I pointed my finger at Thompson’s nose. His eyes bounced back and forth from my face to the shotgun in my other hand. “You broke the law, Thompson, and after they stitch up your leg, I’m taking you to jail.”
“No, you’re not,” said Kathy in her hardest voice. “Come on, Mike. Let these men do their jobs.” Her fingers dug like talons into my shoulder. “Let these men do their jobs.”
I stopped resisting and let her pull me back a step.
We watched the EMTs carry Thompson to the ambulance. When they’d closed the back door and started the engine, Kathy released my shoulder. “You were out of line back there.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Drunks just piss me off.”
“You’re off duty. As of now.”
“What? I said I was sorry.”
“Fine. I accept your apology, but I still want you to go home. You’re on vacation as of tonight.”
“What the hell does that mean? Are you suspending me?”
“Only if you force me.”
I opened my mouth to speak.
She held up her long, callused hand. “We’re not discussing this. You’re going home, and you’re going to get some rest. You have tomorrow off, and then you’re on vacation for a week. We’ll talk about the DeSalle complaint when you get back. Maybe by then you’ll have your head together.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means we’re all sorry about your father, and we understand how freaked out you must be about it. But if the situation’s screwing up your judgment, then it’s better if you’re out of uniform for the time being.”
“What about the bear?”
“I’ll take care of it.” She gestured at my truck. “Go home, Mike. I mean it.”
Her expression was unflinching. I knew I’d crossed some sort of line with her, and I wasn’t sure how it had happened.
Halfway across the lawn I turned and said, with half a smile, “You wouldn’t really suspend me?”
But the look on my sergeant’s face gave me no comfort.
That night I got really drunk for the first time since I’d become a game warden. I took out a half-empty fifth of Jack Daniels a college friend had left behind the last time he’d rolled through town, and I sat on the porch. A mist was rising off the marsh, and the smell of tidal mud and sea salt was thick in the air. A killdeer kept flying back and forth along the creek making a hysterical cry as if it had lost something irreplaceable.
When I awoke the next morning, I found myself inside, lying facedown on the couch. The phone was ringing, and it took everything in me to stumble across the room to answer it. Sunlight, flooding through the windows, burned my eyes.
“Hello?”
“I need to see you,” said my mother.
17
The town of Scarborough is where I’d spent the second half of my childhood after my parents divorced and where my mom and stepfather still lived. It is only a two-hour drive south along the coast, but it always feels longer because the land changes so much with every passing mile. These days, southern Maine is just an extension of the Boston suburbs.
When we first moved to Scarborough, right after the divorce, there were still cornfields and thick oak forests that stretched for miles. Then the houses really began to sprout, first along the country roads heading down to the
