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hunter last month?”
    â€œGive me a couple hours.” We were both about to hang up when she came back on the line.
    â€œMaybe in the meantime you should give your old man a ring. Just a suggestion, but if it were my dad and I hadn’t heard from him in years, I’d be a little curious about the timing.”
    In the few months we’d been working together I’d learned to follow Kathy’s advice. Better to make the call than spend the day wondering what my dad was mixed up in.
    My father didn’t have a phone himself at his cabin but relied on the owner at Rum Pond Sporting Camps to take messages for him. The lodge itself was so remote no phone lines connected it with the outside world, and the surrounding mountains made cell-phone reception iffy at best. Instead, the owner, Russell Pelletier, used an old radio phone to make and receive calls. When no one picked up, I tried the in-town answering service and got an earful of static until the machine came on.
    â€œHey, you’ve reached Rum Pond Sporting Camps, and if we ain’t here, we’re probably out fishing.” When I was sixteen, I’d spent half a summer washing dishes at the camps. The only woman there had been Pelletier’s chain-smoking wife, but this pretty voice definitely didn’t belong to Doreen.
    The machine started to record. “This is Mike Bowditch,” I said. “Jack’s son. I don’t know if he’s still working there—Charley Stevens told me he was, but we haven’t talked in a while—I mean, my dad and I haven’t talked. Anyway, I got a call from him last night. I’m not sure what it’s about. Can you tell him I called?” I rattled off my cell-phone and pager numbers and hung up, embarrassed at my stammering incoherence.
    How come everything to do with my father left me feeling like I was nine years old?
    The sun had risen over the pines and the day was shaping up to be another steam bath. I had two hours to kill before Kathy showed up with the culvert trap, so I decided to stop in town for breakfast. I desperately wanted to see a newspaper.
    The Square Deal Diner, in Sennebec Center, was owned by a plump and hyperactive widow named Dot Libby who also ran a motel and gift shop out on the highway, served as chair of the school board, organized the municipal Fourth of July picnic, and played the organ every Sunday morning at the Congregational Church. She was the mother of six (four living) and grandmother of twenty-two. I knew all this within five minutes of meeting her. Dot liked to talk. Her late husband had passed away several years earlier from prostate cancer, but the joke around town—probably started by Dot herself—was that he died of exhaustion from trying to keep up with her all those years. She kept a photo of him on the wall of the diner, where he continued to stare down at her with sad, hound-dog eyes.
    â€œâ€™Morning, Mike!” she shouted as I came through the door.
    Every head in the room turned to look at me. I felt blood rush to my cheeks. I’ve always blushed easily. “Hey, Dot.”
    â€œSo what are you gonna do about that bear?”
    â€œNews travels fast.”
    â€œHeard it over the scanner.” She poured me a cup of coffee. “You gonna shoot it?”
    â€œHope I don’t have to.”
    This early, the crowd consisted mostly of locals: carpenters, fishermen, auto-body mechanics, road crew workers. All males. Dot and her youngest daughter Ruth, who waited on the booths, were the only females in the place.
    â€œCan I have the bear meat if you get it?” Dot had red blossoms on her cheeks and laugh-wrinkles around her eyes. Her face sometimes reminded me of a talking apple.
    â€œYou ain’t adding bear to the menu, are you, Dot?” said a prematurely bald young man I didn’t know at the end of the counter.
    â€œIt’s for the shelter, Stanley.”
    From a booth behind me